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The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the netThe Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the netPosted Jan 18, 2011 8:18 UTC (Tue) by PO8 (guest, #41661)In reply to: The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net by butlerm Parent article: The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net
All sarcasm aside, I'm genuinely curious—who's the demographic for this? One of the first rules of business is to identify a customer base before designing a product. Someone give me some details of the age, socioeconomic status, vocations and avocations of folks who would think a ChromeOS device is pretty neat. Perhaps the less-active elderly? Many of them are supposedly looking for an entirely turnkey solution with zero administration and zero risk of malware. Needing to be net-connected isn't likely to bother them, and their needs are mostly limited to communications and personal data processing, which this platform should handle fine. There's a lot of them, and in the US at least they tend to be reasonably affluent but not extravagant spenders. Now to get rich designing elder-centric webapps for ChromeOS, LOL.
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The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 8:52 UTC (Tue) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
businesses, kids.
folks who need the computers to do work, not for high-end games.
People who want to want to use their machines, not fight with anti-virus anti-spyware, etc
even power users who want something light with a long battery life that they can carry around and use to connect to their other systems
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 13:50 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link]
With all the objections to Linux-in-the-workplace due to an insufficient amount of suitable apps, is there really any chance of ChromeOS-in-the-workplace given that it is even more limited in that regard?
It seems like you probably can't get much work done on one of these and, even if you could, few businesses would buy them for employees when they could buy an infinitely more flexible netbook for a similar price.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 15:41 UTC (Tue) by jzbiciak (✭ supporter ✭, #5246) [Link]
I guess it depends. If the ChromeOS apps are being hosted by the company on a company server, then I could see this becoming a corporate thin-client solution.
Imagine a sales floor or a call center or what-have-you. Any computer will do for what you need a computer for. Sit down at any station (or in the case of a sales floor, pick up a sales tablet) and do what you need to do, and get on with life. Any computer is as good as another, so you don't have to worry about picking up <I>your</I> computer.
UPS and FedEx already have a limited-scope version of such gadgets for tracking packages. It's not an unreasonable model when the computer is not the end itself, but rather a means to an end.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 19, 2011 2:27 UTC (Wed) by xilun (subscriber, #50638) [Link]
Fully featured corporate thin-client solutions already exists anyway. Retargeting a ChromeOS laptop for that purpose would probably not be the best move. Could have been more interesting if the secure boot stuff could be changed to accept an other root authority than Google, but this is not possible by the design they chose (there are public keys in a true ROM). So despite the "secure for users" / "open for developers" speech, developers in question are still second zone citizens, the only first zone one being Google, and so by design. That's where the openness stops. It is still far better than completely locked devices, but the vision is anyway very similar to the one of apple with their istuffs and of random video game console maker, unsurprisingly.
Neither corporations nor the paranoid geeks that want to build/administrate/maintain and have total mastery of their systems including of course security and privacy are the target of ChomeOs. It's far more suitable for the general public (at least the part that don't really care about privacy and have very little needs beyond web-surfing, and will happily stays in the limited roles the big corporations are willing to put them it, with clear borders).
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 19, 2011 2:33 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
remember that this is a test, proof of concept box.
I'm sure that if you called and wanted to order several thousands of them you could arrange to get the key in the rom changes to something else.
it may even be that the rom is socketed so that you can change it out.
this is assuming that it really is rom, not just flash that requires opening the machine to reprogram. I haven't seen a real hardware tear-apart to know the details of this.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 19, 2011 7:36 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Actually making this a Citrix or similar client would be a good move - I was reading only the other day about the problem of Windows PCs that are only used as Citrix clients which get infected with viruses that could grab corporate passwords.
I think having a really low cost locked-down Citrix client that can also run web apps directly would be quite attractive to corporates, particularly if it can also be configured to only connect via corporate VPN (which avoids the insecurity of open public WiFi).
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 19, 2011 1:25 UTC (Wed) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
there are LOTS of businesses, and even within a business there are a lot of different requirements.
your power users who need special software aren't the users for this, but your call-center users, shipping/receiving/warehouse people just need a machine that can access the web-based apps that they are using.
adding an extra platform to support does add management costs, but if the reduction in admin effort and cost is enough, it will win out.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 19, 2011 9:50 UTC (Wed) by frazier (guest, #3060) [Link]
> With all the objections to Linux-in-the-workplace due to an insufficient amount of suitable apps, is there really any chance of ChromeOS-in-the-workplace given that it is even more limited in that regard?
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Absolutely. This is Google-in-the-workplace. Everyone is already using Google in some form or another. This is just more Google. No big deal.
Linux is a big deal. Who's running Linux? I think we might have some Linux servers in IT, but our Microsoft Partner set up the high visibility web stuff on ASP.NET. All is good.
I'll divide out how I think most people make decisions (from toothpaste to God):
#3 trails hard with many. Linux doesn't have #1 or #2 with many because their Linux time (server) is largely transparent, and for them it's something inside their browser (the web site, not the web platform used). Google though, they've been searching with them for years. They may already have an Android phone that stays with them. For them, it's not a Linux phone, it's a Google Android-based phone. They spend time with it, and it's close by.
I think a big threat for Chrome OS is actually Android. Some cheap netbooks with touchscreens would cater nicely to points #1 and #2. Not saying it'll happen in numbers, but it certainly is possible.
...and yes, I know Chrome OS is Linux-based. That's #3 talk.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 25, 2011 7:42 UTC (Tue) by ceplm (guest, #41334) [Link]
... and all those people who are very happy with their iPads, but they hate Apple and they would prefer real keyboard.
Matej
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 10:22 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (guest, #8876) [Link]
I am not sure if ChromeOS will be a success but the potential target audience seems large to me. Based on the number of friends and relatives that rely on me for tech support, my impression is that most computer users just want their computers to work and really do not want to mess with things like administration and tweaking.
There is another article here on LWN about XFCE. In one of the comments, a poster talks about a relative that just used the icons on his desktop after a glitch caused the "applications" menu to disappear. He managed this way for weeks until the poster was able to stop by and fix it.
A lot of mainstream users consider gaming to be a core use for their devices so that is a legitimate issue to raise. That said, I think we do not understand how many people just want to use their computers for email, web browsing, and very simple document creation.
It is a bit humorous to me that us tech folks imagine that we are somehow the mainstream. Most people do not care about shell access. Most people are not developers. Most people are not computer enthusiasts. Most people, even many of the control freaks, just do not care about their computers enough to want to spend large amounts of time configuring and managing them.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 18:35 UTC (Tue) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]
But, wouldn't those people be happier with an android Honeycomb based device? What is the appeal to ChromeOS over Android?
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 19:43 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link]
> A lot of mainstream users consider gaming to be a core use for their
> devices so that is a legitimate issue to raise.
Casual gamers on ChromeOS can play HTML5 or (ew) Adobe Flash games. Serious gamers will buy a serious game machine like the XBox or PS3.
There are definitely problems with ChromeOS (biggest one: why isn't it Android?), but games aren't one.
C.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 19, 2011 7:33 UTC (Wed) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Generally I agree about gaming - the proportion of Windows PC gamers is actually rather small compared to the massed ranks of those gaming on Xbox, PS3, portable devices (Nintendo DS etc) or smartphones/tablets.
However I do think in the longer term there will be a hybrid Chrome/Android, whereby most of your apps are in the cloud but you can run apps locally as well if required (possibly through offline-cloud features), for those times when there's no internet connection.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 27, 2011 6:55 UTC (Thu) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link]
I honestly disagree. Despite the larger 'media blasting' of games like Halo or Gears of War, there's millions upon millions of PC gamers versus console gamers. Let's take it by the numbers: 50 million XBox 360s, 42 million PS3s, and about 76 million Wiis. Call it about 150 million overall active console gamers worldwide to account for older systems and overlap between platform ownership?
World of Warcraft and many other MMO's. WoW by itself accounts for 12 (yes, TWELVE) million active monthly accounts in late 2010: http://blizzard.com/en-gb/company/press/pressreleases.htm...
StarCraft 1 or 2. Look at the Asian competitive gaming market, it's huge for these and other RTS/pseudo-RTS games like mobile-artillery-fire sorts as well. Those are around 15-20 million active gamers depending on which news report you look at in the last year, some even higher. I'll go with 15.
CounterStrike and Team Fortress 2. I'm unable to find accurate stats for these, so I'll count them at 0, but mentioned here.
Hell, even Minecraft. 1-mil copies sold right there, at least 500k of those actively playing every day from when the stats page worked a couple weeks ago; they're mid-migration to a fully cloud-based web interface, so the stats-tracking code isn't operational at the moment).
Just from that handful of PC games, in a single day, there's roughly a sixth of the entire sold working worldwide console game population accounted for. One out of six, without delving deeply into stats, just nailing the highlights.
And that's not even touching on things like PopCap games that sell well, or all the various niche markets below the size or visibility of Minecraft. Or how many owners of consoles are actually active on gaming on a daily basis.
So, no, Windows PC gamers are not a minority compared to Console gamers at all. And that doesn't even touch on the number of companies supporting Intel Mac gaming now since Steam started the charge. Or even cross-platform and well-liked games that have millions of downloads for their niche market like rRootage for SCHMUP players, or the millions and millions of daily gamers visiting sites like ArmorGames or Kongregate. Or hell... the grandparents playing Solitaire on their Windows PC instead of shuffling a physical deck of cards because their arthritis has gotten too bad. That's still PC gaming too instead of playing it on a console.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 22, 2011 19:13 UTC (Sat) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
> There are definitely problems with ChromeOS (biggest one: why isn't it Android?), but games aren't one.
Android cannot have ChromeOS, but why CromeOS couldn't have Android and anything that implies, starting from AppStore? Only thing needed is a Dalvik JavaVM and some desktop integration so that Android apps blend nicely to desktop and users can easily access stuff they've bought, right?
As ChromeOS verifies whole OS on bootup and doesn't allow users local shell or root access, pirating the commercial games should be harder than say on Windows. And if Java GLES games run fine on Android phones like is stated here:
They should fly on a net/notebook. According to above article, many of the Android games (including popular ones) are just Java, rest may have e.g. native libraries wrapped for Java.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 22, 2011 18:49 UTC (Sat) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
Decade ago my dance instructor asked me whether I could help him with his computer (no idea how he identified me from the group as somebody who works with computers). It turned out his mails had been bouncing as they had viruses and he had bought a virus scanner which he wanted me to install. Unfortunate he had bought it for wrong Windows version, it worked only with newer ones. I think his eventual solution to the problem was to buy a new computer, this time with virus scanner pre-installed...
I'd say that most people don't want to install any software on their machines (games or other things), mostly because they cannot be sure it will succeed. If they don't have friends or relatives who do the computer administration for them, either the software (like MS-office) is pre-installed when they buy the computer or they take the machine to a shop for install. However, I have hard time imagining somebody doing that to get some new game to their machine.
Nowadays people just open e.g. their Facebook account and play (Flash) games that are there or do some casual gaming on gaming www-sites (which also use Flash). If they want 3D games, they buy a game console, but it's mostly kids and lonelier singles who have time for that kind of stuff. People with families are too busy for anything but casual gaming.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 22, 2011 19:17 UTC (Sat) by PO8 (guest, #41661) [Link]
Most everybody *has* Microsoft Office, no matter how it got there. So they can take their computer places that they don't have network access, and still use it for stuff. While some folks will be fine with that, I fear that most people will be unhappy with a portable computer that works properly only when they have an Internet connection for it.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 22, 2011 19:22 UTC (Sat) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
there are a lot of people with 'notebook' computers that only use them in places where there is electicity, and nowdays, just about all of those places have Internet access as well.
we will see how this works out.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 22, 2011 19:36 UTC (Sat) by oak (subscriber, #2786) [Link]
I've never used Google Docs, but AFAIK it has supported offline usage for about two years (with Google Gears), so why not having Internet for a while would be a problem?
Doesn't it also have (basic?) support for importing & exporting MS-Office document formats? At least .doc etc are listed on Google Docs pages as supported.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 13:29 UTC (Tue) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]
Age, socioeconomic status, vocations and avocations of potential users? There's large swathes of the planet who don't have access to the internet yet, and Google wants to sell their user data to advertisers when it eventually comes online. There's people like me who want a fire-and-forget computing experience, so that I can choose to tinker with computers and also choose to not care at other times. There's people whose computing experience is web browsing in place of TV browsing a decade ago, for whom the computer in hand doesn't really matter.
I kind-of expect Dell and Microsoft to respond to ChromeOS with a managed-service laptop on some lightweight edition of Windows (perhaps that's what the Windows-on-ARM announcements at CES were about). Outsourcing your duty to care for your equipment is going to become a commodity that you buy; I've spent the last decade with a mobile phone contract where I get next-day replacement of the phone if broken or lost and think that there are many people who would pay to have the same for their personal computing needs.
K3n.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 15:27 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] All sarcasm aside, I'm genuinely curious—who's the demographic for this? While I would never use such a machine, I could see my kids using it. For example, my daughter's middle school encourages the kids to do their assignments using Google Docs. They have groups so teachers can pick up the kids' assignments directly from Google. It works pretty nicely. Also, my kids spend 99% of their computer time in the browser, doing email, or doing instant-messaging. The Chrome machine would be perfect for that.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 18, 2011 22:07 UTC (Tue) by daniel (subscriber, #3181) [Link]
"Also, my kids spend 99% of their computer time in the browser, doing email, or doing instant-messaging. The Chrome machine would be perfect for that."
And if they ever find themselves without a net connection they can just go outside and play. Right, that's it.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 19, 2011 2:12 UTC (Wed) by dougsk (guest, #25954) [Link]
A decent ICA and or RDP client and Google may have just put all the thin client vendors out of business. Wait it can't print? Wyse thanks Mountain View profusely for all the money left on the table.
The Cr-48 and Chrome OS: Google's vision of the net Posted Jan 19, 2011 15:17 UTC (Wed) by dtlin (✭ supporter ✭, #36537) [Link] It will be able to print, though it's not entirely ironed out yet. Google Chrome Cloud Print
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