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New Zealand Chooses Google Chromebooks Over Microsoft Windows 10 For Education (betanews.com)
Google announced this week that it has signed an agreement with New Zealand's Ministry of Education to provide all state and state integrated schools in the country with Chrome Education licenses. The three-year agreement goes into effect on November 1 next month. From a report: "Starting on November 1, as part of an agreement with Google and the New Zealand Ministry of Education, all state and state-integrated schools across New Zealand will be able to start claiming Ministry-funded Chrome Education licenses to manage new and existing unmanaged Chromebooks. The Chrome Education license was developed to make device management in schools a breeze, so that teachers and students can focus on what's most important -- teaching and learning. Equipped with the Chrome Education license, schools can utilize essential education features to better support the many ways Chromebooks are used in the classroom," says Suan Ye, Head of Google for Education, Australia and New Zealand.
Yeah, I found it weird New Zealand would choose Google given their strong attachment to personal privacy.
As a born and bred New Zealander, I have no idea where you get that idea from.
The average Kiwi knows absolutely nothing about computers, and the people who made this decision will be no different. They want it to "Just Work".
As with any sale this size though, it's usually about the kickbacks
There won't be any kickbacks. Check out the corruption perceptions index. We are either 1st or 2nd in the world for corruption.
This may be because of the many schools who demanded parents buy iPads. The pushback was pretty strong, and I know several people who told their kid's school to get stuffed when told they would have to buy one.
"I have to say, it's a perfect device for most people. It "just works", and they don't have to have a degree in comp-sci to manage the thing."
Yeah, just do all your computing, shopping, and interacting with the world using a device built by an advertising company that wants to monetize you. What could possibly be undesirable about that.
"Yeah yeah someone ALWAYS points out that they can't use one because of UberCadSuperSimulationPublisherLatheController 44.0, but those people are a minuscule minority"
No they aren't. They want to work on a powerpoint or spreadhsheet using exactly the same software they use at work. They run a small business and need some accounting software. They bought a logitech harmony universal remote and want to program it, they want to play some random steam game.
"When that generation of kids gets to be adults, they'll keep using ChromeOS."
For a while it was all ipads ipads ipads, every student gets an ipad, and schools couldn't buy enough ipads, and then the schools discovered they weren't really all that great for education after all. And now home users are finding between their smartphone and their laptop the tablet isn't that useful there either, and the next great thing is now becoming a niche -- still useful and definitely has a place but we didn't get rid of all our computers for them in the end.
Chromebooks are the new tablets which were the new netbooks... maybe they'll take hold... or maybe they'll be ultimately found to be too limiting too. The jury's still out. For me... as lousy as windows 10 is... chromeOs is not an improvement.
What will happen once with greater enablement in their children, the people realize the privacy implications of their decision?
Are you unaware that the latest Windows is also a privacy shit show? I'm sure even an Apple device is reporting *something* back to Cupertino. The only option to not be spied on these days is to install GNU/Linux or similar. That said, having privacy from some megacorp isn't a primary or even secondary need for "education devices"
The requirements are probably more like:
Cheap so it doesn't really matter if a kid fucks it up. Some idiot in this thread listed "cheap" as a drawback, yet it's a primary need for these devices. Cheap also leads to weaker hardware; guess which OS will suffer the most on weak hardware (Clue: it's not one of the *nix derivatives)
Needs to be locked down so a kid won't fuck the OS up and require IT support (even locking down the OS requires IT support if you're on Windows)
Automagically uploading to a server so a virus can't eat the homework, while still allowing offline work that will automagically upload later on when it has a network connection
Collaborative work: Google docs has been collaborative for years, so no mailing around different versions of a doc. The group just edits the doc locally and sees everyone else's update in real time. I'm sure MS Office would have copied this feature by now but honestly who gives a fuck about the product that did it second
And to the people claiming that these kids will be disadvantaged when they join the work force, you've got it backwards. The megacorps try and get people to use their products as kids so that they turn into adults who expect/use the same products in their work place. For example, the university I attended had free licenses of Office, Visual Studio Pro, Visio etc provided by MS to the IT students, as a means of locking us into their way of doing things (If you've already got Visual Studio then you're at least going to try writing your code in C# and your teachers know that they can expect you to produce and submit your work using the provided tools