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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

Or rather, how Google plans to rule the consumer computing world.

It's been a while since the average Facebook addict really needed a computer anyway, they can all throw their laptops away and switch full-time to phones and tablets and I won't care.

But businesses and professionals have different needs. I don't see web apps and NaCl apps replacing Office suites, IDEs, or 3D graphic design tools anytime in the next decade, no matter how much Google tries to advertise Google Drive (Docs) as an Office replacement. There's a lot more to "computing" than shiny new consumer-grade gadgets. Although I vaguely remember a Chrome add-on that can SSH into remote machines, why would I use it when I have GNU utilities running natively on my OS?

> What does your desktop look like a year from now?

Probably the same as it does now. Lots of terminals and text editors, maybe a browser window or two in the background.

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I think there is going to be a big departure in what developers want, and what consumers want. For the most part, over the last 10 years, those two groups were largely using the same computers and OS's, but that has already changed, and will continue to do so. If Google can get their platform in front a ton of people, the developers will most likely follow (although they maybe using different machines than the consumers).

On a random side note, just picked up a Samsung Chromebook. Loaded up crouton and Ubuntu. This thing definitely puts my 5 year old craptop to shame. If you already have a Macbook, you might not be as impressed, but for the price, this thing can't be beat. So to answer the question " What does your desktop look like a year from now?" Assuming the Chromebook holds up that long (although even if it doesn't, I can easily afford a new one), Ubuntu/Linux for dev(ish) work, and Chrome OS for browsing and non-work stuff (switching between the two is instant, and you can even stream music in Chrome OS and listen to it while in Ubuntu).

>On a random side note, just picked up a Samsung Chromebook.

Which one: the one with the ARM (the Series 3) or the one with the Celeron (the Series 5)?

Series 3. Admittedly, there are a few applications that I use that won't run on ARM, but there are also plenty of alternatives that do. I would imagine that will change pretty soon though.

FWIW, the company I work at just moved from a windows+office+outlook setup to google apps.

And it just worked. Very smooth migration.

Just a random datapoint, not claiming its a trend.

And what do you do when they drop a feature that you really depended on for your business? Say that you get addicted to a certain spreadsheet feature and they drop that. You have built an ad-hoc application that needs that feature. Now what? Do you go and now pay a developer tens of thousands of dollars to develop a custom app to replace the feature?

and what do you do when the network is down ?

Keep working offline? http://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

We are in a comment thread for an article that talks about how Google apps work offline... ;)

A lot of businesses tend to be very file/folder focused. There are difficulties in creating browser based line of business apps that interact with the file system. They need servers and sysadmin support which is against the whole ethos of a user driven ecosystem.

An OAuth secured http api that wrapped basic file system commands and gave some kind of indexing and file level hashing would make a whole set of apps much easier to develop.

Chromebooks are amazing for business, in my experience.

- Collaborating on shared documents in Google Docs is awesome.

- Walk up to a Chromebook that's plugged in to the projector, sign in, and show my Presentation.

- Hangouts for video conferences.

- Chrome Remote Desktop to log in to my desktop when I want to do heavy lifting.

- Two-factor Authentication to protect everything.

Yes, those are awesome features, and they might be able to cover 90% of a typical business's use cases. Similarly, lots of open-source alternatives to MS Office, Photoshop, etc. can cover 90% of a typical business's use cases. But the missing 10% is enough to prevent their use in mission-critical tasks, because one unsupported Excel macro is enough to turn an entire spreadsheet into garbage, and you're losing money while someone tries to fix a stupid incompatibility.

Which option would you prefer?

1) Chrome OS, which allows you to use all the Chrome apps but absolutely no other software, ever.

2) A regular OS (Windows, OSX, Linux, whatever) with Chrome installed on it, which allows you to use both Chrome apps and any other software that you might need from time to time.

My whole working life, when Microsoft changes something in Visual Studio, do you know what the only answer has been? Recreate the Project from scratch the new way. Every single time.

So, when you switch to a Google Docs way of life, you don't necessarily import your Office documents into it. For things like Spreadsheets, you might have to recreate them, if they use weird features. It's unfortunate. Moving away from Office is hard, no argument.

Why should I answer a hypothetical where my Chromebox can use absolutely no other software, ever? It's a ridiculous hypothetical.

My Windows box is literally useless to me, if I can't run Visual Studio on it.

My Chromebook is a more secure way and faster to Remote Desktop in to my primary computer, than my Windows Laptop is. Chromebook WILL NOT replace my primary computer, for any time in the immediate future - I work on Windows Applications. That's just my life. But if I were a web developer???

I also don't see how anyone can trust Google with any of these technologies considering how they have been butchering all of their existing applications or outright shutting them down. Gmail is a shell of itself. Google Docs are a glorified WYSIWYG editor. They drop products like flies. They explicitly state that their job is to get as close to the creepy line as possible and not cross it. This has bad idea written all over it.

> Gmail is a shell of itself.

I'm having a hard time thinking of anything GMail used to do, that it doesn't any more. Can you list some?

> I'm having a hard time thinking of anything GMail used to do, that it doesn't any more. Can you list some?

Being the new hotness from a company that its cool to love for being a relatively new upstart gaining ground against tech behemoths on every front rather than a well-established offering from a company that its cool to hate for being a well-established tech behemoth, maybe?

Not wasting massive amounts of screen space, but I think they recently added a "condensed" view again so that issue seems to be resolved.

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