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$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

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Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#51

Post by adrianN »

osrec wrote: post #43
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…

If it wasn't for Office and the ecosystem around it, I don't think many firms would opt for Microsoft products. In my firm, we're purely Linux, but have Windows VMs, just for Excel. As an aside, we run a business management app called Bx ( https://usebx.com/app ) and have recently started making some money. We're putting aside some cash to fund the development of a feature-rich, cross-platform spreadsheet app (I wish…

I hope you consider funding the improvement of Libre Office instead of trying to write your own spreadsheet app. There has been an incredible amount of work poured into it, starting from scratch doesn't make much sense imho.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#52

Post by skybrian »

londons_explore wrote: post #28
rblatz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Goodle Docs is a great product, but for serious uses, it's sorely lacking in the features department. It's odd, because even features from the 90's like mail merge are missing. Mail merge as a feature is something most coders could automate in a few hours. Why isn't it in the product so the rest of the world can use it? How about footnotes? References? Multi-column layouts? A mixture of portrait and landscape pages?…

I'm not sure the average user needs mail merge anymore? These days there are specialized web sites for things like emailing party invites to your friends and keeping track of responses.

Similarly, multicolumn layouts are an annoyance to read online, so perhaps not as popular with people who don't print things out. There are website-building web apps these days that do basic sidebars.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#53

Post by antoineMoPa »

Nasrudith wrote: post #12
beerlord wrote: 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.

I can't believe entire businesses I worked for rely on Microsoft Word for documentation. Heavy, slow, expensive, closed source, not searchable, with ugly output.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#54

Post by mindslight »

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…

> if you think it's fine for ChromeOS to record everything you do in the OS, you equally think it's fine for Windows/Mac OS/Ubuntu to record everything you do too

nit: It's reasonable to not fret about one additional way that proprietary OSs can abuse their users, but still not want to see surveillance culture normalized on a Free software distribution.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#55

Post by jacquesm »

ianai wrote: post #25
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...

They also spread plenty of FUD around all things Linux too.

It went quite a bit further than just FUD.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#56

Post by greglindahl »

londons_explore wrote: post #28
rblatz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Goodle Docs is a great product, but for serious uses, it's sorely lacking in the features department. It's odd, because even features from the 90's like mail merge are missing. Mail merge as a feature is something most coders could automate in a few hours. Why isn't it in the product so the rest of the world can use it? How about footnotes? References? Multi-column layouts? A mixture of portrait and landscape pages?…

I don't appear to ever use those features.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#57

Post by reaperducer »

fjsolwmv wrote: post #36
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.

"Built-in value"

Translation: It's good enough. Why innovate? We still make money on it.

It's like having a company van that breaks down all the time, but that's O.K. because, "It's paid for!" Meanwhile, your customers are getting increasingly impatient with your inability to meet their needs.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#58

Post by dawnerd »

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…

My surface go has been treating me pretty well despite it’s pretty paltry cpu. My iPad Pro has its place and I don’t really see the surface go as being a tablet replacement more of a supplemental computer for when you don’t want to carry a bigger laptop. Or in my case something to test Windows apps and websites on.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#59

Post by wilsonnb3 »

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…

> To use the OS to the full requires a Google account, so you aren't even anonymous while you use it

What can't you do without a Google account? There's a "browse as guest" option.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#60

Post by awucs »

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...

People often quote that, but I don't think he was necessarily wrong. What happened wasn't really so much between Apple and Microsoft, as Google giving away Android. That made all the other, arguably better, offerings redundant. Also letting Apple take a lot more market share because of quality and fragmentation issues. Almost no one makes any money from smart phones. Microsoft is probably fourth in terms of profit (from patents and such) behind Apple, Google and Samsung. Though Microsoft might have lost more in terms of influence and maneuvering.

Addition: Which part, if any, are the downvoters objecting to? From the people I have talked to in the industry that is exactly what happened and why a lot of companies got out of it.

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