Sergey Brin Guesses That Only 20% Of Googlers Still Use Windows Machines | Hacker News Reader

Sergey Brin Guesses That Only 20% Of Googlers Still Use Windows Machines

techcrunch.com

28 pointsssclafani31 comments

Brin also said that since Google will be deploying Chromebooks internally, he hopes that a year from now, there will only be a small percentage of Googlers not working on the devices.

Weird. It's kind of hard to believe that many google employees will use a 12" atom netbook as anything close to their main machine. In addition to, sure.

My guess is they use them like smart terminals and ssh into something else.

They're definitely not running development versions of Google search on their local machine the way I do with my web app, so I don't see why a 12" netbook wouldn't be sufficient. As long as it can handle an external monitor that's a decent machine for text editing and web browsing, which is what development is.

I used to work at a C.S. research institute in California. Every machine there had GNU/Linux installed as their sole OS. I also worked for a German research institute - when I started in the 90's it was a bunch of Windows machines, some GNU/Linux, some Solaris. Today with a new generation of college graduates, virtually no-one uses GNU/Linux any more, it's almost exclusively Windows, although a few people have Mac Books. There are a few GNU/Linux compute servers, but they're only rarely used.

What are other people's experiences over the last decade? Any apparent changes in the usage of different OS's?

I was at Clojure Conj last October and in a room of 200 or 300 Clojure programmers, it looked like probably 70% of everyone had a MBP running usually OS X, sometimes Ubuntu, and the other 30% (myself included -- although I dual-boot Windows) were running Linux on a PC laptop. I would be surprised if more than 10 people were running Windows as a primary OS.

However, it's worth noting that the average age of the crowd there was almost definitely above 25.

Do MBPs dual boot into ubuntu well? I've mostly seen people using parallels and the ilk for linux booting, as the laptop was mostly unsupported according to them.

At my workplace, it's about 40% Windows, 40% MacOS, and 20% Linux. Those who use Windows generally use it to ssh and/or VNC into our general-purpose Linux compute servers.

I personally have a Linux desktop as my main machine and a Linux netbook as my portable. I could see Google going the same way with its own employees, since the only things my netbook has to do is connect to the vpn and ssh to my desktop, where I connect to my existing screen session and keep going right where I left off. A Chromebook could do that sort of thing relatively easily.

What programs do the Windows devs use as a terminal? When I'm using my windows box I use Console 2 - which is great. But still doesn't compare to Mac OS X or Linux terminals.

Of course using a Linux VM or VNCing into one is the easy solution but it's heavy weight in comparison to having a great terminal app :)

There is PowerShell (which I use) but if you thought cmd.exe was slow, its got nothing on PowerShell, which takes slow text rendering to a new level.

On a Core i7 clocked at 3.5Ghz with SSD :)

Getting home to work on a Linux terminal or Terminal.app is like heaven.

PuTTY seems to be the most common.

[edit] Oh, wait, I guess you mean for a local terminal? I'm far too ignorant about Windows to know why a Windows user would even want a local terminal. All the Windows users I polled just log into Linux machines and do their work there.

In the classes I taught this past semester it was roughly 70:25:5 Mac:Windows:Linux. It was mostly international students still using windows.

I was in CS undergrad 2001-2005. I remember first day of class Fall 2002 or 2003 suddenly a quarter of my classmates had macs. That's when I knew Apple was back.

Just last year Google eliminated Windows from their list of OS options for new employees after the Chinese hacks, leaving just OSX and Gubuntu, iirc. No surprise Windows has fallen to 20% then.

Two things come to mind:

1) What are they running instead? Linux or Chrome OS?

2) 20% is probably about the number of people who do require Windows in a company. Getting rid of the 20% is the hard part.

A lot of them use Macs.

They are running mainly Mac and Linux. No idea on any particular distro, though.

http://www.edibleapple.com/google-revamps-new-employee-compu...

Here too, but you've got to be a googler to see it: http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Desktop-Linux/topics

It's pretty interesting how the two big enemies both depend on each others innovations in rolling out products. Macs google, and Macs make Google.

That actually seems high to me considering how cutting edge they are. I'd think Mac's would be the vast majority, followed by a fair number if linux machines. I'd of expected Windows boxes to account for a tiny amount of testing machines, and maybe a few biz/marketing hold-outs, but even those guys I'd expect to be predominately on OSX and running either bootcamp or VM'd for Windows.

Google builds some of the most popular - and in my opinion, exciting - Windows software that has ever existed. Between Chrome, Earth, Picasa and others I imagine a decently large number of devs need to work on Windows machines for more than just "testing".

(also, in your post "I'd of" should be "I'd have")

No, I meant "I'd" to mean "I would", as in "I would think...".

> I'd of expected Windows boxes

http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/couldof.html

I was actually referring to the first 'I'd think Mac's would be the vast majority...', not the one you didn't reference until above.

Thanks for the link, I'll keep that handy if my copy of The Chicago Manual of Style isn't handy (oh they have a nice website now too, cool).

Well it makes sense, given that Google is predominantly a linux-based company.

But it's a fallacy to equate "cutting edge" with "not Windows". Windows may not be as fashionable in the same way that Macs are with the Starbucks/college campus crowd, but it's certainly no less "cutting edge" a desktop operating system than OS X or Linux.

To me, leadership and overall direction indicates how cutting edge a company is; thinking about Apple, Google and Microsoft in these terms, and I think it's an apt statement.

I think you're being too loose with language here. The implication was that Google doesn't use Windows because Google is cutting-edge; this is a claim about the technical merits of Windows, not the direction of Microsoft's leadership.

Anyone knows if building stuff like Chrome on Windows is faster than Linux/Mac?

He's probably way off.

Pretty sure they no longer supply new people with Windows machines, only Linux, Mac, and now it sounds like ChromeOS.

Might be true. But in the corporate world, (Google Apps) Google is all about Windows.So someone at Google is running Windows.

I think you're thinking

Googlers == "People who use Google"

when its actually

Googlers == "People who work at Google"

I know I did at first :D

Nope. I wasn't.

As somebody who worked at Google until very recently, I can assure you, 20% is more likely an overestimate than an underestimate.

I suspect the misdirection in the title is intentional link bait - if it said "Google Employees" instead, nobody's first thought would be "Brin can not be that much of an idiot" and it would have been obvious that the article is no more revealing than one stating that most Apple employees don't use Windows at work.

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