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$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

arstechnica.com

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Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#31

Post by reaperducer »

ChrisSD wrote: post #10
mabbo wrote: 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…

It's not like they haven't got a history of doing this. Remember when the iPhone had "no chance" of "any significant market share"?[0] [0] https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2...

FTA: "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."

I wonder what the maximum penetration was for Windows OSes on phones.

"...my 85-year-old uncle probably will never own an iPod, and I hope we'll get him to own a Zune."

What's a Zune? /s

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#32

Post by ericcholis »

scarface74 wrote: post #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 s…

I think this is entirely due to backwards compatibility.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#33

Post by paulsutter »

mabbo wrote: 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…

Reminds me of Steve Ballmer literally laughing at the iPhone in a 2007 interview[1]:

> There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-what-steve-ballmer-tho...

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#35

Post by godzillabrennus »

mabbo wrote: 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…

First they laugh at you.

Then they fight you.

Then you win.

- Microsoft should have known this but they had made too much money for too long.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#36

Post by fjsolwmv »

matt2000 wrote: post #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…

ChromeOS isn't a new OS. It's Linux running a web browser and a very simple desktop shell.

Windows is 30 years old. Rewriting it would throw away a lot of builtin value.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#37

Post by anoncoward111 »

abraham wrote: post #29
z_open wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean like chrome os?

Chrome OS is basically just a browser so anyone who has been on the internet is pretty comfortable on it.

Lubuntu is just as user friendly and comes pre-installed with all of the things one would expect, like a browser and media player and word processing software.

There's an app store and browser add ons work well.

The hardest thing for a casual user to learn would be "sudo apt-get install" and then guessing what the package name is that they might want to download, like vlcplayer or java

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#38

Post by gruez »

mavhc wrote: post #22
open-source-ux wrote: post #7

Don't forget that ChromeOS is an operating system (OS) that tracks everything you do. To use the OS to the full requires a Google account, so you aren't even anonymous while you use it. (As a reminder, your Google account = your name, your date of birth, your location, your gender and mobile phone number i.e. some of your most private and personal details.) We've seen Microsoft criticised, quite rightly, for introduc…

In no way are your name, DoB, location, gender and phone number some of your most private and personal details. Firstly you can lie. Second: turn off sync, turn on Do Not Track, turn off Manage Passwords, autocomplete, prediction, malware protection, spellcheck, diagnostic data and drm id. Or stop caring about such minor problems unless you're a spy

>Or stop caring about such minor problems unless you're a spy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#39

Post by mikejb »

mabbo wrote: 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…

Not understanding what your competitor is thinking, but dismissing them anyways it is arrogant at best, potentially dangerous. If you choose to ignore a competitive product, you better be able to explain why that product won't endanger your business - that includes understanding the goal of said product.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#40

Post by reaperducer »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #30
ChrisSD wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like they haven't got a history of doing this. Remember when the iPhone had "no chance" of "any significant market share"?[0] [0] https://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2...

And when the Web was irrelevant. Bill Gates and patent troll Nathan Myrvhold wrote a while book unironically displaying their utter lack of vision about the industry. Their while business is a mix of making bland weak copies of more popular software to run on their decades old Windows entrenchment, Xbox, and a few nice keyboard and mice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_b...

I read an old magazine article a few weeks ago where Bill Gates was talking about how the internet isn't necessary outside of businesses. That having a computer use a phone line to dial up to a central server once or twice a day is all anyone needs. This was back when 2400 baud was considered super fast.

Steve Jobs may have had some bad qualities (many of them irrationally amplified in the "Jobs-bad-Woz-good" revisionist history SV jealousy echo chamber), but he was one hell of a futurist.

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