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Comment by Ygg2 | Hacker News Reader

Here is the thing. Google has one primary source of revenue. Ad tech. If Ad tech fails, all their other sources of revenue won't be able to pay for their other services, so the fear they'll cut them is warranted.

Disclaimer I use Google services, but I'm definitely looking for alternatives.

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> Here is the thing. Google has one primary source of revenue. Ad tech.

This is changing though - the most recent quarterly report has YTD ad revenues as 84% of overall revenues, with the corresponding previous year's period at 86%. The non-ad revenues are in the tens of billions of dollars - hardly nothing.

https://abc.xyz/investor/

If your other preferred client is the Mac, you have the same challenge with Apple. Their entire mac product line is only 10% of their revenue.

It isn't the same challenge because Apple doesn't sell Macs at a loss.

Are you saying that Google sells Chrome OS at a loss?

Do google developers get issued chromebooks these days? Either way, there’s a large scale difference in the amount of money (because Apple makes more money than google in addition to 10% being 4x the 2.5% of revenue google is devoting to chromebooks). On top of that, Mac revenue is eaten into by iOS device revenue, which is a pretty close product category. Much closer than ads, at least.

Yes, they do. The default machine you get is a pixelbook, that’s true of basically everyone at Google. You can request a Mac, which is what I did, but I later also got a pixelbook and found that I quite like it.

Literally the only thing keeping me from using it as my primary work machine is that it only supports one chrome browser profile per login, so I can’t be logged into my work account at an OS level and my work and personal accounts at the chrome level. But I went and paid out of pocket for a pixelbook for home because I thought it was a great all around home laptop.

(Disclaimer: I work at google, but not on chromeos or hardware, this is just my personal experience )

Very neat, thanks for the insights!

Did they remove multi profile login?!

You used to be able to login with several accounts and switch between them similar to virtual desktops.

You can still switch between accounts on ChromeOS. I do this on my Google issued Pixelbook daily.

Once you're signed into the other account, you can switch quite easily with <CTRL> + ,

Sorry, to be clear, it switches all of your windows like a separate desktop. I like having both windows available simultaneously. I realize this is a nit picky complaint, and I am in the minority.

You can run the embedded Linux and then run Firefox there. Also, with multiple workspaces now supported I'm funded less reason to grab the mac (bettertouchtool being one thing). I even have vscode running full screen in another orksoace and can easily swap over.

They do make a substantial amount of money with G Suite subscriptions, and they're bound to SLAs.

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