They've been working pretty closely with the Google ChromeOS team for a while across the consumer, business, and education markets. This deal may be a way for Google to expand the number of devices running ChromeOS.
It seems like it could potentially really enable massive reuse of older, slower laptops that might otherwise be thrown away.
It seems to me like handling driver support would be the hard part. Is that their special sauce?
I can't see this as anything but a clear win for the environment and for education. And unlike the "Google shuts down everything" meme, this seems so obviously massively helpful to their entire ChromeOS strategy it looks like it'll be here to stay.
So this acquisition likely means a return to old Chromebooks being ewaste because Google bought out the company that was providing a longer lifecycle.
When Google's team decides a computer is too old to support, do you think their other team is going to be allowed to step in and support it?
Google is likely interested in CloudReady for it's newer uses on Windows PCs, I've seen an employer ship a brand new HP laptop with CloudReady on it instead of the OEM Windows license included. But long term support is likely going to suffer.
I’m having trouble interpreting it myself (see the problem?) but I believe it would go something like “I’ve observed some irony: Google used to have the motto «don’t be evil» and what you describe sounds evil.” Feel free to correct it.
/s
That's called a punchline.
“ Eventually you will initiate support requests directly with Google in the same way that you do for Chrome OS.”
(Full disclosure, I’ve never actually tried to get support for Chrome OS, but I’m fairly confident in assuming it’s right up to Google’s usual support quality standards...)
Congrats: You are lucky and have well placed confidence.
If you go through the user support it doesn't seem to go anywhere. If you then open a chromium bug like a chrome browser developer would, they will say they got no reports on the user channel and then the bug sheriff will eventually close it.
The main thing I hate about modern software development is the failure to understand one source of truth is incompatible with arbitrarily damaging information to fudge numbers. Virtually everything in their database can be correctly marked a duplicate of something they already closed, automatically, possibly without even reading it.
Forgot about it at some point, I'm glad too to see it's still around! Doubt I'd be in tech or so interested in tinkering or programming or whatever if it weren't for that.
I agree with other commenters that Neverware was bought not for old laptops. It is the supposedly zero-administration of Cloudready that in some CXX targetting PowerPoint looks like that old mainframe/terminal setup or like JavaStation (you stick the badge in and your work environment comes up) - CXX like to cut costs through magic of zero-administration/etc. May be Google will even risk to roll it out internally.
It the re-use of old hardware that might be thrown away it's just potential, it's happening at scale right now.
My mother used a Thinkpad T450 with Cloudready for years. To her it was a Chromebook with a larger screen than her old 11" one.
Don’t get me wrong: I am a big fan of Arch, but there are a lot of reasons to not prefer it over Ubuntu.
I think I can solve both of those with one stone..!
tl;dr - it's fine to snack on potato chips, but don't expect people to all want to eat the same thing. Variety is powerful.
They don't play AAA games, they don't really do administrative work (and the times they do, Google Drive can help), and they can't really break it even if they tried.
You'd be surprised.
They can (and will):
- install crapware extensions
- allow notifications from random shady sites, which will then make them install more crapware extensions
- change their default search engine (and a lot of data that Chrome sends goes to the default search engine, e.g. keystrokes in the address bar)
It doesn't break the OS per se, but it still results in "my computer has a virus" support calls.
https://cloudreadykb.neverware.com/s/article/Does-CloudReady...