7 ms·

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 wh

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).

sigi45 9y ago
Companies don't buy Dell or Lenovo because there devices are easily repearable. They buy it because Dell and Lenovo replace/repair a device in 24 hours.
- Moru 9y ago
  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...
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I am yet to work at any company that doesn't make use of custom images.
    - jcelerier 9y ago
      > I am yet to work at any company that doesn't make use of custom images. Does your companies also replace the BIOS of your machines? Because this is where the Lenovo malware were originating from: https://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem-to-have-a-bios-level-backdoor.html https://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem...
    - AmVess 9y ago
      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.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - tallanvor 9y ago
        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.
        Tepix 9y ago
        At some point you ought to stop trusting a company. After Lenovo has done this three times in a row, isn't it time to say "thanks, but no thanks"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security
        tallanvor 9y ago
        I mean, go ahead and not buy from them. 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.
        saimiam 9y ago
        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.
        ethbro 9y ago
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    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.
- jopsen 9y ago
  If the chromebooks are fully cloud-sync'ed, couldn't the IT department just have a few extra sitting around to replace broken ones. In fact, do you even care that you get back the same machine?
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    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.
    - ethbro 9y ago
      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.
      - yazan94 9y ago
        > a lot of companies seem to be getting more comfortable with cloud vs on-prem from a security perspective. I work at a Big Corp Inc. This is unfortunately not the case here. The person you replied to is correct in how our security team sees things.
        kbutler 9y ago
        I've been amazed at the reversal in my employer's attitude and policies, from everything must be internal, to move everything goes to the cloud. Not sure how much to attribute to C-level staff turnover.
        ethbro 9y ago
        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.
- kamaal 9y ago
  >>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.
Moru 9y ago
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... :-)
- yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
  So standardize on one model that you know how to repair, and perhaps even keep spare parts on hand if that's helpful.
  - equalunique 9y ago
    Lenovo ThinkPads and Dell Latitues are great for this.
justabystander 9y ago
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.
- dannyr 9y ago
  > Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support My experience is not the same for all the products I bought for Google. It was really easy to contact support and replacement devices came quickly.
  - Mindwipe 9y ago
    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.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    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.
jpalomaki 9y ago
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.
digi_owl 9y ago
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.

sigi45 9y ago

Companies don't buy Dell or Lenovo because there devices are easily repearable. They buy it because Dell and Lenovo replace/repair a device in 24 hours.

Moru 9y ago
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...
- pjmlp 9y ago
  I am yet to work at any company that doesn't make use of custom images.
  - jcelerier 9y ago
    > I am yet to work at any company that doesn't make use of custom images. Does your companies also replace the BIOS of your machines? Because this is where the Lenovo malware were originating from: https://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem-to-have-a-bios-level-backdoor.html https://www.techworm.net/2015/08/lenovo-pcs-and-laptops-seem...
  - AmVess 9y ago
    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.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - tallanvor 9y ago
      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.
      - Tepix 9y ago
        At some point you ought to stop trusting a company. After Lenovo has done this three times in a row, isn't it time to say "thanks, but no thanks"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security
        tallanvor 9y ago
        I mean, go ahead and not buy from them. 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.
        saimiam 9y ago
        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.
        ethbro 9y ago
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- digi_owl 9y ago
  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.
jopsen 9y ago
If the chromebooks are fully cloud-sync'ed, couldn't the IT department just have a few extra sitting around to replace broken ones. In fact, do you even care that you get back the same machine?
- pjmlp 9y ago
  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.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    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.
    - yazan94 9y ago
      > a lot of companies seem to be getting more comfortable with cloud vs on-prem from a security perspective. I work at a Big Corp Inc. This is unfortunately not the case here. The person you replied to is correct in how our security team sees things.
      - kbutler 9y ago
        I've been amazed at the reversal in my employer's attitude and policies, from everything must be internal, to move everything goes to the cloud. Not sure how much to attribute to C-level staff turnover.
      - ethbro 9y ago
        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.
kamaal 9y ago
>>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.

Moru 9y ago

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... :-)

yjftsjthsd-h 9y ago
So standardize on one model that you know how to repair, and perhaps even keep spare parts on hand if that's helpful.
- equalunique 9y ago
  Lenovo ThinkPads and Dell Latitues are great for this.

justabystander 9y ago

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.

dannyr 9y ago
> Google's terrible reputation of poor and unreachable support My experience is not the same for all the products I bought for Google. It was really easy to contact support and replacement devices came quickly.
- Mindwipe 9y ago
  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.
- kuschku 9y ago
  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.

jpalomaki 9y ago

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.

digi_owl 9y ago

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.