Will Chromebooks Someday Threaten Windows? (itworld.com)

"There are signs that Chromebooks are a bigger long-term threat to Microsoft than you might imagine," reports ITWorld, arguing that "long term, they'll likely be a serious competitor." The reason? Chromebooks sell big in education. They've unseated the Mac in schools. Two years ago, for the first time, Chromebooks outsold Macs in schools. Schools are a great market for Google, but Chromebooks are also Trojan horses. Children and teens use them for schoolwork and more. And when they get Chromebooks, they also get free subscriptions to Google's G suite of apps. If kids grow up using G Suite and Chromebooks, there's a reasonable chance they'll use them when they get older.

Where I live, in Cambridge, Mass., the public Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School gives out free Chromebooks to every one of the more than 2,000 teens in the school, in a bid to close the digital divide between families who can afford to buy computers for their children and those who can't... Cambridge isn't unique. According to a 2017 article in The New York Times, "More than half the nation's primary- and secondary-school students -- more than 30 million children -- use Google education apps like Gmail and Docs... And Chromebooks, Google-powered laptops that initially struggled to find a purpose, are now a powerhouse in America's schools. Today they account for more than half the mobile devices shipped to schools...."

When students graduate, Google makes it easy for them to move all their mail and documents from their school accounts to their personal accounts. And schools sometimes even act as inadvertent salespeople for Google. The Times reports that some schools tell graduating seniors to move all their documents from their school to their personal accounts... The upshot of all this? Windows hardware continues to rule in enterprises. But Chromebooks may one day prove a serious competitor, as students make their way into the workforce.

Comments

Missing something here

[redback]

As if kids fresh out of school have any power to challenge the status quo of corporate IT

Re:Missing something here

[CastrTroy]

The fact that the iPhones and Android phones took over the corporate market from BlackBerry in a very short period of time shows that employees can force change on their employers.

Re:Missing something here

[vtcodger]

If enough people -- especially in management -- use chromebooks -- corporate IT will eventually find a way to wedge them into their network. Easier to adapt than to try to deal with a constant deluge of questions about why what works at home or in school doesn't work at work. Training people is harder than training chihuahuas. (Our chihuahua flunked puppy school ... twice).

And if chromebook based IT eventually turns out to be say $25 per seat cheaper than MS based IT, you can bet management will want to switch.

As far as individual users are concerned, I'm not a big Google fan and I dislike both Chrome and most Google stuff other than the excellent search engine, but I can't see that it makes a lot of difference whether one is being spied on by Google or Microsoft. Assuming roughly equal capability, I'd go with whichever is cheaper.

Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in a offices that is transitioning to "Cloud based apps". Read Google Docs and dropbox style filesharing.
It can take upwords of a minute for a 20 page document to "load". You dare not load more than a few at once lets the browser eat so much memory it heads out to virtual. At that point, you may as well re-start the machine.
The "features" available on such software -- on most apps, web or mobile in general -- would have been a miserable excuse of a featureset back in 1998, let alone 2018.
What exactly was wrong with a fast, fully featured, files on your drive executable I will never understand. Maybe in a decade or so a new generation will get tired of javascript black holes and unresponsive, lag ridden cloud-based "software" and actually think about going back to the idea of a PC as a fast, responsive, personal computer on which powerful software can actually be run.

Re: Please Bring Back Rich Clients

[swillden]

Collaborative editing has its uses but I wouldn't call that a killer feature. Which is probably why non cloudy variants haven't taken off yet, because it's not the architecture that is stopping it.

Collaborative editing is the killer feature, especially in the workplace. Actually, perhaps that's the second killer feature, right behind the ability to have a single copy of a doc that is accessible from all devices, by all interested people.

I was converted years ago (shortly after joining Google, actually, though the same events could have happened anywhere) during a design review meeting. I presented my design for the implementation of a new software feature to a group of other engineers. They shredded it, in a good way, providing many significant improvements and simplifications. Normally, this would have meant that I'd have left the room with a lot of work I needed to do, to document all of the changes. But during the meeting, eight people were simultaneously editing my design doc so by the time I left the only thing I had to do was to clean up some inconsistencies and polish the language a bit. What would have taken hours took less than 10 minutes.

In the years since, I've come to rely so heavily on collaborative editing that I cannot imagine going back. Even though the "collaborative" part is often sequential, having a single shared, cloud-based copy of the doc to pass around between people is fantastically better than emailing copies, tracking the most recent version and perhaps integrating changes from multiple copies. And not just at work, but at home as well. Whether it's kids wanting my thoughts on their school papers (I never edit directly, only add comments), my wife wanting me to edit the annual Christmas letter, a shared spreadsheet I built to track the distribution of my father in law's estate (my wife was the executor)... it's unbelievably better to have a shared document in the cloud. In every case. I can't think of a single time in my personal or professional life that I'd have preferred to keep separate versions.

I said I can't imagine what it's like to go back, but that isn't actually true. I don't have to imagine it. I recently joined a couple of international standards committees that still exchange documents the old way. Even with a shared document repository (iso.org web portal) it is still so painful to handle document sharing and versioning. We end up with dozens -- and I'm sure eventually hundreds -- of separate files that represent stages in the draft standard, not to mention an order of magnitude more documents containing comments and suggested changes from all of the participants. Also, because documents are too non-interactive for discussion, there are volumes of separate email threads about all of the above documents. It would be dramatically more efficient to have a single shared doc that allowed collaborative editing and in-doc comment and discussion threads. Google docs retains full version history so important "checkpoint" versions can be labeled for posterity, and of course all of the discussion on comments is retained.

Even for documents that I create on my own with no collaboration of any sort (though that's actually really rare) I prefer cloud-based docs, because then they're always available on all of my devices, or any other device I might use. I enable offline editing on all of my devices as well, so that's not a problem either -- though I'm really not often offline. Overseas flights and camping in the mountains are about the only times I don't have a network connection.

Yeah, there are a few features that office software packages have that their cloud-based versions lack, but none of them are remotely worth giving up having a single copy accessible on all devices and by all relevant people.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Bert64]

You should be preparing students by showing them a range of different technologies, showing them how to get their work done using whatever tools are available and how to pick the best tool for a given task for a range of options.

Getting tied to a particular technology is a bad idea, because by the time these kids enter the workforce whatever they learned in school will be obsolete and have been replaced with something else. Teach them how to adapt, embrace change and get things done regardless of what tools are given to them.

Re:There's more to life than Office

[Bert64]

Macs were not successful primarily because of the cost, Apple do not make cheap lowend desktops to compete with the machines that the average corporation buys thousands of to throw on everyone's desks.
ChromeOS devices on the other hand are available cheaply and from several suppliers.

Chrome lacks the biggest disadvantage of apple (price), while offering many significant advantages over windows for a corporate environment.

When it comes to custom applications, especially in-house ones, many of these are now web based and the market is heading that way. The client does not matter when the custom apps are web based. Those few remaining (and declining numbers) apps which are not web based can usually be handled via rdp or telnet/ssh clients with the apps running on a remote host.
In most of the offices i see, what the majority of users are doing could easily be performed on a chromebook, and switching to chromebooks would result in significant cost savings and security benefits.

Re:No

[Zontar The Mindless]

...Windows will be about as popular as Hillary.

So it'll still be the choice of the majority? SAD.

Re:Higher Education is what is Missing

[squiggleslash]

The last comments here tend to suggest you still see Chromebooks as "A OS running a web browser", but that hasn't been the case for a while.

While Chromebooks have always had a native API, very few applications have been written for it so it kinda got ignored by most people and there was always an assumption that Chromebooks can't run local apps; but in the last two years most Chromebooks now have the capability to run Android apps.

OK, but what about LaTeK, to name something you specifically identify above?

Well, that bit is being rolled out. It's still effectively a beta but Crostini, a way to run arbitrary GNU/Linux apps in a sandbox, is being rolled out right now. Within the next couple of years, it'll be a standard part of ChromeOS, and the current quirks (it doesn't support hardware accelerated graphics and a few other features it needs) will be resolved.

The only issue Chromebooks have ever had with local apps is the lack of developer interest, but Google is addressing that.

I use one. I don't use Crostini because it's not stable and not in any way finished, but it's clearly coming along nicely and people are using it to run IDEs and other tools. The Android feature makes it a "better Android tablet than an Android tablet" oddly enough, and it's kinda funny running Outlook and various video conferencing systems on it that happen to run better on ChromeOS than they do on Windows. Once Crostini is stable, and I can run Atom on this thing, I can see it becoming my main work machine.

As for universities, it's way more complex than "Students need a way to run X". Most courses aren't going to require anything other than a web browser, perhaps with a subscription to Office 365. For them, a Chromebook will do right now. For others it's not, and never will be, going to be that simple.

Re:Are students being prepared?

[Voyager529]

I work in higher ed (community/state college with only a few 4yr programs) and we were discussing G vs MS the other day. K-12 in my area also uses G and Chromebooks. [...] How do we best prepare our students in general?

At least for me personally, I think the best thing that can be done is to try and teach conceptual computing by abstracting the principles from the products. Skilled, educated students should be able to be able to compose a document with basic formatting in pretty much anything from Word to Docs to WordPerfect to Writer to AbiWord. It stopped shocking me that people don't understand how files and folders work; many think files are "in Word" because the only way they know to access their documents is using the File->Open command...and don't get me started with the wizardry that they ascribe to knowing Ctrl+O, Ctrl+S, and Ctrl+X/C/V.

Essentially, I think you're asking the wrong question, because you're debating which product to teach. Don't teach Docs or Word, teach word processing. Don't teach Sheets or Excel, teach spreadsheets. Don't teach Windows or Linux, teach file management. Don't teach Chrome or Firefox, teach web browsers. Part of the 'higher' part of 'higher education' is being exposed to lots of different things, and learning to problem solve. Most of the students who are entering the freshman year are simply not taught these skills.
Part of the problem is that tech in K-12 is a train wreck. Boards and superintendents implement products based on shiny pamphlets and demo sessions, and computer teachers who are skilled at both computers and teaching are rare (so students are either taught correct information poorly or taught well but incorrect or limited information).
By the time information gets to kids, they're generally better off with Youtube tutorials or self-motivated exploration of Sourceforge...except they can't do those things at school since computers can't run applications IT doesn't approve, and at home, the aging desktop is probably either a magnet for "don't touch that" or a malware-ridden train wreck of uselessness.

In conclusion, obviously a rando Slashdot commenter is not going to be a reason for the powers that be to turn around their feelings on the matter...but for whatever it's worth, teaching 'computing' rather than 'G-Suite' or 'MS Office' is what I really feel will benefit the kids the most.

Re: ewaste of the future

[Tough Love]

Microsoft is still prevalent enough that its market dominance is not under any serious short-term threat.

You mean, after losing roughly 100% of the phone market and HPC market and major chunks of other markets? You bet Microsoft is threatened, there is a reason they are hiring Linux devs and shifting major parts of their business to Linux.