Google’s Chromebooks Rule Schools as IDC Pegs Them as Top Sellers in K-12
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Supposedly there is a way to install Skype for Android on a Chromebook (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2686712/run-any-android-app-o...) but Skype app did not load properly for me.
I ended up making a dual boot with Lubuntu on it just for Skype.
Otherwise a Chromebook is pretty much sufficient for casual users(my mother-in- law etc).
"what happens is that they give their program to a journalist to review, and the journalist reviews it by writing their review using the new word processor, and then the journalist tries to find the "word count" feature which they need because most journalists have precise word count requirements, and it's not there, because it's in the "80% that nobody uses," and the journalist ends up writing a story that attempts to claim simultaneously that lite programs are good, bloat is bad, and I can't use this damn thing 'cause it won't count my words."
There is an ARChon-ready version of Skype on Github, which may or may not work for you.[0]
First, I think there's still a big whole in home computing. Windows laptops are a bundle of compromises that doesn't serve the average home user all that well. Chromebooks are an appealing concept.
OTOH, the praise of chromebooks since the start always seems to be "these are cool, they would be great for X" where X is your theoretical aunt, nephew or neighbor. Enthusiasts also like them as a "2nd machine." At the same time, while they continue to sell well I see very little of Chrome OS traffic in web analytics. When the iphone first went on sale, the traffic ramped up immediately. Android web traffic lagged behind sales a lot more and the build up took longer, but it was still obvious. Public data seems to be generally similar.
I don't know how far to take conclusions from that. I realize that certain sites do experience significant Chrome OS traffic, especially US education focuses sites. But, for most of the web, Chrome OS seems to be fighting to get to the middle of the "other" category, with SymbianOS and Playstation as rivals.
I think Chrome OS is awesome, but still not done. Some sort of a merger with android, some rejigging of the apps and the basic metaphors might be an improvement. I know for my part I'd like to get my Dad one, but it doesn't run Skype so...
Also, they've already announced the ability to run Android apps on ChromeOS (and Android now has Chrome as it's main browser). So some sort of merger has already happened (if you don't count both using linux + wekbit/blink + Google accounts & apps as enough of a merger already.
I think it's also weird to have "ChromeOS" as a seperate category in web stats. It's basically Chrome, which the stats will tell you is doing just fine, both on mobile and desktop.
The 10-year-old daughter (not old enough for a phone (for us), reads paper books) drags around another Chromebook for YouTube and writing.
The 8-year-old son uses a Kindle Fire tablet to play games and read books we've bought.
We replaced the iMac in the kitchen with a Chromebox and that's been hugely popular. The old iMac was six years old and very slow.
My 10-year-old has had some trouble at her school because they use MS Office and she's not used to having to save her changes. She's written 6730 words in her story for English class since the start of November in Google Docs and we transfer it onto a flash drive so she can take it to school.
My wife and I have MacBook Airs but I would find it tempting to replace mine with a new Toshiba Chromebook (1920x1080 IPS screen for $330) if my MacBook died today. I'd like shell access without necessarily needing root access. Trying shell access meant flipping a switch on the Chromebooks that brought up a scary warning every time I opened the lid. This was a couple of years ago and I hope things have progressed.
So, what are the figures?
http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/29/hp-plunges-downmarket-with-...
On one side the institutions cash strapped from years of government under-investment into education and with lots of their infrastructures long beyond end-of-life.
On the other, large software vendors that - like with FMCG - want to create their products from childhood onward as everyday items that every child knows (and will continue to buy for the rest of their lives).
Within higher education, at least in the UK, Microsoft seems to be winning in the moment.
You have only a (very) small set of universities that are providing Google apps etc to their students. With HW - BYOD and that latest every second year student now has her own computer(s)has most likely helped a few of the universities to stay more easily afloat. Microsoft at the same time has managed to win over more than 60% of all universities in the UK (to use Office 365).
One reason for that might also be that those universities that tried to provide Google Apps 1-2 years ago to their students mostly had rather negative experiences & many issues with the "roll-outs". But an even more important reason is the continuous dominance of MS Office in the business world - full proficiency with MS Office does still sound much better on a CV than having used Google Apps for 4 years.
This is now intensifying with Microsoft providing MS Office for free directly to all students (including K12) latest from next month on. They have last week started to give free access to their mobile (iPad, Android - tablet solution soon arriving) versions and those are now leading the download charts of all app stores. BTW - real world stats show that about 2/3 students use MS Office on at least 2 devices (laptop plus 1-3 mobile).
And the battle for the education infrastructures (storage space, business compute, thin clients - higher edu is one key client for that market) is also intensifying with MS now getting more aggressive with their virtualised desktop solution offerings (see also IE as a service).
If Google wants to regain some ground here it needs to provide more turn-key solutions in the infrastructure area. With day-to-day web based and virtualised application infrastructure, the OS becomes more and more secondary for typical end users (HPC / scientific computing / design & engineering are completely different ballgames and dominated by Apple machines on one side and linux / unix clusters for the other use cases).
When most mass use and productivity apps can be delivered to almost every machine including Chromebooks in those ways, the end user OS has fully become a commodity and decisions are / can be made mainly by the price / cost only. At that point Chromebooks (together e.g. with NUCs today, US$100 sticks to plug into monitors running Win8/10 / ChromeOS tomorrow) might become the cheapest option with all the consequences for the manufacturers (small margins, scale needed, etc).
That said, I think Microsoft is very committed to a bunch of paradigms that are real losers. A windows machine, more than any of the "computers" that we have around us seem to be made for use by individuals under supervision and control of IT, in the school or office. I think that's a loser paradigm. The "personal" part of computers is important. I think it works better, and that is relevant in education.
The paradigm is hard to kill because it helps them negotiate with school systems and work systems. Microsoft's marathon endurance for dealing with persistent hairiness lets organizations maintain their fragile ecosystems of servers, applications, permissions and such. These might be necessary, but they also pressure Microsoft into building a "faster horse" (to butcher the Ford cliche).
Unless they can manage to put below median users in charge, I think they'll ultimately lose the education market.
I don't know who will "win" but I think there's an inherent advantage to anything self sufficient and sell sustained, things that don't require a "roll out" or where the roll out is small and contained. Microsoft can do that stuff and I wouldn't even say it doesn't play to their strengths, but I would say it doesn't play to everyone else's weaknesses.
I think it's going to be interesting to see whether Googles' strategy of encouraging lowest common denominator consumerization of the enterprise while only building "support" infrastructure is effective faster or slower than Microsoft's strategy of going the opposite direction.
One of the reasons MS is so successful within the (higher) education sector is the general risk avoidance of ITC management in these institutions (in the UK, central government wants cloud services so cloud are being implemented) and being driven by revenue-based investment vs CapEx - MS caters directly for that with their packaging and existing framework contracts already in place. One example - currently you get a US$100k StorSimple appliance from MS for free / paid soft via 1 year Azure services cost for scale-out storage service e.g. to replace shared drives (yes many universities still use them).
The other area where MS has done their home work is with EU Data Protection laws / DPA in the UK where they negotiated a full turn-key framework with JaNet that allows universities to be compliant without going to another 6m-1y assessment as they currently still have to do with Google.
Have a look at http://linuxgizmos.com/stick-computer-runs-on-quad-core-atom... to see what I meant with sticks plugged into the monitor - guess these certainly can be called commodity end user devices.
However, I don't think that what students use in universities really matters when they transition into the corporate world. Even with BYOD, when everything's on the web, you can just require your employees to use a particular productivity suite. So I'm not convinced that using free/discounted education software to gain mindshare among future employees is an effective tactic.
Office 365 is awesome in terms of capability, but it's not a unified experience, and isn't very discoverable. The PC app interactions are somewhat fragile as well. My company uses 365, and very few people use the online tools.
There also students very frequently were using GMail and just used mail forwarding from their university email accounts.
With at least one large UK university we've seen very strong uptake of the MS Office apps & email (85% vs 30% in the years before). They also have a large number of distance learners for which these solutions are substantially better than what the university offered previously so that might skew the numbers a bit. Uptake of OneDrive for example was much lower around 40% 3 months after the roll-out but still rising. Stats that MS provides on this are mainly MS Exchange (online) based (plus some SharePoint / OneDrive data - the rest of the stats they provide are at best historic or unusable).
At the same time when the university wanted to communicate with all students besides their course work, they used Twitter or Facebook and not email.
A third option is to use crouton to install and run Linux in a chroot under Chrome OS
The c720 touchpad drivers made it into the most recent (3.17) kernel, which is good, but with most distros this will require you to compile the kernel yourself. I've had issues both with a normal linux installation and crouton chroots; it's hard to recommend either option wholeheartedly. Generally my experience has led me to use cloud-based alternatives when I can; it's a nice experience to boot Chrome OS for the first time, sign in, and have all my Chrome apps, settings, and wallpaper available in at most a couple minutes. I can particularly recommend cloud9 as an IDE. Together with a VPS for my "real" linux work, I am becoming more accustomed to using Chrome OS exclusively.
I think it's better to get an Intel Chromebook. Otherwise you're limited to programs that run on ARM.
Main issue, obviously, is space, since everything is on the 16 GB internal storage. Haven't tried installing to SD or USB yet. Also, it's slightly inconvenient that developer mode (a prerequisite for using crouton) interrupts the boot process, requiring you to press Ctrl-D to continue.
From http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/13/26google.h33.ht...
"As part of a potentially explosive lawsuit making its way through federal court, the giant online-services provider Google has acknowledged scanning the contents of millions of email messages sent and received by student users of the company’s Apps for Education tool suite for schools. In the suit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company also faces accusations from plaintiffs that it went further, crossing a “creepy line” by using information gleaned from the scans to build “surreptitious” profiles of Apps for Education users that could be used for such purposes as targeted advertising."
"A Google spokeswoman confirmed to Education Week that the company “scans and indexes” the emails of all Apps for Education users for a variety of purposes, including potential advertising, via automated processes that cannot be turned off—even for Apps for Education customers who elect not to receive ads. The company would not say whether those email scans are used to help build profiles of students or other Apps for Education users, but said the results of its data mining are not used to actually target ads to Apps for Education users unless they choose to receive them."
...
"Student-data-privacy experts contend that the latter claim is contradicted by Google’s own court filings in the California suit. They describe the case as highly troubling and likely to further inflame rising national concern that protection of children’s private educational information is too lax."
"Mr. Thiele said his district has used Google Apps for Education since 2008. Officials there have always been aware that the company does “back-end processing” of students’ email messages, he said, but the district’s agreement with Google precludes such data from being used to serve ads to students or staff members. As long as the company abides by those terms, Mr. Thiele said, “I don’t have any problem with it.” In an emailed statement provided to Education Week, Bram Bout, the director of Google Apps for Education, said that “ads in Gmail are turned off by default for Google Apps for Education and we have no plans to change that in the future.”"
...
"Those plaintiffs in the California lawsuit allege that Google treats Google Apps for Education email users virtually the same as it treats consumer Gmail users. That means not only mining students’ email messages for key words and other information, but also using resulting data—including newly created derivative information, or “metadata”—for “secret user profiling” that could serve as the basis for such activities as delivering targeted ads in Google products other than Apps for Education, such as Google Search, Google+, and YouTube."
"The plaintiffs allege that Google has employed such practices since around 2010, when it began using a new technology, known as Content Onebox, that allows the company to intercept and scan emails before they reach their intended recipients, rather than after messages are delivered to users’ inboxes, regardless of whether ads are turned off."
"While the allegations by the plaintiffs are explosive, it’s the sworn declarations of Google representatives in response to their claims that have truly raised the eyebrows of observers and privacy experts. Contrary to the company’s earlier public statements, Google representatives acknowledged in a September motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ request for class certification that the company’s consumer-privacy policy applies to Apps for Education users. Thus, Google argues, it has students’ (and other Apps for Education users’) consent to scan and process their emails."
"In November, Kyle C. Wong, a lawyer representing Google, also argued in a formal declaration submitted to the court in opposition to the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification that the company’s data-mining practices are widely known, and that the plaintiffs’ complaints that the scanning and processing of their emails was done secretly are thus invalid. Mr. Wong cited extensive media coverage about Google’s data mining of Gmail consumer users’
>Mr. Wong’s inclusion of the following reference to the disclosure provided to students at the University of Alaska particularly caught the attention of privacy advocates: The University of Alaska (“UA”) has a “Google Mail FAQs,” which asks, “I hear that Google reads my email. Is this true?” The answer states, “They do not ‘read’ your email per se. For use in targeted advertising on their other sites, if your email is not encrypted, software (not a person) does scan your email and compile keywords for advertising. For example, if the software looks at 100 emails and identifies the word ‘Doritos’ or ‘camping’ 50 times, they will use that data for advertising on their other sites.”
“The fact that Google put this in their declaration means we take it as true,” said Ms. Barnes of the privacy watchdog group EPIC. Google’s sworn court statements reveal that the company has violated student trust by using students’ education records for profit.”
From a Google filing in court about Gmail privacy:
>Indeed, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” Smith v. Maryland, 442 U.S. 735, 743-44 (1979).
>it's "inconceivable" that someone using a Gmail account would not be aware that the information in their email would be known to Google.
Very surprising to know that the paid Google Apps for Business were also being used that way, but this being primarily an ad company, not surprised that they were making misleading and false statements to the public on their web site until they were compelled to explain in federal court, where apparently they couldn't continue lying under the threat of heavy fines or jail time. Only Google knows what other data is being used to track people for showing ads.
I doubt many people are aware that their Android phone's location might be being tracked for monetizing ads.
http://www.datadrivenbusiness.com/google-quietly-testing-off...
I am debating getting a Nest, but all this makes me queasy.
>removed all ads scanning in Gmail for Apps for Education, which means Google cannot collect or use student data in Apps for Education services for advertising purposes.
>We’re also making similar changes for all our Google Apps customers, including Business, Government and for legacy users of the free version, and we’ll provide an update when the rollout is complete.
I believe the data gathered was used to target ads shown in other Google properties, like YouTube, and that Content OneBox was scanning all emails. See this:
>The plaintiffs allege that Google has employed such practices since around 2010, when it began using a new technology, known as Content Onebox, that allows the company to intercept and scan emails before they reach their intended recipients, rather than after messages are delivered to users’ inboxes, regardless of whether ads are turned off.
Looks like the ads checkbox applied to only ads being shown in Apps, not to the data being collected from the emails on the backend to build ad profiles.