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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

#81

Post by gsich »

reaperducer wrote: post #57
fjsolwmv wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What needs?

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#82

Post by hedora »

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?…

Yeah, but MS Office is missing transparent font embedding and cross OS file sharing (even between different versions of windows or office).

The upshot is the giving PowerPoint presentations is hit or miss / embarrassing, but gsuite presentations usually just work.

The same can be said for sharing spreadsheets, etc. Writing documents is fundamentally a form of communication, and MS Office is built with the fundamental assumption that you will share your work by printing it out. The retrofit PDF export works OK, but sharing editable documents does not, and I think they need to from-scratch rewrite the core document engine to fix the problem.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#83

Post by fasafsaf3 »

scarface74 wrote: post #74
fasafsaf3 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How can compatibility not have to do with bloat? Entire subsystems in Windows are devoted to backwards compatibility. If you follow Raymond Chen’s blog on MSDN, he talks all of the time about all of the hacks in Windows to make it compatible with one specific program. There is still a 32 bit version of Windows in 2018.

There are a few hacks here and there that, I assume, introduce a bit of overhead, but the real problem with 10 is the absolute disregard the Windows team has for performance.

Windows 7 has the same level of compatilibity (or perhaps even more, as I'm sure more software is compatible with it) but it's much lighter.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#84

Post by nextos »

sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…

I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones.

I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me.

Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro?

Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to run Linux on (thanks to having just Intel components). Same for Huawei if you are willing to spend a bit more, but on that price a Thinkpad is probably the way to go.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#85

Post by toyg »

gregmac wrote: post #21
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…

I'm not at all defending the practice, but I think it has to do with the legacy. Google is (somewhat) up front about tracking, and has always required an account. There was never a Chrome OS that didn't track you. Windows didn't used to do this, so it feels like they're changing the rules after you've agreed and bought into the platform. If Microsoft had instead called "Windows 10" something completely different, and…

No, it's just that the volumes are still not comparable.

Everyone at some point has had a Windows machine, including the privacy-conscious and the paranoid -- simply because, at the time, there was no realistic alternative. Once you reach 90% penetration, any special-interest group with a pet complaint will be sizeable.

That's not happened with Chromebooks and it's unlikely to ever happen. Privacy-conscious users now have NSA-hardened Linux and "won't-let-FBI-in" iPhones, they will never have to deal with Google if they don't want to. They are not forced to use any of their services, since there are alternatives for pretty much everything -- even superior ones, in most cases. The only service that used to be unmatched was Search, and sure enough, plenty of people still complain about tracking searches.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#86

Post by dpark »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #35
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.

Yes and no. Just because they laugh at you doesn’t mean you’ll eventually win. Lots of shitty products get laughed at deservedly.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#87

Post by detaro »

bitL wrote: post #73
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…

Alright, you like a challenge, so what's the purpose of a ChromeBook outside of a plastic cutlery-equivalent of a device destined to quickly end up in a landfill, contributing to unnecessary damage of environment? Do you feel good about working on an unsustainable disposable device, meditating how much of a chess master you are these days? Did you meet people that actually decided to move forward with this project an…

Where's the data that chromebooks have shorter useful lives than other laptops in the same price class? Other laptops on average? It's possible that's the case, but not obvious to me.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#88

Post by osrec »

adrianN wrote: post #51
osrec wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not denying the amount of work gone into LibreOffice, however I'm not sure if I agree with you on the approach (this will probably be an unpopular opinion). I find the entire ecosystem of LibreOffice a bit clunky, and it wouldn't surprise me if there is a lot of technical debt that would need to be understood before we could make any sort of contribution. Don't know why, but my gut says starting afresh would allow us to build something more useful, faster. It would make sense to use the LibreOffice code base as a guide though.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#89

Post by skymt »

sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…

> I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models.

In the current version of Windows 10 there's a feature called "fresh start" that makes it trivial to reset to a clean OS install without vendor crap. It even automatically preserves your home directory. The only problem is that you need to know it exists, so it only benefits technical users and users with geeky friends to advise them.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-use-the-fresh-st...

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#90

Post by awucs »

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 don't think that is ever a good idea. But Google does also have a reputation for getting things wrong. Plenty of their product never make it anywhere, because they don't have to. You have been able to get a cheap Windows laptop for probably almost ten years. Recently e.g. the Lenovo IdeaPad and before that there were netbooks. I think there could be merit to ChromeOS, but for now it seems like a placeholder so no one else can take that position in the market.
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