It's my understanding that Google bought Motorola Mobility for the patent lawsuits Motorola Mobility was filing against other Android device manufacturers. Imagine if the Android manufacturers started waging patent wars against each other, on top of the Microsoft patent tax on Android.
At that point, some of the manufacturers might decide paying $30 per device to license Windows Phone, writing your own mobile operating system, or abandoning the market completely might become more cost-effective than using Android.
It's common for the person in charge of distributing the operating system images to be very different from the person in charge of the network. Maybe the parent AC has no control over the networking gear.
But further, wouldn't multicast work best only when you're transmitting images to multiple machines at once? If the image has to be retransmitted after each system restart, wouldn't torrents work better? The machine that restarts can just grab everything it needs from all of the other machines running the same image on the same subnet.
I haven't looked recently, but last time I checked Windows XP 64-bit had cruddy driver support. If you want good device drivers for Windows and the ability to use more than 3GB of RAM - and even cheap laptops and desktops from the last few years have more than 3GB of RAM - then you want Windows 7.
They fund the development of all sorts of research projects, and they now do take security seriously.
On the other hand, they display a maddening inability to tackle the basics. The file manager still hangs in Windows 7 and Windows 8 when you open a network drive that's slow to respond or a disk directory with lots of files. Most software updates require a system restart. When a program hangs, you are still forced to wait 30 seconds or longer instead of being able to exercise a "nuke immediately" option (unless you use taskkill/f from the command prompt and its PowerShell equivalent, but who outside the power users knows that). Windows Update breaks periodically and can take a lot of research to fix when it happens. On Windows 8, I wanted to buy games on my account and create a second Windows account with access to my games for my kids to use, but not my email or bookmarks. If that could be done, I couldn't figure it out.
On the business side navigating the product documentation, figuring out which version of what product you need, and understanding the licensing restrictions is a major headache. I don't know about now, but when Windows Azure launched, taking the technology for a spin was a nightmare.
I think Microsoft's so hated in the tech community for the exact same reason it's not taking the world by storm. They demonstrate an infuriating inability to sweat the little details that really matter. For every step forward that helps (like the excellent search feature in Windows 7) they have a giant step backwards that hurts (removing DVD playback from Windows 8 Home edition).
In defense of Microsoft, I don't think Windows 7 2.0 would do significantly better than Windows 8 right now. Part of the problem is Windows 8 itself, but part of the problem is just that iOS, Android, and even Chrome OS are acceptable alternatives to Windows for a lot of casual computer users and Windows 7 itself still runs just fine even on computers that are five years old and not particularly high end when new.
1. Windows RT on ARM doesn't have backwards compatibility with x86, and that's the flagship product that launched with Windows 8 (the "Microsoft Surface RT").
2. Windows Mobile applications weren't compatible with Windows Phone 7, and Windows Phone 7 applications run in emulated mode on Windows Phone 8 but Microsoft is encouraging developers to rewrite them to be native for Windows Phone 8.
3. Internet Explorer 9 and 10 attempt to be standards-compliant, which is a massive break from IE6 and IE7.
4. Silverlight is not getting new releases and ends support in 2021 (granted that's 8 years away, but if you're a developer that invested time in it, that's disappointing).
I don't think Microsoft is on a death spiral, at least not yet. But their claim to backwards compatibility is weaker today than it was four years ago.
More importantly, I think many of the "killer apps" of the modern day are independent of operating system: Facebook. Twitter. Google Maps. Cut the Rope. Angry Birds. MineCraft. Farmville.
Exchange, ActiveDirectory, and especially Office will keep Microsoft strong for a very long time. But I think their grip on consumers will only weaken further.
AppScale is an attempt at an open source re-implementation of Google App Engine. So if you don't like something Google's doing, you have an option besides completely porting your application to another infrastructure.
I'm curious, have you looked at AppScale? http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/ It's an open source re-implementation of the Google App Engine APIs. It's not totally feature complete, but it has quite a bit and allows you to move your Google App Engine software (if you're using the subset of APIs AppScale supports) to Amazon EC2, your own servers, or other hosting services.
It seems to me that this kind of thing is ideal, these open source toolkits that provide the facade of Amazon Cloud and Google App Engine APIs permit competitors to challenge the giants.
It's not nearly as big as object-oriented programming, but:
Scala allows procedural programming but can be written in a totally functional style.
Clojure (another JVM language, and a Lisp dialect) is functional by default, uses laziness in a few key places, and requires extra steps to operate in a procedural style.
Java 8 adds Lambdas.
The D language version2 has the "immutable" keyword, which is const on steroids because it's transitive. immutable x =.... means x is immutable and everything x references is immutable too.
Perl6 has its own way of doing Haskell/Scala style pattern matching on function calls: http://perlcabal.org/syn/S06.html#Unpacking_tree_node_parameters
etc... etc.... it's not exactly taking the industry by storm, but it's getting a lot of attention and while few purely functional languages (i.e. Haskell) are going mainstream, lots of mainstream languages are borrowing features from the functional world.
There is a right and wrong in economics, but it's not the same right and wrong as in philosophy. Right in economics are things that enhance the economy's growth, stability, or the rate of advancement of technology. Wrong is things that slow those aspects of the economy or reverse them. I contend that in terms of economics, our current intellectual laws and especially patent laws are more wrong than right.
I didn't mean that Facebook and Google were the first or the last to occupy their current position, just that companies like that are rare. For every Facebook and Google there are undoubtedly hundreds or thousands of other entrepreneurs with similar ideas and weaker executions, who failed. That is normal, and acceptable. But I suspect there are also dozens or hundreds of other entrepreneurs with similar ideas and similar executions, that ran afoul of legal loopholes that the established players used to shut them down.
I lamented the lack of moral right and wrong in economics elsewhere.
I did know that you could change the search engine in Android. I didn't know Windows Phone is locked to Bing, but I'm not surprised.
I want to see competition in the mobile marketplace. But in my ideal world, the competition would be between Android, Firefox OS, Tizen, WebOS, etc.... and all of the proprietary players (Windows Phone, iOS, Blackberry) would be dead.
You're saying that little innovators will always find a way around the big juggernauts? I think you are too optimistic - for every Facebook and Google there are thousands of people working hard on brilliant ideas that get driven out of business by legal tricks instead of superior business models. If the big players aren't constantly terrified of every little new company that comes along trying to take the rug out from under them, there is something wrong.
Thanks for the link to the short story, by the way. Nice. I should read more of Arthur C Clarke. I've read some Larry Niven, Isaac Aasimov, Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, and Jack Vance but never Clarke.
I disagree. It's one of the cases where government intervention to help the market (patents and intellectual property law) has come to cause more drag than increase on innovation and competition.
On a moral level (not a business level), theft of trade secrets is wrong. Patent infringement is wrong. Copyright and trademark abuse is wrong. But the mechanisms we have in place to combat these problems are a cure worse than the disease. A well-staffed legal department should never be a superior substitute for innovation. Google and Facebook are two of the most recent tech industry juggernauts, and they were both flukes - they got big enough fast enough that they became too expensive for competitors to buy and amassed too many financial resources to simply bludgeon to death with lawsuits.
That's what you get when capitalism works properly. But there are major problems on two sides. First, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc... use intellectual property law to crush most of the bubbles forming down below. "If you can't beat them, sue them into oblivion for patent infringement." And every big company has a hand in lobbying legislators to get favorable legislation, from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) trying for SOPA and PIPA, to Comcast and Verizon trying to get township-funded broadband declared illegal in as many states as they can.
Second, capitalism places profits above morals. Illegal acts are only a problem if the chance of getting caught multiplied by the expected legal and penalty costs for being caught exceed the costs of complying with the law. And legal but immoral acts (like using child labor overseas, or using a loophole in banking rules to improperly value a subprime mortgage) are expected. If your company doesn't ignore right in wrong in favor of profitable versus unprofitable, it will be crushed by other companies that do. This is why Walmart has large numbers of its employees on food stamps and Medicaid, so that taxpayers effectively subsidize their business model. This is why General Electric uses every tax trick in the book to pay very little taxes. This is why most of the clothing we buy is made in third world facilities.
Again, I'm not saying socialism or communism or for that matter fuedalism or theocracy is better. Clearly they're all worse. But what we have now is still really bad.
Google only gets away with operating this way due to their profitability. They can consider the 20% partly as a means to keep employees motivated and happy to stay with the company, and partly as a kind of investment into research and development. If the company's profitability decreases, you can bet there will be shareholders howling for the 20% to be axed - and I see that event, if it occurs, as the beginning of Google's transition into the next Microsoft.
It's difficult to make a logical argument for the 20% plan for a company that's not currently profitable. How would you present that to executives? "I know we're barely breaking even, but if you give the employees 20% of their time to work on independent projects, I think our long term prospects will improve." I suspect it would work in many cases - you would boost morale, have better employee retention, and some of the employees would use that 20% time to learn skills that make their performance improve in their primary jobs. But it's difficult to quantify, and I think most people would just view it as a 20% loss of productivity with less than equal gain in other areas. That's capitalism... and as much as I hate it, I'm not aware of anything better.
Meyer changed the rules at Yahoo because an audit of their VPN logs indicated that most Yahoo employees that were telecommuting used the VPN far fewer than eight hours a day.
I'm not saying she's going to do a good job with Yahoo or a poor job, I'm just saying that particular decision was not made for the reason you state.
If Internet Explorer got 95% of the browser market, the browser itself might have suddenly gained a hefty price tag, and version 1.2 of the HTTP protocol might have been encumbered with Microsoft patents and anyone trying to make a browser would have to license the technology, and so forth.
If Android gets 95% of the mobile operating system market, Google can't raise the price or use it to introduce patent-encumbered technologies into open standard or force competing mobile operating system vendors to license technologies from Google.
Microsoft wasn't harming consumers directly by bundling IE. They were working towards a future when they could harm consumers. By using open source software, Google cannot do that. I don't like the amount of data Google is collecting - but since Google's services are in the iPhone and custom applications and websites for every mobile platform, restricting Android will have a weak impact on reducing that. (I don't even think the people at Google have evil intent for all the data they collect. But the Patriot Act lets the US government sift through all of the data at its leisure and makes it illegal for Google to inform anyone that has been targeted by the government. I think it even makes it illegal for Google to challenge the data requests under the Patriot Act in court, since any such court filing would make public the data request.)
Certainly. But I'm not trying to argue that big government is inherently better than unfettered capitalism, just that unfettered capitalism has problems too.
Like the cable companies, which keep dropping prices to... oh wait. Like Windows and Office, which got cheaper all of the way through the 1990s and 2000s until... oh wait. Like medical costs, which kept going down so nobody was clamoring for government subsidized health care. Oh wait. Like education, which kept getting cheaper until nobody wanted public schools or government assistance for education.
Look how Intel colluded with PC vendors to lock AMD out of parts of the market, and is in the process of finishing them off. If ARM hadn't started becoming a major player in the processor space, we'd be looking at $500 i3s. Look at the collusion between Intel, Apple, Google, Quicken, and a few other companies to avoid poaching each other's engineers in an artificial means to keep employee costs low.
I'm not a rah-rah-rah fan of big government. But businesses do get a position of power and ruthlessly exploit it. The market has no ethics, it's winner take all and illegal is only wrong if the cost of getting caught exceeds the savings by breaking the law.
Usually for an "unfair business practices" complaint, you have to demonstrate harm to consumers, not competing businesses. If Google comes to totally dominate the mobile device market, they can burn consumers by.... what? Android is free, so they can't raise the price on the operating system and application licenses. Android is open source, so if Google raises the device on the next Galaxy Nexus phone, competing vendors can sell Android phones with lower prices. And also because Android is open source, competing companies are free to distribute their own version that uses Bing or Yahoo or any other search engine, any competing Maps service, etc....
Google is terrifying. But this isn't a traditional monopoly, where the owner can suddenly triple the prices or box out the competition. Because Android is open source software, Google benefits tremendously from it but doesn't own it.
Some people like laptops with touch screens, others don't. Even if you like the feature, if they can put a decent touch screen on a $200 unsubsidized tablet then adding one to a $1000 laptop should be very cheap.
I don't love Google, but I like the Chromebook Pixel because it appeals to me better than lining Apple's pockets or Microsoft's (if I got an Ultrabook).
You get more computing power, more storage space, a wider selection of runnable software, but also slower boot time, much shorter battery life, and the occasional time wasted while a software update installs itself and requires a reboot.
Most people deep enough in the tech field to post to Slashdot are going to consider that a trade worth making and would never get a Chromebook. But enough casual PC users might think differently.
I love Chromebooks for two reasons: 1. It's a computing device sold to consumers without a fee going to Microsoft behind the scenes. 2. It's a computing device sold to consumers without bloatware. I'm sure if Linux on consumer laptops had taken off, your spiffy new $500 Dell PC with Linux would have a desktop link to get internet access from AOL and a 60 day free trial of Norton Anti-Virus and similar junk.
The Apple laptop is $500 more than a Chromebook. Better, but more expensive.
Cheap Linux laptop vs Cheap Windows laptop vs Chromebook: Chromebook gives a faster boot time, a longer battery life, and less time twiddling your thumbs while software updates run. On the other hand Linux and Windows both give more storage and more processing power. I'm a power user, I would rather have a full Linux install and suffer with the shorter battery life. But I can understand why casual users would prefer Chrome OS.
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It's my understanding that Google bought Motorola Mobility for the patent lawsuits Motorola Mobility was filing against other Android device manufacturers. Imagine if the Android manufacturers started waging patent wars against each other, on top of the Microsoft patent tax on Android.
At that point, some of the manufacturers might decide paying $30 per device to license Windows Phone, writing your own mobile operating system, or abandoning the market completely might become more cost-effective than using Android.
It's common for the person in charge of distributing the operating system images to be very different from the person in charge of the network. Maybe the parent AC has no control over the networking gear.
But further, wouldn't multicast work best only when you're transmitting images to multiple machines at once? If the image has to be retransmitted after each system restart, wouldn't torrents work better? The machine that restarts can just grab everything it needs from all of the other machines running the same image on the same subnet.
I haven't looked recently, but last time I checked Windows XP 64-bit had cruddy driver support. If you want good device drivers for Windows and the ability to use more than 3GB of RAM - and even cheap laptops and desktops from the last few years have more than 3GB of RAM - then you want Windows 7.
They fund the development of all sorts of research projects, and they now do take security seriously.
/f from the command prompt and its PowerShell equivalent, but who outside the power users knows that). Windows Update breaks periodically and can take a lot of research to fix when it happens. On Windows 8, I wanted to buy games on my account and create a second Windows account with access to my games for my kids to use, but not my email or bookmarks. If that could be done, I couldn't figure it out.
On the other hand, they display a maddening inability to tackle the basics. The file manager still hangs in Windows 7 and Windows 8 when you open a network drive that's slow to respond or a disk directory with lots of files. Most software updates require a system restart. When a program hangs, you are still forced to wait 30 seconds or longer instead of being able to exercise a "nuke immediately" option (unless you use taskkill
On the business side navigating the product documentation, figuring out which version of what product you need, and understanding the licensing restrictions is a major headache. I don't know about now, but when Windows Azure launched, taking the technology for a spin was a nightmare.
I think Microsoft's so hated in the tech community for the exact same reason it's not taking the world by storm. They demonstrate an infuriating inability to sweat the little details that really matter. For every step forward that helps (like the excellent search feature in Windows 7) they have a giant step backwards that hurts (removing DVD playback from Windows 8 Home edition).
In defense of Microsoft, I don't think Windows 7 2.0 would do significantly better than Windows 8 right now. Part of the problem is Windows 8 itself, but part of the problem is just that iOS, Android, and even Chrome OS are acceptable alternatives to Windows for a lot of casual computer users and Windows 7 itself still runs just fine even on computers that are five years old and not particularly high end when new.
1. Windows RT on ARM doesn't have backwards compatibility with x86, and that's the flagship product that launched with Windows 8 (the "Microsoft Surface RT").
2. Windows Mobile applications weren't compatible with Windows Phone 7, and Windows Phone 7 applications run in emulated mode on Windows Phone 8 but Microsoft is encouraging developers to rewrite them to be native for Windows Phone 8.
3. Internet Explorer 9 and 10 attempt to be standards-compliant, which is a massive break from IE6 and IE7.
4. Silverlight is not getting new releases and ends support in 2021 (granted that's 8 years away, but if you're a developer that invested time in it, that's disappointing).
I don't think Microsoft is on a death spiral, at least not yet. But their claim to backwards compatibility is weaker today than it was four years ago.
More importantly, I think many of the "killer apps" of the modern day are independent of operating system: Facebook. Twitter. Google Maps. Cut the Rope. Angry Birds. MineCraft. Farmville.
Exchange, ActiveDirectory, and especially Office will keep Microsoft strong for a very long time. But I think their grip on consumers will only weaken further.
AppScale is an attempt at an open source re-implementation of Google App Engine. So if you don't like something Google's doing, you have an option besides completely porting your application to another infrastructure.
I'm curious, have you looked at AppScale? http://appscale.cs.ucsb.edu/ It's an open source re-implementation of the Google App Engine APIs. It's not totally feature complete, but it has quite a bit and allows you to move your Google App Engine software (if you're using the subset of APIs AppScale supports) to Amazon EC2, your own servers, or other hosting services.
It seems to me that this kind of thing is ideal, these open source toolkits that provide the facade of Amazon Cloud and Google App Engine APIs permit competitors to challenge the giants.
CloudBees and OpenShift.
It's not nearly as big as object-oriented programming, but:
.... means x is immutable and everything x references is immutable too.
Scala allows procedural programming but can be written in a totally functional style.
Clojure (another JVM language, and a Lisp dialect) is functional by default, uses laziness in a few key places, and requires extra steps to operate in a procedural style.
Java 8 adds Lambdas.
The D language version2 has the "immutable" keyword, which is const on steroids because it's transitive. immutable x =
Perl6 has its own way of doing Haskell/Scala style pattern matching on function calls: http://perlcabal.org/syn/S06.html#Unpacking_tree_node_parameters
etc... etc.... it's not exactly taking the industry by storm, but it's getting a lot of attention and while few purely functional languages (i.e. Haskell) are going mainstream, lots of mainstream languages are borrowing features from the functional world.
There is a right and wrong in economics, but it's not the same right and wrong as in philosophy. Right in economics are things that enhance the economy's growth, stability, or the rate of advancement of technology. Wrong is things that slow those aspects of the economy or reverse them. I contend that in terms of economics, our current intellectual laws and especially patent laws are more wrong than right.
I didn't mean that Facebook and Google were the first or the last to occupy their current position, just that companies like that are rare. For every Facebook and Google there are undoubtedly hundreds or thousands of other entrepreneurs with similar ideas and weaker executions, who failed. That is normal, and acceptable. But I suspect there are also dozens or hundreds of other entrepreneurs with similar ideas and similar executions, that ran afoul of legal loopholes that the established players used to shut them down.
I lamented the lack of moral right and wrong in economics elsewhere.
I did know that you could change the search engine in Android. I didn't know Windows Phone is locked to Bing, but I'm not surprised.
I want to see competition in the mobile marketplace. But in my ideal world, the competition would be between Android, Firefox OS, Tizen, WebOS, etc.... and all of the proprietary players (Windows Phone, iOS, Blackberry) would be dead.
You're saying that little innovators will always find a way around the big juggernauts? I think you are too optimistic - for every Facebook and Google there are thousands of people working hard on brilliant ideas that get driven out of business by legal tricks instead of superior business models. If the big players aren't constantly terrified of every little new company that comes along trying to take the rug out from under them, there is something wrong.
Thanks for the link to the short story, by the way. Nice. I should read more of Arthur C Clarke. I've read some Larry Niven, Isaac Aasimov, Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, and Jack Vance but never Clarke.
I disagree. It's one of the cases where government intervention to help the market (patents and intellectual property law) has come to cause more drag than increase on innovation and competition.
On a moral level (not a business level), theft of trade secrets is wrong. Patent infringement is wrong. Copyright and trademark abuse is wrong. But the mechanisms we have in place to combat these problems are a cure worse than the disease. A well-staffed legal department should never be a superior substitute for innovation. Google and Facebook are two of the most recent tech industry juggernauts, and they were both flukes - they got big enough fast enough that they became too expensive for competitors to buy and amassed too many financial resources to simply bludgeon to death with lawsuits.
I'm very interested to know how it would work too.
Just because I don't have a solution, that does not prevent me from defining a problem.
That's what you get when capitalism works properly. But there are major problems on two sides. First, companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc... use intellectual property law to crush most of the bubbles forming down below. "If you can't beat them, sue them into oblivion for patent infringement." And every big company has a hand in lobbying legislators to get favorable legislation, from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) trying for SOPA and PIPA, to Comcast and Verizon trying to get township-funded broadband declared illegal in as many states as they can.
Second, capitalism places profits above morals. Illegal acts are only a problem if the chance of getting caught multiplied by the expected legal and penalty costs for being caught exceed the costs of complying with the law. And legal but immoral acts (like using child labor overseas, or using a loophole in banking rules to improperly value a subprime mortgage) are expected. If your company doesn't ignore right in wrong in favor of profitable versus unprofitable, it will be crushed by other companies that do. This is why Walmart has large numbers of its employees on food stamps and Medicaid, so that taxpayers effectively subsidize their business model. This is why General Electric uses every tax trick in the book to pay very little taxes. This is why most of the clothing we buy is made in third world facilities.
Again, I'm not saying socialism or communism or for that matter fuedalism or theocracy is better. Clearly they're all worse. But what we have now is still really bad.
Google only gets away with operating this way due to their profitability. They can consider the 20% partly as a means to keep employees motivated and happy to stay with the company, and partly as a kind of investment into research and development. If the company's profitability decreases, you can bet there will be shareholders howling for the 20% to be axed - and I see that event, if it occurs, as the beginning of Google's transition into the next Microsoft.
It's difficult to make a logical argument for the 20% plan for a company that's not currently profitable. How would you present that to executives? "I know we're barely breaking even, but if you give the employees 20% of their time to work on independent projects, I think our long term prospects will improve." I suspect it would work in many cases - you would boost morale, have better employee retention, and some of the employees would use that 20% time to learn skills that make their performance improve in their primary jobs. But it's difficult to quantify, and I think most people would just view it as a 20% loss of productivity with less than equal gain in other areas. That's capitalism... and as much as I hate it, I'm not aware of anything better.
Meyer changed the rules at Yahoo because an audit of their VPN logs indicated that most Yahoo employees that were telecommuting used the VPN far fewer than eight hours a day.
I'm not saying she's going to do a good job with Yahoo or a poor job, I'm just saying that particular decision was not made for the reason you state.
If Internet Explorer got 95% of the browser market, the browser itself might have suddenly gained a hefty price tag, and version 1.2 of the HTTP protocol might have been encumbered with Microsoft patents and anyone trying to make a browser would have to license the technology, and so forth.
If Android gets 95% of the mobile operating system market, Google can't raise the price or use it to introduce patent-encumbered technologies into open standard or force competing mobile operating system vendors to license technologies from Google.
Microsoft wasn't harming consumers directly by bundling IE. They were working towards a future when they could harm consumers. By using open source software, Google cannot do that. I don't like the amount of data Google is collecting - but since Google's services are in the iPhone and custom applications and websites for every mobile platform, restricting Android will have a weak impact on reducing that. (I don't even think the people at Google have evil intent for all the data they collect. But the Patriot Act lets the US government sift through all of the data at its leisure and makes it illegal for Google to inform anyone that has been targeted by the government. I think it even makes it illegal for Google to challenge the data requests under the Patriot Act in court, since any such court filing would make public the data request.)
Certainly. But I'm not trying to argue that big government is inherently better than unfettered capitalism, just that unfettered capitalism has problems too.
Like the cable companies, which keep dropping prices to... oh wait. Like Windows and Office, which got cheaper all of the way through the 1990s and 2000s until... oh wait. Like medical costs, which kept going down so nobody was clamoring for government subsidized health care. Oh wait. Like education, which kept getting cheaper until nobody wanted public schools or government assistance for education.
Look how Intel colluded with PC vendors to lock AMD out of parts of the market, and is in the process of finishing them off. If ARM hadn't started becoming a major player in the processor space, we'd be looking at $500 i3s. Look at the collusion between Intel, Apple, Google, Quicken, and a few other companies to avoid poaching each other's engineers in an artificial means to keep employee costs low.
I'm not a rah-rah-rah fan of big government. But businesses do get a position of power and ruthlessly exploit it. The market has no ethics, it's winner take all and illegal is only wrong if the cost of getting caught exceeds the savings by breaking the law.
Usually for an "unfair business practices" complaint, you have to demonstrate harm to consumers, not competing businesses. If Google comes to totally dominate the mobile device market, they can burn consumers by.... what? Android is free, so they can't raise the price on the operating system and application licenses. Android is open source, so if Google raises the device on the next Galaxy Nexus phone, competing vendors can sell Android phones with lower prices. And also because Android is open source, competing companies are free to distribute their own version that uses Bing or Yahoo or any other search engine, any competing Maps service, etc....
Google is terrifying. But this isn't a traditional monopoly, where the owner can suddenly triple the prices or box out the competition. Because Android is open source software, Google benefits tremendously from it but doesn't own it.
Some people like laptops with touch screens, others don't. Even if you like the feature, if they can put a decent touch screen on a $200 unsubsidized tablet then adding one to a $1000 laptop should be very cheap.
I don't love Google, but I like the Chromebook Pixel because it appeals to me better than lining Apple's pockets or Microsoft's (if I got an Ultrabook).
You get more computing power, more storage space, a wider selection of runnable software, but also slower boot time, much shorter battery life, and the occasional time wasted while a software update installs itself and requires a reboot.
Most people deep enough in the tech field to post to Slashdot are going to consider that a trade worth making and would never get a Chromebook. But enough casual PC users might think differently.
I love Chromebooks for two reasons: 1. It's a computing device sold to consumers without a fee going to Microsoft behind the scenes. 2. It's a computing device sold to consumers without bloatware. I'm sure if Linux on consumer laptops had taken off, your spiffy new $500 Dell PC with Linux would have a desktop link to get internet access from AOL and a 60 day free trial of Norton Anti-Virus and similar junk.
The Apple laptop is $500 more than a Chromebook. Better, but more expensive.
Cheap Linux laptop vs Cheap Windows laptop vs Chromebook: Chromebook gives a faster boot time, a longer battery life, and less time twiddling your thumbs while software updates run. On the other hand Linux and Windows both give more storage and more processing power. I'm a power user, I would rather have a full Linux install and suffer with the shorter battery life. But I can understand why casual users would prefer Chrome OS.