“At its annual developer conference in San Francisco, Calif., on Wednesday, Google said that Chrome OS notebooks, now called ‘Chromebooks’, will be available in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain starting June 15, and that it will be offering a combined software and hardware subscription service for businesses, schools, and government customers. The pricing of Google’s subscription plan is modest: For $28 per user per month, businesses will receive Chromebooks, Web-based administration controls, enterprise-level support, a warranty, and hardware replacement upon subscription renewal. Schools and governments have access to the subscription package for $20 per user per month.” Look at the concept here.
I can see this pricing setup being extremely attractive to students and school admins alike.
Bad name though; I thought it had something to do with ebooks.
Yawn
I’m usually a fan of Google stuff, but this leaves me feeling nothing.I really can’t see this as anything but a flop. Maybe if they had made it run with an ARM to give it great battery life for even cheaper it would work. It only runs one program after all, you don’t have to worry that much about compatibility. But no, its just an Atom like every other netbook. The $20/month deal might appeal to some organizations who need lots of low power machines. I could see these working well in out local library for instance. But otherwise I can’t see an actual consumer getting this instead of a full netbook.
Given that the locked-down browser-only machines at my local library are still running IE 7, I’m really hoping they decide that Chromebooks are a more attractive option.
So how about regular joe user, how can he get his hands on one of these chromebook?
They’re betting on Universities to subsidize them and push their ad revenue for them.
You’re not the market.
By paying anywhere from $349 to $429 depending on the model. It uses one of the newer Atoms, so no big difference in hardware for the current crop of netbook for pretty much the same price. I can kinda see organizations that lock down their computers so much they are only useful for browsing seeing them as a good buy. But otherwise, why not just get a full OS for the same price.
I’ve heard win 7 can be a tad sluggish on netbooks, but installing a light linux distro would give you just as many features as a chromebook (since they have chrome too), plus more. No matter how you look at it, your paying the same for less features. Unless you see this as a feature in itself there is no incentive.
Depends entirely on the total package, services provided by google included. We haven’t seen how they’ll be marketed to the broader public yet, or if it’ll even be a point of focus. Honestly I could see the subscription based setup with timely hardware refreshes included being the preferred way for all chromeOS customers
This really killed me and stirred up the finicky part in me:
So… how did IBM, Google, Microsoft, Samsung et al. manage to be successful until now? Trying to scare companies into Chromebooks?
You may find arguments for your product, that’s all nice and acceptable but such an assertion isn’t different from any Apple-esque “revolution” claim. At least, to me.
The $28 or $20 figure is the price for renting a Chromebook, right?
Edited 2011-05-12 12:47 UTC
I agree, it’s crazy. I don’t think any large business will be very interested. Where this will be a winner is for grandma-types and small businesses which don’t have any IT staff or expertise. Everyone else will stay away.
Of course to actually appeal to small businesses you need a web-based quickbooks replacement. If google had that ready to roll, along with maybe some simple inventory management app, then they could sell these things to mom and pop shops like hotcakes.
“Grandma” will be much better off with a 200 bucks second hand computer and a nice Linux distro on it. Install Debian Stable on it and grandma will be happy for many years to come.
Grandma will be unhappy as soon as something breaks or her new printer doesn’t Just Work. For her a managed system is better. Now for *my* grandma a cheap PC with Debian is managed, because I manage it, but not everyone has someone like me as a relation.
Well, I was assuming that grandma has a nice and smart grandson (or granddaughter) who manages her Debian PC
I agree. You have to be careful who you give Linux to… As an experiment, my flatmate agreed to use a Linux laptop I gave her for a week instead of her slow-as-molasses Vista machine. It was a similar spec (~2GHz budget CPU, 1GB RAM), and all she used hers for was the internet, so I thought this was a sure thing that she’d like it. I had Lubuntu on it, Chromium, Flash and Skype – everything she needed.
Initially she loved it – booting about 10 times faster, shutting down properly etc., but in the end she just handed it back to me because Cafe World didn’t work properly on Facebook. The Flash implementation is horrendous, taking 100% CPU time and making the machine unresponsive, and as far as she was concerned it just “didn’t work”.
If Granny does any of that sort of stuff, she’ll need more than a cheap 2nd-hand PC…
Google has wet dreams about everything being on the web and in the cloud. Lucky for us Crysys, WOW, MS Visual Studio, Photoshop, 3d Max, Maya and hundreds of other used, needed and successful applications won’t run in the cloud. At least in the foreseeable future.
Google makes the same bet Apple did. They think most people are using computers for browsing web, facebook, IM, twitter, email and skype. That maybe the case, and maybe “Chromebooks” will be successful.
But they won’t take the PCs away from us, not in a 1000 years. Only over our dead bodies.
As long as heavy duty computing work needs to be done fast and with good responsiveness, gadgets, tablets, “Chromebooks”, dumb terminals and the cloud won’t take the PC away from us. And that means never.
Edited 2011-05-12 15:02 UTC
I wouldn’t care to wager on that always being the case. Remote access technology has come a long way, services like OnLive are already testing the waters of what’s possible in the remote 3D gaming arena.
Cloud based access also has interesting implications for curbing piracy…
Absolutely my point of view. I want my (powerful) computers and the OSes and all applications here, at home,not “in the cloud”.