Serious question:
Is the chromebook division run by an entire different company? They are great exactly where Google has otherwise failed.
Is the chromebook division run by an entire different company? They are great exactly where Google has otherwise failed.
Google generally seems to treat its users pretty well. As long as you can accept that free accounts don't come with any kind of customer service or recourse. And that it's going to shut down products that don't ultimately contribute to its bottom line, since it's a business.
Google also released a firmware update for the controllers allowing them to be used as generic Bluetooth controllers. It was the best Google product sunset I have experienced.
Google sure gets a ton of flack (and deservedly so) for unceremoniously axing beloved products that don't quite bring Google-scale revenue, but this sunset sounds beyond incredibly respectful to their users and really shines a positive light on them. The controller thing is such an unnecessary but trust-promoting thing to do!
{Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel} is big enough so that {insert product here} operates a lot like an independent company, just with lots of automatic mind share (although that can backfire when the parent brand is devolving), access to top-tier lawyers, marketing, sales, etc people and practically infinite runway (as long as the bosses like what you do).
If search is the root, then the branches would be maps, street view, books, earth, scholar, patents, etc. Just cataloguing and indexing everything there is. Truly mind-blowing projects, each one of these. Hardware (and some of the other PAs) seem somewhat tangential to this core idea.
What comes to mind for you when you think of Google culture, and what parts of that do you see in ChromeOS?
On the software side, ChromeOS also reminds me of the Google's internal platforms software. Remove everything and start from scratch, build something that doesn't really resemble anyone else's Linux distro. Use all of the sandboxing and isolation features that other distros ignore, and invent a few new ones. Don't take the BIOS for granted. Maybe you don't need one.