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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

#311

Post by mark_l_watson »

disconnected wrote: post #96

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/m…

While Windows revenue must be nice, I agree with you that Microsoft ‘s future is more tied with Office 365 and Azure.

The Office 365 iOS apps are nice enough and the web version runs anywhere. Mostly because of the cloud storage space, but also the applications, I will probably be a lifetime customer for $100/year. I wonder how $100/year compares to Facebook’s and Google’s revenue per user. I pay Google $500/year for music, books, movies, tv dhows, and GCP but I am not a typical user.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#312

Post by scarface74 »

londons_explore wrote: post #105
reaperducer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 phon…

To be fair, after over a decade of trying, Apple still only has 15% market share. If Microsoft had the other 85%, they'd be in a good position.

None of the 85% of Android manufacturers are in a good position fighting over scraps and Google still pays Apple over $2 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS.

Market share doesn’t lead to profit.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#313

Post by CephalopodMD »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #222
disconnected wrote: post #96

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/m…

Doesn't Office 365 still run on the desktop? It's a bit of a stretch booking that as cloud revenue.

There's also the web apps. They're pretty much on par.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#314

Post by apozem »

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…

Speaking of companies laughing at competitors they shouldn't, my father has a great story from his time at IBM.

He was in a meeting where they were talking about Amazon Web Services, which had just launched. He said an IBM executive called it "stupid" and asked, "Who would ever pay for a server with a credit card?"

This blew my mind, because now that AWS is crushing IBM's cloud offerings, the answer to his question is tons of people.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#315

Post by AmericanChopper »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #167
londons_explore wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, after over a decade of trying, Apple still only has 15% market share. If Microsoft had the other 85%, they'd be in a good position.

Why should Apple care about the other 85% of the market if all the profit margin is in the 15% they have?

This is called market segmentation, it’s one of the hardest things to get right in a business, and I think Apple have done a pretty good job of it. Every decision in a business has an opportunity cost, you can’t make products that will meet the needs of everybody in a market, and you can’t try to sell products to everybody in a market. It’s hard because segmenting your market is essentially deciding that you don’t want to sell to some customers, but it’s more important to look at what each customer is worth rather than how many you can get in total.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#316

Post by mr_toad »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #222
disconnected wrote: post #96

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/m…

Doesn't Office 365 still run on the desktop? It's a bit of a stretch booking that as cloud revenue.

MS books anything they can as ‘cloud’ revenue, including all their server software and o365. So when you hear about Azure being the second largest cloud - take it with a grain of salt.

Their IAAS revenue is a lot smaller.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#317

Post by scarface74 »

komali2 wrote: post #262

I'm pretty new to tech, and young in general, but I'm curious why what's happening between the different browsers regarding working together to identically implement JavaScript, thus allowing tons of modern applications to be universal across machines as long as you can install a modern browser, not happen before with other programming languages? Or did they? I don't know anything about desktop application developmen…

Microsoft has always supported the Mac. It was an early Developer for the Mac in ‘84. PowerPoint was running on the Mac early on.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#318

Post by balls187 »

komali2 wrote: post #262

I'm pretty new to tech, and young in general, but I'm curious why what's happening between the different browsers regarding working together to identically implement JavaScript, thus allowing tons of modern applications to be universal across machines as long as you can install a modern browser, not happen before with other programming languages? Or did they? I don't know anything about desktop application developmen…

It's not really the web browser that enabled it. Web browsers have been around for a very very long time.

Instead, it's two big recent changes:

1. The relative ease at which application developers can build globally scalable infrastructure via Cloud PaaS.

2. More computers can depend on always-connected internet access.

Also worth mentioning:

Users also had a strong preference for apps that performed like native apps, which made using cross-platform toolkits less appealing (still exists when building mobile apps).

Apple Mac's didn't switch over from power pc to x86 until ~2006, which meant only large companies could support code bases for both, Windows and OSX.

Linux had a number of competing distributions, and expertise on how to deliver linux software to customers wasn't common knowledge.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#319

Post by nailer »

danso wrote: post #293
nailer wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think changed those people's minds? My feeling is that in the years post Jobs' death negative stories about his personality have been increasingly common. For the record: I believe Jobs definitely deserves the credit, I'm just observing the mud that has been slung his way.

Stories about his negative side are likely more common because people feel more free to talk about them, now that Jobs, being dead, can no longer respond or retaliate against people with grievances, such as the daughter he disavowed [0]. I perhaps unfairly read negative connotations in your use of "revisionist", but I see nothing wrong with adding Jobs' uglier side to the historical record. It doesn't change what he…

I didn't use the term revisionist, I just felt like I understood where OP was coming from. People act as if Jobs' harm towards others takes away from his achievements - that's the revisionist part - when in reality those things are orthogonal.

Re: $600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

#320

Post by nextos »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #289
nextos wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I patch that, and a few other things. It's a poor man's CopperheadOS.

Have you considered writing a guide on how you do this and what changes you make? I also own a Pixel, but kept running into problems when I tried to compile Android, eventually making me give up.

There's great work around from many people. See e.g.: https://github.com/dan-v/rattlesnakeos-stack

That's a whole toolset to compile your AOSP in AWS and then build your own over-the-air updates.

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