
Chrome OS and IT platform longevity - duck
http://www.marco.org/2194283690
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jrockway
I work at a bank, and while what the article says is true, we will never use
Chrome OS. Why? Because the IT department can't easily make it miserable.

For example, does Chrome OS have a $1000/workstation program to pop up a
message saying, "OMG you're going to be fired for charging your phone from the
USB port"? Nope? Then they won't use it.

The goal of corporate IT is to make using their machines as miserable as
possible while costing as much money as possible. ChromeOS is limited, but
friendly and cheap. So no sale, sorry. (Also, can you unleash a team of 10,000
C# developers on it to deliver full-screen messages from our CEO? No? Double
no sale!)

~~~
TomOfTTB
You say that but the irony is Chrome OS holds the potential for IT departments
to make your life even more miserable. One example...

It's still reasonably difficult to document every single thing a user does on
a PC. It can be done with key logging but it's a pain and even key logging
solutions can miss things. With Chrome all you need is a browser extension.

That same extension can be used to detect your phone on the USB port and
deliver your CEO's full screen messages. So having everything in the browser
actually provides IT departments with a level of control and monitoring they'd
never have dreamed of before.

~~~
raghava
>>irony is Chrome OS holds the potential for IT departments to make your life
even more miserable

That is, when IT Teams in those places themselves are aware of playing around
well with those systems.

IMHO, banks (like where jrockway is employed) or BigCorp Inc (where I am) have
IT teams comprised of subcontracting teams with MCSE types, hired precisely
because their CTC is far less than average. Am pretty sure most of those teams
would never (or even allowed to) take the pain of hacking up and altering OSes
for that company's needs (blocking USBs/CD-ROMs, limiting privileges to
ridiculous levels etc), when they could do it the easy way in Win XP or Win 7
installations.

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dholowiski
That article is 100% wrong. My aha moment was when they showed the citric
'app'. A google chrome computer is a modern day dumb terminal, and the citrix
server is the mainframe. Corporations who spend millions of dollars supporting
computers (and most of whom already host their business critical applications
on a citrix server) will jump at the chance to replace their costly (in terms
of money and tech support) pc's with cheap dumb terminals.

~~~
whatusername
But IBM etc supported their cheap dumb terminals.

From the server side -- sure you can continue to patch/update your citrix apps
etc.

If Google drops Chrome in 5 years time and in 5.5 years there is a massive
flaw (some form of root-kit that saves every username/password and grants you
access to the citrix system or the ceo's cloud based email account). If google
decides that it wants to focus on Android and drops Chrome -- the pain could
be immense. // This obviously doesn't apply for smaller faster moving
companies.. But if you roll out 10,000+ Chrome systems -- Long Term Support
plans are a good thing.

Otherwise - I agree. If you can replace a complex win/mac system with a cheap
dumb chrome terminal -- the benefits for support are immense.

~~~
cryptoz
It seems most of these corporate "dumb terminals" are running Windows 2000 or
Windows XP. In a few years (or already?) Microsoft will stop releasing
security updates for these operating systems. The argument to switch to a new
system, especially one that is free and open source, more secure, faster and
better in almost every possible way, will be clear and obvious.

~~~
whatusername
See OP Footnote: Win 2000 had 10 years of support. Win XP has until 2014 (13
years). The point is not: What is the best option at this point in time, but
What is the best option for 5 years from now.

// Something like Ubuntu LTS might fit the bill perfectly so please don't
think I'm just advocating Windows. I'm just considering that Google already
produce a very successful light-weight linux-based OS (That has shipped far
more units than Chrome likely will) and has a history of killing off products
that don't get much traction (see Wave for a recent example)

~~~
juiceandjuice
IIRC, XP was EOL'ed several times, and to M$'s dismay, they've lengthened the
support date a couple of times.

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stcredzero
_For Chrome OS to be considered by any reasonably large business, their IT
decision-makers are going to want to know that Chrome OS is going to be around
and supported by Google many years from now._

Actually, they just want to know that it will be around and supported by
_someone_.

The change over to things like Chrome OS will be partly generational, much
like it was with web applications. Young people brought up on Chrome OS will
start businesses which will use Chrome OS to run their businesses fast and
lean. Larger firms will have a lot of cultural inertia to overcome.

~~~
pak
You bring up a good point, actually: since Chrome OS is almost entirely open
source as Chromium OS, couldn't just about anybody step in and provide a
reasonable level of support for a fee, in the unlikely event the Google
decides to quit?

~~~
zmmmmm
Absolutely. To me the key "risk" really is not so much the OS going
unsupported but any Google services that it depends on doing so. Which is more
about the buy in to things like Google Docs, Calendar, etc. The risk is all
the higher because the services are "live". If Microsoft gives up on MS
Exchange, your exchange server doesn't immediately stop working. But if Google
turns off Google Calendar one day because it's not turning a profit ... oops.

The problem is that, for me, a huge part of the value of ChromeOS is provided
by Google's suite of apps. Those apps are the _reason_ it is viable in the
business space. I would be looking for a way to run hosted versions of those
in house and _then_ we would have a really interesting situation.

~~~
omh
This issue was the main reason that we decided against Google Apps for our
email system. If we're running an Exchange or Domino server then even if
MS/IBM stop supporting it we can continue to use everything and plan a
migration. Google could turn off decide GMail was unprofitable and turn it off
tomorrow, and everyone would be screwed.

I went to a Google Enterprise sales event and asked them about an internally-
hosted version, but they were very clear that this wasn't something they were
considering.

You could protect yourself against this by building an internal IMAP server
and syncronising it with Google regularly. But that's a lot of work, and
maintaining your own email server negates many of the benefits of outsourcing
to a cloud service.

~~~
duck
_turn it off tomorrow, and everyone would be screwed_

Could Google stop offeringing Google Apps at some point? It could happen.
Tomorrow? No way. They have shown that they give people time and options when
they no longer want to provide a service. Google Apps would be no different
and they would probably even work a lot harder at making that easy.

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willscott
A big point that the article doesn't bring up is the ongoing upkeep costs that
already exist even for smaller organizations. Even if the computers are all
running windows 2000, the easiest way for most companies to license the
software is by paying a yearly site licence to Microsoft.

If Chrome OS costs less than than that yearly upkeep cost, and comes with
perks of low maintenance and remote connectivity, I could see a lot of
companies being very tempted to switch.

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mbreese
I'm pretty sure Google has shown the longevity of Gmail. That's another large
IT platform which they are trying to get enterprises to use.

At least that's a start. Plus, it's not like Google OS is a from-scratch
endeavor. It is just a highly customized Linux, is it not? So at least
enterprises could be reasonably comfortable with getting support in that
regard. However, I suspect that businesses that might be inclined to such
migrations may have already moved in that direction.

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ecaradec
You can't go wrong by doing nothing : I think that the most prevalent
behaviour in bank. Anything new is dismissed as too unsecure, so only the most
essential things get ever done.

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TomOfTTB
I've been reading the comments here and I think most are thinking of this the
wrong way. Chrome OS is simply not going to be a viable corporate environment
out of the gate. That's not even a question (the incremental updates that are
automatic and can't be turned off would prevent that all by themselves).

The question is whether the computing model will be enough to entice CIOs and
IT Managers. The dream of every IT manager has always been the dummy terminal
it was just never viable (Though Citrix solutions and Terminal Server get much
closer). If Google can prove they're serious about this they could start to
make serious in-roads by the time Microsoft releases Windows 8 (around 2013
I'm guessing)

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pschlump
I support a small business with 3 PC's (XP, Vista, Win7). One of them has an
intermittent problem that I have spent 50 or 60 hours tracing. Chrome OS would
solve 99% of the support problems that they have - reducing all of the support
to just "Are you connected to the internet?" I so wish that all the apps that
they use were available as SaaS.

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RockyMcNuts
2 words - desktop virtualization.

then the deployment nightmare goes away, support costs go down, and a ChromeOS
appliance which is a head for a PC in a data center can justify itself.

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trezor
For Chrome OS to "work" in the enterprise, I suspect you need to have working
AD-authentication or the IT-department will make it a no-go.

So far my attempts to make Linux do AD-authentication has all been failed and
miserable with _immense_ amounts of work compared to just "join domain. done."
in Windows.

Not saying it can't be done, but I seriously doubt Chrome OS was made for a
corporate environment or that corporate environments see Chrome OS as a viable
fit for their needs. Yes, it may be cheap, but a cheap OS alone doesn't make
for a cheap total.

~~~
RickHull
> So far my attempts to make Linux do AD-authentication has all been failed
> and miserable with immense amounts of work compared to just "join domain.
> done." in Windows.

Have a look at likewise-open. It's pretty much that easy to join a domain and
allow domain auth. Integration is where it gets interesting.

