Chromebook confirmed: Google redefining computer industry, hardware + cloud for just $20 per user a month
It’s official, everyone: Google’s offering Chromebooks, hardware + cloud, for a monthly fee per user of just $28 for companies and $20 for schools. Google has waged war on desktops with this breakthrough anouncement at the I/O 2011.
Making a brief analysis on computing history, this step might seem as if to some extent we were going back to the “stoneage” of mainframes and shared-time client concepts. However, the bargain seems pretty juicy in terms of hardware cost reduction and the management of up-to-date information technologies.
If one of the chromebooks crashes suddenly, it is replaced. If there are any updates on software, you get them automatically because they are already on cloud. If any upgrade is done to hardware, they send you a new chromebook to substitute the one you previously had.
The person in charge of the organization (a school, company, institution, etc) can manage all of the software through a web interface. This makes me think that Microsoft executives might be peeing in their pants right now…
On the other hand, something which all developers might love about this, is that the Google Chrome Web Store fee they are going to pay for each app they sell will be of only 5%. Another epic win: it’s actually a pretty sweet deal in comparison to the 30% developers have to pay at other web stores.
Google has its mind set on having absolutely EVERYTHING done on the browser, and it seems so because demos of the new Chrome shown at I/O 2011 were far beyond amazing.
Chromebook is just perfect for people working in sales, business and students with common needs who always require access to internet.
The demos of the file manager were shown and they let us see how everything could be saved in the cloud. I could not help to remember one of my teachers back at university: Omar Mendez, who taught us basic algorythms. A decade ago, he was already saying that FTP was like a little window into a future where hard drives would become a thing of the past.
However, Google’s vision might be a little frightening when we think of service cuts and attacks on servers as those happening to Amazon, Gmail and Sony’s PSN. It’s kind of scary to have EVERYTHING floating on cloud and I truly think that in many cases a lot of people won’t be happy about this. Anyway, stay tuned for more updates!
English translation by Wayka Mariño (Wayvias CEO)