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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

#61

Post by Someone1234 »

Let me just say right off the bat that I like Chromebooks and think they're fantastic for education in particular (combined with GSuite).

But that being said, Chromebooks don't scale with better hardware very well. You can spend $250-350 and get 90% of the experience, and a very good experience at that. If you spend three times more you'll get more memory for Chrome and slightly more responsive tabs but hardly blows your socks off.

Microsoft likely aren't shaking in their boots because of a $600-900 Chromebook. If anything Android emulation is the real "killer app" since it massively expands a Chromebook's capabilities, including running Microsoft's own Android-Office apps.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#62

Post by csomar »

No they are not. We are still not there yet. First, $600 is pretty expensive. Most Windows laptops that I see run on less than $500. Second, they don't have the ecosystem yet.

Here are things you do on Windows:

1. Browse the Internet using Chrome.

2. Play a relatively demanding Video Game.

3. Run Office, Word and Excel.

4. Install your Canon Printer and print a few papers.

5. Plugin your Nikon Camera.

6. Run Adobe Photoshop to do some tweaking.

Most people do that on their laptops. We are still far from being 100% cloud. Also ChromeOS is not an improvement over Windows. It is a change of environments. OSX is an improvement. The only deal is that it is prohibitively expensive.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#63

Post by scarface74 »

dylan604 wrote: post #47
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…

Isn't there another quote from Bill Gates on not optimizing Windows because why pay for his engineers to makes things faster/smaller/efficient when RAM/CPU/HDD were outpacing by getting faster/larger/cheaper. Or is that an urban legend type of quote? It makes sense business wise. Getting new features is sexy/sell-able. Refactoring existing/working code to be smaller/faster/secure/etc isn't.

Seeing that in 2008 a midrange laptop came with 4GB of RAM and 10 years later, a low end laptop - like the Surface Go - still only has 4GB of RAM and has less storage than my 10 year old laptop.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#64

Post by [deleted] »

ericcholis wrote: post #32
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.

[deleted]

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#65

Post by [deleted] »

ericcholis wrote: post #32
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.

[deleted]

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#66

Post by kerng »

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…

I think it's a sign of not being prepared and not having an answer. I am certain that the guy knew this was a smart move by Google, even right at that time. But it needs a certain skill to behave appropriate and professional in such situations. It reflects that the person certainly is not of the humble kind.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#67

Post by matt2000 »

praseodym wrote: post #19
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…

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.

That's why I was suggesting running Win7 in an emulator for legacy apps.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#68

Post by fasafsaf3 »

ericcholis wrote: post #32
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.

Absolutely not. All the bloat 10 ships that makes it so slow is completely new. Compatibility has almost nothing to do with bloat.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#69

Post by jkaptur »

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…

Wasn’t Longhorn pretty much that?

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#70

Post by Ataraxy »

csomar wrote: post #62

No they are not. We are still not there yet. First, $600 is pretty expensive. Most Windows laptops that I see run on less than $500. Second, they don't have the ecosystem yet. Here are things you do on Windows: 1. Browse the Internet using Chrome. 2. Play a relatively demanding Video Game. 3. Run Office, Word and Excel. 4. Install your Canon Printer and print a few papers. 5. Plugin your Nikon Camera. 6. Run Adobe Ph…

I would argue that "most people" only do #1 from that list.
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