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Comment by supportengineer | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised more huge corporations don't move towards a "Chromebook only" by default. Now you don't have to manage anything. We're all doing our work in browsers anyway.

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There are quite a few who have. Ive worked in a google workspace enabled company on a chromeos device for like that last 6? Years. It works 95% of the things, but that last 5% can be frustrating: especially when it involves interoperability with a customers system. Now multiply that by 40000 employees.. that's a lot of help desk tickets.

There is also the what 5% and for whom and do they overlap? You may be missing 5% that 5% is really a much larger number orgnizationally.

Its the same theory behind the issues with the office toolbar. They find that people only use 5% of the buttons but there is almost zero overlap among millions of users.

If you are issued a chromebook to me it signal that they consider you a replaceable cog.

Its one of my interview questions these days. What device will I be issued?

If its a chromebook I know that no matter what they say they don't really care about the postion.

What are you talking about? Because the software you'll be expected to use for your job can run on a Chromebook you're considered a replaceable cog? All that means is that to do the job you're being employed for the company thinks you can do it with a web browser and whatever software will run on a Chromebook, its no different to being issued a centrally managed Windows device.

Chromebooks can be had dirt cheap and for the most part are not customizable in any way. Laptops not so much. Most of the world is not SV or google. They don't put thought into the hardware you use other than is it the cheapest we can get for this persons position.

On the other had I've seen execs/directors that barely turn on their PC get $10k monster laptops because they are considered important. While staff get recycled garbage equipment or a $1000 max per person equipment budget.

It's becoming increasingly popular, albeit slowly. The main barriers are 1) it has to be a corporation that uses Google Workspace rather than MS Office, and 2) there can't be any legacy .exe's that are still required, or else you need to figure out how to support those over some kind of remote desktop to a virtual Windows installation.

Why on earth do you think Chromebooks wouldn't need to be managed?

I think at some point there will gradually be a line that divides consumer type devices and Workstation with a capital W type devices. If nothing else it'll encourage the PC market to really decide for each use-case how much they value having a huge range of laptop or pre-built configurations or being able to assemble from parts. There's a lot of momentum in the PC mindset, but I also think a lot of people would be satisfied with less 'personal' so long as they were able to identify what they need and match it to capabilities of a model. 20 years ago the idea of a phone/table as the personal computer for most people and not a PC/laptop would be silly, yet here we are

Is there not one already? Having a laptop or desktop puts you firmly in workstation category; the consumer type devices are smartphones (and they make up about 90% of all devices so we should probably stop treating mobile web pages as an afterthought).

My experience with mobile vs desktop web pages is that the mobile ones are stuffed full of ads and "engagement" sinks. Not that the mobile version is second class.

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