Google might be targeting high end enterprise needs, but breaking into that market is a long, painful road predicated on strong sales/IT relationships. Hence why you don't see ODMs eating large portions of the market, Dell, HP and Lenovo offer essentially the same product, but with sales and some support.
From what I've read on other threads about high end Chromebook Pixel's, getting them repaired if there is a manufacturers defect, or worse yet it gets damaged is very inconvenient and costly. Comparatively, replacing a smashed screen in a T440 is a $50, sub-5 minute affair, and Dell & HP's enterprise laptops seem just as repairable (albeit parts are 40% to 50% more).
There's also Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support, as well as the unappealable terminations of service. And they're not limited to consumers - some companies have had service terminated leaving them with no recourse.
Google's offerings are as much software as hardware, and having Google drop your account over a misunderstanding and thereby disabling all your laptops for several weeks would be a nightmare. Many of the people in charge of making purchasing decisions will have this type of concern in mind.
Whether they can turn that around and make a strong enterprise support channel is a valid question. But it's going to take some strong sales and tech to get people to risk trying it out. Google's a great company as long as you don't have to actually talk to anyone. Which makes them wholly undesirable for companies that obsess over the number of nines in their reliability.
In another lifetime, we bought a Google Search appliance. It never did work as well as they said it did. The support was pretty good, for the first month. After that, it got more sparse and less helpful. Reaching someone on the phone was not easy. We weren't the only people to notice this and complain.
It's just an anecdote, so weigh it appropriately. I've absolutely no idea if they have improved.
Just to add a counterpoint to this experience report, I use GCP and pay for their support, and have found it to be generally great (with some variability in quality of SE).
I understand that this isn't the experience that folk have with every Google product, but I suspect that any enterprise support would hook into their GCP support platform.
Concerns about "turning off your account" are certainly valid, though you that's something that Amazon or any other SaaS vendor could do with (I've seen a few nightmare reports over the years, though they seem to be the exception not the rule).
There is a big difference between supporting cloud services and hardware deployed at a customer end point. Google has a history of providing mediocre at best support for the latter.
> There's also Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support, as well as the unappealable terminations of service... some companies have had service terminated leaving them with no recourse. Google's offerings are as much software as hardware, and having Google drop your account...
That's directly referring to cloud services/software support, not hardware support; I'm not making any claim about the latter.
> having Google drop your account over a misunderstanding and thereby disabling all your laptops for several weeks would be a nightmare.
This I think will be the biggest challenge. I've never heard of Microsoft disabling software or cancelling support if by some stroke you were audited and failed. The matter is handled outside of normal business operation.
We're in Germany, and have tried for 4 months to get my sister's Nexus 5X repaire d or replaced. The damage was caused by a third party, who is willing to pay for repair or replace.
So far, so simple.
It's been 4 months of calls, emails, faxes, and sending the device back and forth between Google, LG, the insurance, and the repair facility.
Google says they're not responsible for Nexus devices, so we should talk to LG. LG says they're not responsible, we should talk to Google. We got someone at LG to discuss this, and they told us to send it to their official repair facility. They just sent it back because of a typo on the form, or because the insurance didn't say fast enough that they'd fund it, or because "dunno".
We've now taken the device to Media Markt to get it repaired, and it took 2 days.
Never ever are we going to buy a device from Google again.
Odd, it took me a single phone call to get my 5X replaced when it started bootlooping. I called Google, and they replaced it well out of warranty after a 20 minute phonecall.
(disclosure I work at google but this was before I started)
That may be fine if you get a warranty replacement, but even if you want to pay, getting a repair is basically horror.
This is now the second time we’ve had this odyssey with Google (the Nexus 7 2012 being the first case), and by now it’s obvious it’s not a problem with the OEM, but Google.
Google are reasonably responsive on hardware issues, the problem is software ones. Google have significant issues closing or limiting accounts with no support or recourse to find out what the problems are and resolve them (if they're even real). Given the reliance ChromeOS has on Google accounts that's a huge problem. Eminently fixable from Google's end, but a problem today.
>>They buy it because Dell and Lenovo replace/repair a device in 24 hours.
This.
I worked in the Dell Call Center in Bangalore, India around 2005. Customer support was treated as the most important function in the entire company. I remember they would make us agents skip meals if the call volumes got high. Managers would walk to the cafeteria can carry us meals/sandwiches to our desks. Breaks were highly partitioned throughout the day. It was 2 fifteen minute breaks, which you could take anytime. And then a 30-45 minute meal break. Every single thing in the building looked like revolved around one single thing- 'customer satisfaction'.
The metrics for performance were designed around these quality parameters. resolve rate(solutions/calls), mean time to resolve(span of solution calls/no of calls)... things like that. There used to even y-jack(eavesdrop) on our calls randomly for evaluation. There were also strict penalties for goofing up, upto things like getting fired if you make them more than 3 times.
I could go on..
The point being these people are good at customer service because they take that business very seriously. As techies we may laugh at that, but that is whole different league of business with cut throat performance requirements.
Only if cloud-sync'ed means on the IT controlled servers.
Actually given how strict many companies are about NDAs and controlling their internal network, it surprises me how some put their golden eggs on Google's basket.
If transit is properly encrypted, a lot of companies seem to be getting more comfortable with cloud vs on-prem from a security perspective.
Think of it as a security-analog to infrastructure as a service: why build best in breed, when you can buy cloud resources that already have security integrated (and maintained!)?
Even at a large org, keeping internal infrastructure secure and updated is non-trivial.
kbutler's experience to the counter has been mine at well. I moved to Big Company, Inc, and have been amazed at how smooth the "cloud" security conversations go to "on prem."
One of the major factors seems to be standardization. Once security has blessed a cloud provider, they're blessing the infrastructure and features, so the blessing holds for most projects that might want to use it. In contrast to getting approval for a semi-custom config on-prem.
Caveat: I'm not working with privileged data (gov or healthcare) anymore, so those considerations aren't influencing the behavior. Imagine HIPAA shops would be a lot more conservative.
We don't buy Lenovo because of the 24 hour service, we don't buy Lenovo because once we did and apparently it was full of adware already on first boot...
Lenovo had a BIOS that would download and install their own crapware. You could image it all you wanted, and it would still inject their own garbage into Windows.
That was a stupid thing Lenovo did, but it was limited to consumer devices (and not all of them at that - the Microsoft Signature edition devices didn't have this, for example).
Laptops purchased through enterprise sales were not affected by this.
For me, If they have the best product available when I'm ready for a new laptop, and I know how to buy it such that I won't be getting any bloatware/spyware/etc., then I'll still buy from them because the quality of their hardware has been consistent for me.
It's interesting that different people took up the cause of highlighting Lenovo's faults. Unless it's the same person using alts, it looks like people are quite mad at Lenovo.
There certainly are plenty of people that are still mad at them, and they did make some really bad decisions. And maybe I should be more upset since those actions were more likely to affect people who aren't as likely to understand what was done. But at the end of the day, I can probably find as many things to hate about Dell, HP, and every other manufacturer, and then who would I buy my next laptop from?
And it's shocking that a company like Lenovo doesn't understand that when they act unethically in one line of business, the tarnished reputation may harm a different line of business. The bullshit they engaged in with consumers definitely made me less likely to replace my current ThinkPads with new ThinkPads. What they do have working for them is that their competition is largely just as bad or worse.
I wish Microsoft would get serious about hardware. I trust them more than any of their partners.
Thinkpad? I do not recall ever reading about any Thinkpads being found with anything close to malware on them.
Their ideapads on the other hand...
That is really a problem across the board though, people conflate the brand with the cheapest product line out of the nearby brick and mortar.
For example i have read all kinds of doom and gloom about Acer quality control. Yet i have seen their business line survive far beyond what people claimed.
This is why I try to stay away from laptops at work in general. A stationary computer of normal size I can easily get spareparts from the store nextdoors. In most cases I already have spareparts from old computers. For a laptop I need to do research on how to open up the thing, order parts and wait several days.
The users however do not want to drag around stationary computers for some reason so we mostly have laptops of different brands, even some mac's since salespeople refuse to use anything else... :-)
One option is to team up with somebody, who already has a relationship with the enterprise and who is looking for additional business. Here in Finland for example telcos have been trying to move into the field of providing IT equipment and support services (although mostly for smaller companies to my knowledge).
As others mentioned, if the company is accepting that everything goes to cloud (which I guess is the pre-requisite for even considering Google device) then you don't need to worry so much about broken hardware, as you can just provision a new device for user and RMA the old one. Vendors could go even further and provide this spare device free, only charging money for devices which are in use.
Never mind that Google have been trying to push ChromeOS for that since the day it was introduced.
Hell, i can't shake the suspicion that Android on anything but phones were left to languish for years because of this. Because just as ChromeOS and Chromebooks were unveiled, Android was being readied to go beyond phones with Android 3.0.
This included support for new input devices, and even a generation of tablets that had full size USB ports for various uses.
Only recently have we seen Google return to this via two prongs. First is Android for Work, the second is combined development of windowing Android apps and Android apps on ChromeOS.
I wonder might Google be making a play for the Macbook segment of the market? That'd be interesting. Imagine a non-Windows high end laptop able to go toe to toe with Apple quality and design but running a very secure version of Linux.
I know that Apple Macbooks are as popular as ever but there has been some grumbling that RAM is limited, the touchbar has caused a split in opinions, and there has been suggestions that Apple is trailing Intel's top of the line chip launches, and finally that Mac OS X is not getting the love that iOS is getting.
Put that all together and maybe Google has a small window of opportunity to surprise the dev community and bring out a kick-ass Linux laptop workstation to offer true competition to Apple on their home turf. That would be pretty exciting, all the more so if they got within sniffing distance. Since the demise of SUN Solaris and SGI Irix workstations and the like Apple has had this segment (brawny Unix workstations) pretty much all to themselves in a way.
Dream machine: Great Intel hardware, RAM up to 64G, decent graphics card, flawless 2D/3D drivers (minimum brawn needed for ML work), ChromeOS w/ dev tools a couple of command line scribbles away, software repo as large as Debian/Unubtu/Arch/Gentoo, ability to run Android apps, Secureboot and non-reboot kernel/driver updates, ability to install my won boot key if I so wish, fingerprint reader –– hey I did say dream machine!
Exactly what I would love. A Linux MacBook. That is really secure and then the cherry on top would be also Android support. Really hope that is what we will get with Pixelbook.
If Google wants to go enterprise, they need to get their support act together.
I had a 2013 Chromebook Pixel that started to have a vertical line of dead pixels running down the screen. It should have been a simple fix. But first, Google didn't want to repair the thing because it was barely out of its one-year warranty (which you can't even pay to extend, by the way). Then, when they finally relented and agreed to take it, they sent me a new one, rather than fixing the other one. There have been minor problems with it since then, but I don't dare try to get them addressed, given that the laptop is way out of warranty and no longer manufactured.
My next laptop after the Pixel was a Dell XPS 13. And that was in no small part because I knew that Dell could provide hardware support if something broke. I even paid additional support to extend my warranty through 2019, because it's mission critical that this thing work.
Google needs to understand that there's no way any reasonable person can be expected to spend $1200+ on a laptop that can become a paperweight because it suffers a hardware failure and the manufacturer refuses to touch it. The "rumor" is that the original Pixel was created because Google themselves was having trouble getting support from Apple for their employee Macbooks, which makes the lack of Pixel support even more mind-boggling.
Speaking as a "Enterprise" with over 800 Windows PCs deployed to students and teachers. The primary draw of a Chrome device to us has been the cost. The pixelbook does not have that advantage. It will be a very hard sell if the pixel devices end up costing just as much as an equivalent Lenovo ThinkPad. If they can't compete on price anymore they need to make the features at least as good or better. They just are not there yet.
The article is speculating this will be targeted towards developers. A laptop shipping with out of the box VMs/containers for ChromeOS, Android, Ubuntu, and Windows, with easy VM management could have a compelling sales-pitch (at least if support is decent, which is the biggest question).
TLDR: commits indicate ChromeOS will be able to host virtual machines.
This still fits the "device for google internal use that they also sell outside" model since the Pixel 2013, with perhaps increasing emphasis on selling outside.
Making ChromeOS a stable, durable hypervisor that also hosts other OSes (better linux support than Crouton, and possibly adding windows support) just makes it an ever-more viable replacement for those-other-companies' high-end laptops.
Is there any benefit of a VM-friendly ChromeOS retaining Chrome as root-level functionality? Why not move the Chrome-browser-UI into a client VM as well, parallel to Linux and Windows clients?
I am hoping it’s gonna be ARM based and that it will be easyish to install Linux on it. ARMs, at least apples cores, finally seem to have gotten fast enough to be powering my main/Dev machine and if I could get the screen, look n feel, ram and disk that’s high-end enough I am jumping at it. I am really hoping for something to be replacing the x86 with something more open, more secure and more battery friendly.
I don't know why you'D want to pick the worse evil. Most ARM systems are more closed. There are less opensource drivers available unless you want to limit yourself to very specific SoCs and apple SoCs are not part of that subset. Even if you buy the latest SoC and reverse engineer the drivers by the time you're done the SoC is already outdated and there is a better one available. I'm not sure how ARM is supposed to be battery friendly because as soon as I do something CPU intensive the battery on my phone drains in less than two hours. There are more effective strategies that are completely irrelevant from the instruction set of a CPU. You can significantly increase the lifetime of the battery by limiting depth of discharge and usable capacity via software. Phones and laptops use batteries in the most unfriendly way possible because space is a premium and getting 30% more charge in the same space for the first one or two years is more important than the capacity dropping to 50% or less after four years.
ARMs are mostly horrible in case of drivers. I have an Acer Chromebook 13 with nVidia Tegra K1. Around the beginning of this year videos can get pixelated [1]. Generally there are few graphical glitches - boot splash screen can have many short black lines overlaid, mouse cursor can have some random garbage in it.
I had to once wait over an update, because it broke the system. It had symptoms of GPU driver issue.
Generally I'm quite pleased with the machine, but I wouldn't buy another ARM Chromebook. Rockchip SoCs have drivers mostly open source from what I understand, but GPU driver is not OS. Intel is safer bet. I really like the idea of AMD Chromebook, but you can't have everything.
I can't think of a single reason to pay $1800 for an ARM-based device. If I'm going to spend so much money on it it's better be able to run Windows/Linux and all my x86 architecture apps.
That is hinted in the article, i.e. the specs are too beefed up just to run Chrome OS (half a terabyte of storage) and a full dev environment awaits via virtualization.
It looks like Google may target devs and leverage containers (i.e. Docker) to run to their cloud services or even other OSes locally.
After all, Google is a SaaS and developing a SaaS requires back-end services. I run a SaaS and on the dev side, we've dockerized the database, cache, and other services. Google's plan may be to provide local versions of their cloud services for development on the PC.
The PC is powerful enough to run all of this. 512GB of storage and (hopefully) a powerful processor would explain this.
Good for them. So do you think that when Google will make billions of dollars in profit a year from the hardware it sells, it will stop tracking user behavior on those same machines?
I guess the counter could be, they are a company that is predominantly engineering focused, they have a good understanding of what it takes to make a customer product that is widely approved of.
Coupled with a ton of money, it's in a good position to make a product that is pretty good.
Now for $1800 it would really have to blow my socks off!
Just to add onto this, Google earned $3 billion in Q2 from "other revenues", which primarily is made up of: Play Store Apps/in-app, Google Cloud offerings, and Hardware. This is 12% of Google's total revenue.
And all of that security goes out of the window when Google stores all of your data on their servers, and it gets hacked. From what I've noticed hackers increasingly prefer going after major companies to steal user data now, because it's much easier to get millions of accounts in one go this way. Google may not be Equifax, but the more data it stores on us, the more juicier of a target it becomes, especially for nation states. Local national governments will also keep changing their laws to allow themselves to get more data from Google, too.
How do you do this? I really need to step up my security game. As an aside - are you encrypting all your cloud storage data, and if so, what tool are you using?
Really. This is your comment on HN? Do you have any reason to believe Google are installing spyware? You cant see a company can operare in more than 1 area?
Marketing was a strong business back when newspaper and billboards dominated the industry. Sure personal information is useful for targeting. Should it be removed, it makes little difference to the industry or myself. Mainly there would be less relevant ads, ad stock going to less relevant eyeballs and some channel realignment. Your statement I am making this statement for my work is completely incorrect.
I believe some people define ChromeOS as spyware, in and of itself. On a personal level, I'm not sure what to think. I just know that I've seen multiple complaints.
A link within that article mentioned Android Studio possibly running on it. Who cares? Are there any developers who live 100% in an IDE? I use Sublime Text in addition to a full blown IDE because sometimes there's stuff that you know will be tedious in an IDE and simpler with your go-to editor.
Until you can run Sublime Text, and bash (with perl, python, sed, awk, etc, or any other arbitrary piece of software I don't see developers moving to this device.
Lots of iOS and Mac developers for better or worse live in Xcode, same with C# developers and Visual Studio. So even if it just runs Android Studio there could be a developer market for it.
Can confirm that if you're doing C#, you're probably never leaving Visual Studio. Nothing can touch the VS autocomplete, and the text editing features are at least pretty good.
Yes, since Turbo Pascal 6.0 with Turbo Vision based IDE for MS-DOS, with the exception when I started working on UNIX systems, where the IDE concept was kind of foreign.
There I tried to do my best with XEmacs, DDD (or similar) and some GUI builder.
Thankfully eventually IDEs started to be a thing on GNU/Linux as well, starting with KDevelop and Anjunta.
"Google will stop scanning your Gmail messages to sell targeted ads" [0]
Likely because of this fear that Google might be using corporate data (even if it was not done for corporate emails, aka Google Apps / GSuite, even before this policy).
There are a couple of reasons why Chrome and other browsers aren't allowed in some companies:
1. Standardization - if you use one web browser and know that your apps all work and display properly on that browser, you have one less call driver to support. This seems silly, but when Bob from accounting calls to complain about not being able to access his app and you find he's using Chrome which isn't supported, that's time wasted ("But Jim in Sales told me to use this!")
2. Security is a concern. Honestly, Chrome is at least as secure as the other browsers, and possibly more secure. Nevertheless, more browsers means you have a larger attack surface to worry about. Related to this, some industries have to prove compliance, and that may mean testing each application that gets installed to verify that they are complaint with various regulations. Testing each browser is extra expense that doesn't really add anything to the company's bottom line.
Actually, for what its worth, Google has excellent ADMX templates. It's arguably easier to lock down Chrome with group policy than IE. I disabled all extensions and all data sync for any of the few Chrome installs on my domain.
For how long are Chromebooks supported again? I can use a PC for more than 10 years if I want. Do Chromebooks approach that level of support? Or are they the "Android phones" of PCs?
I suppose it depends on the enterprise but working in a highly regulated environment that wants to guard against data exfiltration, desktops and laptops are the exception not the rule. And once you build out infrastructure to support virtual desktops served up by low cost appliances, there's no compelling reason to go back to something like a chromebook. I have no idea what the discount would be when you buy 10,000 thin terminals but they're pretty much disposable when they break at the kind of pricing I'd guess one would enjoy.
"enterprise" is not that easy as there are a lot of financial /creative / inhouse apps requiring .net, windows, ms office and adobe stuff which will be too hard to run on pixelbook. it could be best if google targeted the startup/SV crowd with a high end, linux-installable workstation just for PR. I think of macbook pro or thinkpad killer. but when it comes to hardware google underwhelms recently.
Somehow the idea of running VMs on laptops never adds up. The constrained laptop environment just doesn't lend itself to that use case.
Using cloud resources or ssh'ng to other boxes just about make sense which you can do with any laptop. But any heavy apps or workloads will have your fans spinning up, throttling and heat and generally reduce the life of a pretty expensive product.
If this means that Google is attempting to shift to having its customers be anyone but advertisers, this is probably a good thing for everyone. There GSuite product is pretty good and even has reasonable privacy controls. I want to like Google more than I can with their current loyalty to the advertisers paying the bills.
I reckon this is where its going. It will allow for a local cloud. Need M*SQL, Elastic, Redis, etc? Run it in a container. The PC is powerful enough to do it.
From what I've read on other threads about high end Chromebook Pixel's, getting them repaired if there is a manufacturers defect, or worse yet it gets damaged is very inconvenient and costly. Comparatively, replacing a smashed screen in a T440 is a $50, sub-5 minute affair, and Dell & HP's enterprise laptops seem just as repairable (albeit parts are 40% to 50% more).