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$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

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11–20 of 426 posts

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#11
post #4

Chromebooks have one fatal flaw: Microsoft Office on them sucks. You're stuck with side-loading in the Android edition, which is an app with a simplified UI and requiring always-online connection. All of this might be OK for a schoolkid, but for anyone else you might as well stick with a Windows laptop for real work, or an iPad for real consumption.

I haven't used Office since I was a schoolkid, and I do real work. Not everyone has the same needs as you.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#12
post #4

Chromebooks have one fatal flaw: Microsoft Office on them sucks. You're stuck with side-loading in the Android edition, which is an app with a simplified UI and requiring always-online connection. All of this might be OK for a schoolkid, but for anyone else you might as well stick with a Windows laptop for real work, or an iPad for real consumption.

I don't get the insistence upon Microsoft word as a killer app personally. It seems to be the suit and tie of software - more expensive than the alternatives and cumbersome but hidebound ones insist it is a prerequisite to be taken seriously.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#13

$100 Pre-2010 laptops running Lubuntu are an even more dangerous threat that more and more people are learning about

And every year they get better. I'm running Kubuntu with such beasts as Atom and Android Studio on a 2012 Laptop. I would like a few more pixels on screen but that's all

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#14
post #5

I was an intern at Microsoft the day that ChromeOS was announced. Conveniently, a few days later the head of Windows was giving a talk to all the interns. Overall, spoke well, but during Q&A someone asked him what he thought about ChromeOS. He laughed. He said it was a joke. He made it very clear that he didn't understand what Google was even thinking. And that stuck such a sour chord on me. Here's a company well kno…

[deleted]

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#15
I never really understood why MSFT didn't start a clean slate rewrite of Windows about a decade ago. Imagine how much simpler and more reliable it could be, and you could run Windows 7 in an emulation layer if you had older apps you depended on.

Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include features for advanced users like developers and business analytics.

Definitely feels like a missed opportunity, especially with growing discontent among developers with the Mac hardware line.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#16
Dependence on Windows is the most dangerous development for Microsoft. An 8GB RAM Windows Surface Go is less performant than an iPad with 2GB of RAM for consumers.

For the server, I recently had to write a process that takes messages from a queue in AWS and store it to a database. It ran well as a .Net Core based lambda running on a 256MB RAM Linux VM.

I did the same with a .Net Framesork app that inherited and the smallest EC2 instance we could use was one with 4GB RAM. It was barely usable. We had to upgrade to 8GB. Microsoft has been successful because of Moore’s law hid the increasing bloat of Windows. But once smartphones and low resource required operating systems became popular, they can’t compete.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#17

I never really understood why MSFT didn't start a clean slate rewrite of Windows about a decade ago. Imagine how much simpler and more reliable it could be, and you could run Windows 7 in an emulation layer if you had older apps you depended on. Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include…

They did, Windows RT

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#18
post #4

Chromebooks have one fatal flaw: Microsoft Office on them sucks. You're stuck with side-loading in the Android edition, which is an app with a simplified UI and requiring always-online connection. All of this might be OK for a schoolkid, but for anyone else you might as well stick with a Windows laptop for real work, or an iPad for real consumption.

G-Suite is a thing, and so is office 365

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#19

I never really understood why MSFT didn't start a clean slate rewrite of Windows about a decade ago. Imagine how much simpler and more reliable it could be, and you could run Windows 7 in an emulation layer if you had older apps you depended on. Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include…

A rewrite without full backwards compatibility just wouldn’t have taken off. Even today, developers are reluctant to embrace the new Universal Windows Platform that sheds a lot of the legacy Win32 brings with it.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#20

I never really understood why MSFT didn't start a clean slate rewrite of Windows about a decade ago. Imagine how much simpler and more reliable it could be, and you could run Windows 7 in an emulation layer if you had older apps you depended on. Even OS X has the feel that cloud services are kind of bolted on, whereas a new OS written in this era could feel more like ChromeOS in terms of reliability but still include…

The “growing discontent” is mostly within the Internet bubble. Mac sales declines are happening more because of the lack of new compelling hardware until recently.

Microsoft rewriting the operating system from scratch wouldn’t help. The only compelling advantage that Windows had was backwards compatibility. Once you take that away they have nothing left - evidenced by thier complete failure on mobile.

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