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Comment by Beretta_Vexee | Hacker News Reader

More and more of this software is moving to the cloud and only requires a web browser. A distribution that is very difficult to break and can launch a web browser would already meet many use cases for receptionists, hotels, consultation stations, etc.

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Yes, but doctors offices are still the last places in the US to use a fax machine.

Not just in the US, they‘re surprisingly popular still here in Switzerland. I‘ve written interfaces to fax gateways (convert incoming fax to pdf, extract metadata, save in DB) multiple times.

The United States is not the only country in the world. In France, it is almost impossible to make an appointment without using Doctolib, which is SaaS software for booking consultations (and lots of other things).

Same in Germany. Doctolib got popular very quickly, in just a fee years. Now it’s almost mandatory.

I am not a fan. It’s a big outage waiting to happen. It’s an enormous data breach waiting to happen. It will inevitable be enshitified.

Doctolib is not the problem at all. he real problem is the lack of government proactivity on these initiatives.

If the government had already thought about this in advanced (even in 2013 when doctolib was just starting out), then there could be very strong protectiosn for data which would then allay all of these concerns, and we might have had multiple players in this space.

The best use of Doctolib for me is that I can make appointments without having to speak perfect German on phone. I can make appointments in evening when I'm back from office and can relax a little bit. So, doctolib is a godsend for me as an immigrant here. and I'm guessing for a lot of people too. I can look up doctors who are available without having to bother the receptionist. This is much more efficient way of doing things.

> It will inevitable be enshitified. that only happens with the western venture capitalist model in private companies. doctolib makers already have income from all these government contracts instead of just relying on adverts and hype

Doctolib is a B2B model. Patients are not the customers; medical practices are the customers. Doctolib saves on the cost of a medical secretary, which is why it is so popular.

What's more, this is a sensitive and regulated field, where trust is essential. They can't afford to mess around if they don't want to quickly find themselves subject to moe restrictive regulations.

They were heavily criticised in France because they allowed charlatans and people with no medical training to register (particularly for Botox injections). As soon as this became known, they quickly rectified the situation.

The fax protocol provides a real-time recipient receipt. Email doesn't.

Seriously. That's the reason that fax is still popular in the medical industry.

Also the limitations of fax sort of end up being it's differentiator to email and it's biggest advantage. Not needing an email server is a big boon, not really being susceptible to phishing is a boon, and with modern fax over internet it's virtually indistinguishable in user experience from email.

I remember fax phishing even before I had ever heard of email. From many large companies, simply paying a sub $100 invoice was standard procedure without even checking with the other internal bodies.

This is true, but it's much less of a concern because:

1. You get way less faxes than emails.

2. Faxes can't steal credentials.

3. You should be auditing expenses anyway.

If only a standard existed to do this... Hint: it exists since ages in Italy and it has been extended to Europe recently (See Registered Electronic Mail - RFC 6109 and ETSI EN 319 532 – 4)

Germany here. Fax is king.

In that case, wouldn't ChromeOS actually make the most sense?

Because ChromeOS is not an open base?

It is.

https://opensource.google/projects/chromiumos

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/

Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work.

What's more, it's Google, so we're not safe from a ‘Lol, we're discontinuing support for Chrome OS. Good luck, Byeeee.’.

Some offices still have bad memories of Google Cloud Print, for example. I'm not saying that being an early adopter of a distribution that's less than a year old is a good solution. Just that Google's business products don't have a very good reputation.

> Because Chrome OS is offered on low-cost laptops that are unsuitable for office work.

ChromeOS Flex exists, it is free of charge, and it runs on more or less any x86-64 computer, including Intel Macs.

Nordic Choice got hit with ransomeware and rather than paying, just reformatted most of its client PCs with ChromeOS Flex and kept going with cloud services.

https://www.bitdefender.com/en-us/blog/hotforsecurity/nordic...

Businesses seem okay using Google Chrome, Google Drive/Docs, and Gmail.

In my experience they're not, these are way less popular in enterprises as compared to Microsoft equivalents.

Being #2 with tens of millions of users is OK, you know. It doesn't mean you've failed.

Sure it's less popular. It came in under 20 years ago, competing against an entrenched superpower that was already nearly 30 years old back then. It's done pretty well.

The Google Apps for Business bundle has outsold by far ever single FOSS email/groupware stack in existence, and every other commercial rival as well.

Notes is all but dead. Groupwise is dead. OpenXChange is as good as dead. HP killed OpenMail.

ChromeOS stops getting updates when your hardware gets a bit too old, at that point even your web browser is no longer updated.

That's ridiculous.

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