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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

I used the Chromebook I got from Google I/O for a while. You have to understand that it's not designed to be a hacker's computer or even really a consumer device. It's designed to be a cheap, low-maintenance terminal for generic business computing. This is the new 3270.

I actually think it's a pretty good product for that purpose. The economics are compelling if you maintain hundreds of desktops. Instead of PC + Windows + Office + McAffee + a large desktop support organization, you just have ChromeOS devices and Google Apps. It's not sexy but 99% of the employees at the DMV don't need sexy, they just need to run a handful of basic apps.

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There is a lot of crossover between the anti-power user at work and the anti-power user at home. The former gets a locked down machine managed by IT to keep it running and uses the browser and a contant handful of apps. The latter uses a machine that runs poorly because no one is managing it.

Making a disruptive improvement for one market would probably end up being compelling to both so you focus on either for a start.

I don't like the decision to focus on office staff first. Google's in a great position to sell to consumers. Also I think Apple demonstrated that going through consumers first encourages better products.

Those 2 comments really helped me understand where chromeOS and other browser-OS machines sit. The are the opposite of Raspberry PI, which is a tiny but all-capable thing for general purpose computing. They are limited by design, therefore might be more secure (not prone to OS-vulnerabilities) and suitable for anti-power users.

I've been using a chromebook at home as a mostly-primary computer, replacement for a 13" MBP w/ SSD (which cost ~$2000 when it was new).

The only thing that's weird is printing, but for 90% of "generic internet stuff" it works fantastic. ChromeOS just updated last night and I haven't even had a chance to mess with it.

It will even work mostly-ish as a web-dev terminal as it'll do SSH as well as chrome developer tools (although it is slightly hokey).

I'm a 15+ year linux user and I don't mind using the chromebook at all AS AN ADJUNCT TO A REAL COMPUTER!

A ChromeBook is ~1/10th the cost of a "real" computer, is SSD by default (only I think), is great for "kitchen computing", great for travel (just turn on password-protection and it gets very good battery life, and you don't mind if it gets lost, stolen, or damaged and it's very lightweight).

It's got a lot of advantages even for a power-user, although it doesn't (yet) replace a "real" computer / linux / osx box.

The things I've used my "real" computer for since then have been seashore (gimp), inkscape, video editing, printing, and some minor gaming, and I've had the MBP for 1-2 years and the chromebook for ~6 mo.

I don't see ~1/10th the cost. I'm on a netbook now, that I could re-buy for under US$300 with 2GB of RAM and 250GB drive. It's great for travel and runs 5+ hours on battery.

> PC + Windows + Office + McAffee + a large desktop support organization, you just have ChromeOS devices and Google Apps

I think if you put a Chromebook/Chromebox in front of most business users, the organization has to be using Citrix. Google Apps is not even remotely viable as a replacement for Office except in cost or for very basic work.

FWIW, I haven't used Office for 5 years and I don't miss it one bit. Google docs and gmail work fine and collaborative document editing is much easier.

The big challenge with business users are that they have established workflows and habits. Converting an existing Office-based infrastructure to Google Apps is a struggle mostly because it's expensive and difficult to retrain workers. On the other hand, if you start off with Google Apps, it works pretty well.

Certainly every now and then you have The Giant Spreadsheet Of Doom to maintain cost models or whatnot; this is more like custom application software that only a handful of users use. Give them Excel if they need it. There aren't many of these employees even in a large organization.

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