Hacker News Reader

Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

I think Microsoft is also almost an essential product company. You can either get a PC or a Mac. Or Linux but even that requires getting a PC anyway. Chromebook market is still tiny.

View on HN

PC != Windows

And was never. The Personal-Computer is an original product of International Business Machines (IBM) and not Microsoft. Contrary to most products shipped today it's architecture is open for industry standards and other companies. A huge success for IBM.

Microsoft shipped the pre-installed and required operating-system. You can order desktops and laptops without an operating-sytem or Linux from Lenovo (former IBM), Dell, System76, Purism, Tuxedo and many more. Vendors which aim for cheap distribution to private customers usually only ship Personal Computers with Windows. Most of these are crap and come with questionable pre-installed software - and I don't refer to Windows.

That IBM sold the PC subsidiary was the worst mistake the could ever have done, both Apple and Lenovo show how much money you can earn with long lasting high quality products. IBM lost the contact point to many customers. They need to succeed with Red Hat now. Irony, IBM use and prefer (again) ThinkPads, preinstalled with Linux.

If you say "it runs on PC" you're actually saying your software is compatible to an Intel 286 CPU or higher. Well, if it is portable?

>PC != Windows

Technically, yes, that is correct, however, looking at the over 90% marketshare Windows has on the IBM/PC space, Windows is pretty much the synonym for the PC OS. Most laptops and PC's sold with an OS by retailers or OEMs, are shipped with Windows by default. It's basically a monopoly.

Sure, on tech boards like this one the proportion of people running some GNU/Linux based OS on their PC is much higher than the statistics, but the average joe consumer is 99% surely gonna have Windows on their PC which is where the assumption that "PC automatically equals Windows by default" comes from.

I likely use often also incorrect or misleading terms.

Yes. The mass market works (thinks) like that. Like you said, we're here on a tech board and therefore I refer to the actual definitions. Depends on situation when correct terms must be used or not.

don't let it stop you correcting people calling their desktop PC a hard drive. We're technically on a tech board so the correction is _correct_.

Nah, the box on your desktop is the CPU. Just like "Adobe isn't working" means there's an issue opening/editing PDFs.

Extremely pedantic.

When people say "PC" as in "PC or Mac?" they do mean computers running Microsoft windows

I agree, but it is also correct. Somehow similar to asking "github or subversion?". It also a bit confusing once you introduce Linux into the mix. I will stick to Windows or Mac instead (oranges to oranges comparison).

Pedantic? Yes. But the difference is significant between "remove" and "delete" and there is a difference between "while" and "if". Regarding APIs I'm hopefully pedantic.

And even before that, they meant MS-DOS. Microsoft's DOS!

> That IBM sold the PC subsidiary was the worst mistake the could ever have done

That was years and years after they had already committed "the worst mistake they could have done", which was not buying Microsoft early on when they had the chance. This should be immediately obvious, as you're here complaining about people confusing Windows with PCs. After that, their failure to secure exclusive rights to Intel's x86 chips, their inability to keep up with all the clones on the market, and the missteps of the PCjr and OS/2, the eventual sell off the PC hardware business was inevitable.

Wasn't IBM's philosophy to have always two vendors for each component, therefore a clone from AMD and later an own chip? Probably manufacturing everything exclusively would've counteracted the idea of exclusive rights. They had a plan but not probably not expected the success in this way. On the other than, luckily they didn't planned for "vendor lock-in with eco-system" :)

> not buying Microsoft early on when they had the chance.

That would likely have led to closing down the clones, not allowing others to use DOS, they would have became an also-ran.

lol in their heyday it was virtually impossible to find a computer you didn't build yourself that didn't include a Windows license. Regardless of whether you ran Windows on it Microsoft got their tax.

I can't remember if they actually did this or were just trying to but I recall they wanted Intel and AMD to charge a license fee for every processor they sold.

> A huge success for IBM.

A huge success for users because it created the clone market. IBM was never a big player in the PC market after the clones came out.

Lenovo is not high quality compared to mac except at the top of the range. Which is very expensive. Trying to compete in a commodity consumer market where nobody (other than Apple) made money for well over a decade would be a business disaster.

> IBM use and prefer (again) ThinkPads, preinstalled with Linux.

Citation required. They had ~300K apple devices several years ago.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-cio-mac-users-perform-bett...

>Or Linux but even that requires getting a PC anyway

I'm not sure I understand what you mean here, if I buy, say, a Dell computer with Linux pre-installed then I don't think MS gets a cut? They don't own the PC platform.

Or maybe you mean that most prebuilt PCs come with some OEM Windows license even if you don't intend to use is, which is fair enough I suppose.

Not that it really matters for desktop PCs where Windows is king anyway. Although from personal experience I'd argue that the "essential product" these days is less Windows itself than the Office suite which is still the gold standard in many institutions.

Apparently Chromebooks outsold Macbooks in 2020, and their market share only seems to be increasing:

https://www.geekwire.com/2021/chromebooks-outsold-macs-world...

(That said, ChromeOS still makes up a much smaller percentage of active installations, as Google don't have the legacy hardware base that Apple and Microsoft do)

In some sense this demonstrates a point about key markets. Chromebooks have market share that's not important, beyond sales volume for a variety of reasons. It's a secondary machine, a non-work machine, a machine for the unsavy, etc. People who don't need much from the laptop. It has few apps, and the ecosystem isn't that important. Companies don't run on it. Companies don't even really run on Google docs very often. These products remain non essentials with little to no lock-in.

You could argue that kindle is a computer too, but it doesn't really matter either way.

I think you are forgetting a gigantic market that is worth billions upon billions of government funded cheese: schools. Chromebooks have the education market down. Damn near every single school that wants to upgrade its tech is getting a chromebook. Schools need google docs. Schools need a low cost machine so that they can buy a thousand of them. Schools need something incredibly locked down. Schools are a source of income that is not only great but also gets people used to using google products as that is all they have learned (you ever wonder why Adobe and Microsoft work so closely with education?). To say that chromebooks have an "unimportant" market share is just flat out wrong.

I think you forget that only US schools buy their students computers.

That isn't true. I know of many schools in Norway and Sweden that buy iPads or Chromebooks for their students. Although it is admittedly not universal

Probably Switzerland does that too. That's still very small fraction of the whole world.

This is an important point. The experience that people have as children defines their understanding of technology to some extent. Getting children used to your hardware and software is a major investment in the future. And lucrative school contracts are an investment in now.

> Getting children used to your hardware and software is a major investment in the future.

I disagree. Apple tried this in the 1980's in the U.S. It was a disaster, no one bought Apple computers for home use and the company almost went under. Apple didn't come back to life until they came out with the iPod. It didn't hurt that they later got a booster when MS released the sh*tshow know as windows 8.

I'm pretty sure the school market is not terribly lucrative. I thought that Chromebooks were dumped on schools to try to build momentum and familiarity in children. So when they grew up they would be Google Docs / Chromebook users.

Closed source in education is unethical. Full stop. We can argue about the rest of the world.

I don't know where you get this idea that Chromebooks are secondary machines.

For everybody that I know who owns one, it's their primary machine.

Remember that you can run Docker natively on a Chromebook and you need a VM on both windows and Mac

Nit: Docker runs just fine in WSL on Windows.

WSL runs on a lightweight VM:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-version...

WSL is not native. You don't get native perfomance for especially disk reads

They're marketed as such, I imagine to avoid antitrust of "general purpose computers" like the iPhone, despite both being generic computers

Could it be related to the offers giving away free Chromebooks, for example when purchasing Samsung products: https://www.samsung.com/ca/offer/chromebook/

As a subjective observation I've seen quite a lot of ads for those giveaways.

I suspect that has a lot to do with how “disposable” Chromebooks are. What’s the average lifespan for a Chromebook given to middle school students? I can’t imagine it’s very long.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com