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Chromebox

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271–280 of 305 posts

Re: Chromebox

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're likely being downvoted because your criticism shows no understanding of the market segment this product is aimed at.

You mean the market segment that is not technical enough to understand specs like HN'ers can? Note that my comment was more about the way it was presented rather than a complaint that it is slow.

I mean the market segment doesn't care if you can play Quake on it.

Re: Chromebox

#273
post #268
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.apple.com/ vs http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/ http://www.apple.com/iphone/ vs https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebox.html I'd say Google's doing a better job.

The two products are incomparable. One is unknown, the other is known by pretty much anyone who would be interested in buying a smart phone.

It's the brand of the company that matters; It's the foundation for what a user will expect, and will let them trust what they are seeing in front of them as valuable to them - prior to even knowing anything specific about it.

Re: Chromebox

#274
post #229
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.apple.com/ vs http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/ http://www.apple.com/iphone/ vs https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebox.html I'd say Google's doing a better job.

Not sure how that's obvious from your links. It'd be helpful if you gave some explanation.

It's nuanced UI-related. There's a lot of psychology involved to understand the holistic effects. You need to include things like someone's brand perception into deciding how effective a UI will be, such as trusted brands will let someone assume that what they are looking at is trustworthy - and therefore of enough value for them to care and look further into it / to get interested.

Hope that helps?

Re: Chromebox

#275
post #214

I used the Chromebook I got from Google I/O for a while. You have to understand that it's not designed to be a hacker's computer or even really a consumer device. It's designed to be a cheap, low-maintenance terminal for generic business computing. This is the new 3270. I actually think it's a pretty good product for that purpose. The economics are compelling if you maintain hundreds of desktops. Instead of PC + Wind…

> PC + Windows + Office + McAffee + a large desktop support organization, you just have ChromeOS devices and Google Apps I think if you put a Chromebook/Chromebox in front of most business users, the organization has to be using Citrix. Google Apps is not even remotely viable as a replacement for Office except in cost or for very basic work.

FWIW, I haven't used Office for 5 years and I don't miss it one bit. Google docs and gmail work fine and collaborative document editing is much easier.

The big challenge with business users are that they have established workflows and habits. Converting an existing Office-based infrastructure to Google Apps is a struggle mostly because it's expensive and difficult to retrain workers. On the other hand, if you start off with Google Apps, it works pretty well.

Certainly every now and then you have The Giant Spreadsheet Of Doom to maintain cost models or whatnot; this is more like custom application software that only a handful of users use. Give them Excel if they need it. There aren't many of these employees even in a large organization.

Re: Chromebox

#276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Can an admin or somebody fix this comment? It's breaking the page layout.

Just a tip for those who aren't web devs: the page layout can be fixed by removing the comment/element via Chrome's inspector.

Right-click on the comment, choose "Inspect Element", and delete it.

And of course the same could be done with any modern browser's inspector.

Re: Chromebox

#277
post #73

This is a terrible page and the product manager of this thing should be ashamed. The inmates are truly running the asylum. The technical specs are completely irrelevant to the interests of the majority of consumers. This page needs to show what this is capable of without the foreknowledge of what Chrome OS is or is capable of or what Googles other offerings are. Sell me a story! Tell me why my life is going to be bet…

The inmates are truly running the asylum

Exactly, this is why I always tell people that if you let technical people run companies you'll run into huge failures like you see with companies like Google and Facebook.

Re: Chromebox

#278
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know, what if they need to edit a report with a company template someone made in Word? There are full fledged PC for sale at less than that price. Salespeople are often on the move and would probably use a netbook I think.

How do businesses currently share Word docs? They either email them around or put them in a shared folder. And when that happens, and the ChromeBox user clicks it, GMail or Google Drive will happily open that Word doc in Google Apps.

I may be mistaken but I don't remember being able to keep the template of a word document while editing it in google docs, changing examples anyway, slightly more complex excel files could also not be supported I think.

Re: Chromebox

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's seriously underpowered. My phone holds more than that and considering the expectation that they've set (not mentioning cloud storage at all) horribly low for what looks like a home computer.

Its also about half the "price" of a smartphone.

ok, 32gb ipod touch.

Re: Chromebox

#280
post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can an admin or somebody fix this comment? It's breaking the page layout.

Just a tip for those who aren't web devs: the page layout can be fixed by removing the comment/element via Chrome's inspector. Right-click on the comment, choose "Inspect Element", and delete it. And of course the same could be done with any modern browser's inspector.

FWIW, it's also useful to use something like "HN Collapse": https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bbkfcamiocfccgmcjn...
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