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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

#91

Post by icc97 »

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…

Have you tried Wine? A lot of work has been done on it [0] with also help from the Steam devs [1] (that's mostly for games but it will have knock on benefits for Excel), and it was already reasonable back in 2010.

[0]: https://www.winehq.org/announce/3.0 [1]: https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#93

Post by datguacdoh »

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…

> On Chromebooks, Chrome's fantastic profile system is deliberately conflated with Chrome OS login sessions, which makes it harder for one user to maintain multiple independent browsing contexts than when using Chrome on other platforms. Power users on Windows can run multiple browsers, or use profile systems in browsers to keep separation, but on Chrome OS, you only get two de facto contexts (the white one and the black one with the cool spy icon), you blast the same cookies everywhere, and half your builtin applications are just hyperlinks to auto-log you into the corresponding Google product in your global white context. Applications like Hangouts (the app, not the extension) are rare, where the entire window inherits your OS login, but keeps your context entirely separate from what you're doing in the browser.

ChromeOS actually has the ability to sign into multiple accounts at the same time and fast switch between them. It's not obvious in the UI though, so many don't know about it. https://support.google.com/chromebook/answer/6088201?hl=en

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#94

Post by jedieaston »

wilsonnb3 wrote: post #59
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.

And if you toss the device into developer mode you can give it a root password and have an account that saves.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#95

Post by ChrisSD »

awucs wrote: post #60
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...

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 (f…

The iPhone was beating MS phones before Android was even a thing[0]. They were certainly way more than "2% or 3%" in the markets they operated in. I can't see how Ballmer's statement was even slightly correct.

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2008/02/05/iphone-with-28-of-u-s-s...

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#96

Post by disconnected »

This article misses the mark completely by assuming that Microsoft still needs Windows to stay afloat.

This hasn't been true for years.

They have realized that it doesn't matter whether you use Windows, Chrome OS, Android or Linux, or anything else: everything is in the cloud now, so the OS is pretty much irrelevant.

Azure, Office 365 and heck, even Linkedin are doing great:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/19/microsoft_huge_2018...

So I very much doubt that Microsoft is sweating it about Chromebooks.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#97

Post by amelius »

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…

Yes, even though the user does consent to the tracking through an EULA, the average user will not be aware of it (or understand what it means practically), so it is very reasonable to call this software spyware, on some level.

Question: can you install your own OS on this machine without hacking?

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#98

Post by androidgirl »

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…

There's always the GalliumOS project if you want to swap out ChromeOS. Compatibility with chromebooks overall is pretty fair.

I had a collegue who got Arch linux for Arm working on a Chromebook with some caveats.

Of course, the average user isn't going to swap the operating system.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#99

Post by paulcarroty »

nextos wrote: post #84
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 r…

> if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me.

It's doesn't resolve the tracking issues.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#100

Post by akhilcacharya »

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…

Most people I know don’t have Photoshop, exclusively use their iPhones to shoot and edit photos, and only use Word and Excel for work (for which they already have a work machine).

Only one that might be relevant is gaming but even then most people who are serious about it buy a gaming machine or game console.

I got my parents - technically capable folks a Chromebook and it works beautifully.

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