Sunday, January 18, 2015

Do not bury the Laptop just yet...

Four years ago I had an argument with a peer of mine about Chromebooks.
We got a Chromebook from Google, I tested it and found it slow and useless, both as a work tool and a browser. Even battery life was poor.
Laptops (And PCs) seemed to be a decaying platform back then. Tablets were all the rage, and for consumer (And education) seemed like the go to platform.
My prediction was that ChromeOS, which was parallel to Android, was useless, and sales figures approved this.

But Google, with its limitless cash, kept on pushing.
Web tools got way better, becoming usable (Google docs, Office 365, Dropbox to name a few)

The first hit came from Samsung, which sold a 250$ Macbook air lookalike, with decent screen and battery life. It quickly became the most selling laptop in Amazon.

Finally, after finding out that tablets are a nice play tool, but not as good for education, the educational market also caught on.

I'm pretty sure that decent developer frameworks are on their way as well, though the road is still a bit long.

So now, I'm admitting I was wrong - The Google way of doing things (Throwing pre mature products to the market, and then throwing a lot of $$$ on them until they take off) actually works.

Unless you're Google plus.

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