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Comment by dholowiski | Hacker News Reader

That article is 100% wrong. My aha moment was when they showed the citric 'app'. A google chrome computer is a modern day dumb terminal, and the citrix server is the mainframe. Corporations who spend millions of dollars supporting computers (and most of whom already host their business critical applications on a citrix server) will jump at the chance to replace their costly (in terms of money and tech support) pc's with cheap dumb terminals.

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But IBM etc supported their cheap dumb terminals.

From the server side -- sure you can continue to patch/update your citrix apps etc.

If Google drops Chrome in 5 years time and in 5.5 years there is a massive flaw (some form of root-kit that saves every username/password and grants you access to the citrix system or the ceo's cloud based email account). If google decides that it wants to focus on Android and drops Chrome -- the pain could be immense. // This obviously doesn't apply for smaller faster moving companies.. But if you roll out 10,000+ Chrome systems -- Long Term Support plans are a good thing.

Otherwise - I agree. If you can replace a complex win/mac system with a cheap dumb chrome terminal -- the benefits for support are immense.

It seems most of these corporate "dumb terminals" are running Windows 2000 or Windows XP. In a few years (or already?) Microsoft will stop releasing security updates for these operating systems. The argument to switch to a new system, especially one that is free and open source, more secure, faster and better in almost every possible way, will be clear and obvious.

See OP Footnote: Win 2000 had 10 years of support. Win XP has until 2014 (13 years). The point is not: What is the best option at this point in time, but What is the best option for 5 years from now.

// Something like Ubuntu LTS might fit the bill perfectly so please don't think I'm just advocating Windows. I'm just considering that Google already produce a very successful light-weight linux-based OS (That has shipped far more units than Chrome likely will) and has a history of killing off products that don't get much traction (see Wave for a recent example)

IIRC, XP was EOL'ed several times, and to M$'s dismay, they've lengthened the support date a couple of times.

Why do you care about security updates for a dumb terminal?

Well, you're probably typing credit card numbers, passwords, and other private information into the dumb terminal. It seems absolutely critical to make sure nobody is running a keylogger.

Except that Chromium OS is open source so you or the community can patch it if such a thing were to happen.

Will Google allow you to install a patched version on a native Chrome OS notebook? It seems like some of the value lies in the hardware/software integration, and those machines are going to ship with locked-down bootloaders.

Otherwise, I agree that the community aspect does differentiate it from past legacy products like Win2K.

> Will Google allow you to install a patched version on a native Chrome OS notebook?

The answer is an unqualified yes. According to Google, jailbreak mode is a feature of Chrome OS hardware. On the Cr-48, it requires flipping a small switch under the battery.

If it's a hardware feature, who knows what the other hardware vendors will do with that?

You don't have to buy that hardware. The point is Google is all in favor of you having control.

"You can do it yourself" is not what enterprise IT people want to hear either.

I predict that somebody will ship chrome notebooks to corporations that have the 'jailbreak button' removed.

Yeah. In some sense, it's an advanced thin client with local persistence, portability, with additional security and better performance than a traditional thin client.

The hardware will be cheap, and the software will be ridiculously easy to maintain. It will be easy to adopt, and comparatively easy to abandon, if needed.

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