9 ms·

It would be ironic if Microsoft took the OS, added Edge, and released EdgeOS running on Edgebooks, Edgeboxes, etc.

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
That…feels very plausible? Microsoft has to be peeved at how much of the education market has been taken over by Chromebooks. Providing some locked down OS, with minimal specs, friendly to corporate management software, Teams preinstalled, etc feels like a pretty good move. The Chromebooks only work though an app store, so this idea could feed into Microsoft’s as well. Unless Microsoft would rather target the cream of the market through their tablets. Edit: then again, maybe they have become hooked on the Win11 telemetry + ad revenue. Stripped down OS has a harder time justifying the need to include Candy Crush.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >how much of the education market has been taken over by Chromebooks. Why is this even a ting wherever this is(US?)? Mandating school kids use a platform owned by Google, a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting, feels like letting McDonalds's and Coca-Cola be in charge of the school cafeteria and educating kids about a balanced diet. Am I taking crazy pills, or am I missing something and I misunderstood the situation?
  - rrdharan 3y ago
    If you want kids to have laptops - which is really the questionable thing to begin with - then Chromebooks are safer and easier to secure against the typical kinds of threats a school cares about than Windows PCs and cheaper than Macs. I think a bigger question is why kids need laptops at all..
  - yeahmaybe333 3y ago
    It's pretty much this way anyway, the largest shareholders of CC and Mc Donalds are also the largest shareholders of largest outsource catering providers.
  - 1MachineElf 3y ago
    >a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting You could be describing Microsoft in 2023, e.g. Chromium-based Edge, Windows 11 start menu ads, Xbox Live background services being integral to Windows even on government/corporate computers, the unholy marriage of Bing & OpenAI, Windows Live ID, outlook.com, every corporation being cool with putting their data into Azure/Office 365, etc.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      How does whataboutism make an argument for the existing issue?
      - moritzwarhier 3y ago
        In this case I find the argument relevant. Why? In my country (and I assume it's similar in others), Microsoft has and traditionally always had schools, hospitals and governments, pretty much the whole public sector in tight grip. There is a lengthy history behind that which includes numerous reasons. Parent comment was making the comparison because GP pointed out the absurdity of forcing kids into Google ecosystem and exposing them to data harvesting. When the original story was about MS and they behave in similar or the same ways, I believe that it's very relevant. Two wrongs don't make one right though: students at a public school, their data as well as their mindshare, should not mandatorily be sold to the highest/lowest bidder.
  - wmf 3y ago
    Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all evil in their own ways. Chrome OS is significantly more reliable than Windows, macOS, or desktop Linux and Chromebooks tend to be cheap (although Windows craptops are catching up).
    - justinclift 3y ago
      > Chrome OS is significantly more reliable ... Only for the first 2-3 years, at which point it expires and the kids need a new laptop.
      - bzzzt 3y ago
        Some Chromebooks go far in the 2030's with update support so it's not a given anymore.
  - thehappypm 3y ago
    Because they're the best tool for the job. It's not like we're replacing healthy lunches with Coke. It's either Chromebooks, or expensive, clunky, virus-prone, impossible-to-administer Windows PCs.
    - vbezhenar 3y ago
      Why not OpenBSD? Free, secure and great to learn UNIX.
      - anotherhue 3y ago
        There's more important topics on the curriculum than 1970s OS design. Clear speech, thought, language skills, comprehension, critical thinking, mathematics, geography, history -- you know, life's syscalls.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        > Clear speech, thought, language skills, comprehension, critical thinking, mathematics, geography, history Aren't books and a bottom of the barrel PC with internet access all you need to learn those? Why a Chromebook? NUC PCs are cheaper and it's easier to replace the mouse and keyboard that kids break.
        anotherhue 3y ago
        Because any second spent farting around with the machine instead of using it to learn about the topic at hand steals from the topic. Because teachers aren't sysadmins, because even if they were they aren't going to admin 30 different laptops that the students have installed god-knows-what on. This solution has to be military grade in reliability and simplicity and unless/until someone develops a hardware certification programme, a meaningful long-term-support plan, a remote administration solution, a security focused browser and a hosted identity system, all in a package that costs ~$200 new then it's going to be CrOS. Don't forget the marketing spend needed even if you did tick the above boxes. No one is complaining that their text-books are not turing complete, just stop viewing these devices as general purpose machines and view them as the child-focused-appliances that they are. Like Teslas.
  - whyagaintango 3y ago
    It is also popular in some parts of Scandinavia. Why you ask? As a school teacher I can see - for ages no proper trained IT staff in schools - I know better linux, rpi than them. Heck they read IT news from cnet.com - managing+ security in local servers is very difficult - money for space - google edu is/was almost free - HIPAA equivalent rules - though everyone will talk and tell linux, libreoffice - the polishing and consistency of chromeos is great (for cheap $150 laptop) - ideally linux foundation or some one should have made a 'school appliance' but ...
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >- for ages no proper trained IT staff in schools Excuse me but how the hell is this a problem in Scandinavia? Don't you guys have the best schools in the world? Even in Eastern Europe 20 years ago we had sys-admins in schools, and we were told that Scandinavian schools do it so much bater because they fund them the way the US funds its military.
      - whyagaintango 3y ago
        Schools are ok. IT not ok. There is a mishmash of I hate/love google mantra. Some want to do local but most no have the skillset to run servers ZFS etc. Either some idiot in administration then does outsourcing to remote MSP that support Windows.
  - rvense 3y ago
    The startup I work for sells to education customers in Scandinavia. It is my impression that schools are either "Microsoft schools" or "Google schools" (these are the terms used). The Danish data protection agency made some ruling against Google that ought to have meant, if the existing rules had been followed, that kids weren't allowed to use Chromebooks, but the schools said they couldn't teach kids without them, so the rules weren't followed. Yes, it's great.
  - tapoxi 3y ago
    Because schools need cheap laptops that are easy to centrally manage by a single platform. Google also has a Workspace for Education suite that includes all the Google Docs stuff and teacher tools (Google Classroom). They also have a no ads or data collected policy. It's very enticing. There's no real competition. The closest is Microsoft but Windows machines are much more expensive to manage and have worse performance on low-end hardware. Let's imagine what HN wants - a Linux laptop running Firefox and LibreOffice. You're not going to get fleet management features, collaborative document editing, or built-in classroom management tools. Kids are still going to Google to search for things (and use ChatGPT).
  - sliken 3y ago
    No mandate. However chromebooks when they came out were a HUGE improvement over low end windows laptops. They are crazy durable, include instructions for when you pour soda into the keyboard, are durable enough to be thrown, leave a mark on the ceiling, and still survive. They run well even on old hardware, 4GB ram is plenty. They also don't get viruses, don't require any local expertise, don't require backups, don't require any software licenses, no virus scanning, and have minimal requirements from central IT. If a student manages to kill one you can literally just hand them another and say login. So the savings in hardware costs, reduced support costs, and the "it just works" design is pretty attractive to school districts. Who'd have thought a $180 laptop could be durable, useful, no crapware/malware/ransomware, and last a decade? Sure it would be nice if it didn't depend on google, but nobody else was stepping up. My kid has had three over the last decade, the last we paid $50 to keep when she graduated. It's still being used years later.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  In US mostly. Here on this side of the pound, schools hardly give students laptops or similar, on the more fortunate ones there might be a computer room with desktops, and the really very fortunate ones might have some kind of tablets or laptops. And it is up to the families to buy their own kids computers, eventually some kind of state support might be available. Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away.
  - pastage 3y ago
    You need to be more specific. Chromebooks are common in parts of Europe.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      This was already specific enough, > Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away. Seldom see them in public in DACH and southern countries, on planes, trains, coffee shops, only rich family schools have laptops like on US,...
- jasonjayr 3y ago
  Microsoft Windows has all the pieces already to actually make this happen right now. AD, Group Policy, device lock down policies, "S Mode", etc. To be honest, what I think they lack is straightforward licensing in order to run an organization with these tools with high availability.
zer0zzz 3y ago
I’ve recently used a Samsung galaxy book 5g that goes currently for $260 on Amazon running windows on arm64 and I feel this could be an indicator of how they easily could do this.
verdverm 3y ago
would that make them our Edgelord?
- KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
  Gates must have been quite Edgy back in the day
happymellon 3y ago
Microsoft selling consumer Linux? That would be an interesting move.
- 1MachineElf 3y ago
  Embrace, extend, extinguish.
  - happymellon 3y ago
    They would really be doing nothing more than what Google is doing with Chromebooks.
TrueSlacker0 3y ago
Will that result in longer than a 5 year support life? A LTS Chromebook or EdgeBook would be wonderful.
cykros 3y ago
Microsoft has had the sense to let Linux become the dominant OS on its cloud provider. Where it's the right tool for the job at hand, I suspect Nadella's Microsoft would be perfectly fine with being built on Linux.

That…feels very plausible? Microsoft has to be peeved at how much of the education market has been taken over by Chromebooks. Providing some locked down OS, with minimal specs, friendly to corporate management software, Teams preinstalled, etc feels like a pretty good move. The Chromebooks only work though an app store, so this idea could feed into Microsoft’s as well. Unless Microsoft would rather target the cream of the market through their tablets. Edit: then again, maybe they have become hooked on the Win11 telemetry + ad revenue. Stripped down OS has a harder time justifying the need to include Candy Crush.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>how much of the education market has been taken over by Chromebooks. Why is this even a ting wherever this is(US?)? Mandating school kids use a platform owned by Google, a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting, feels like letting McDonalds's and Coca-Cola be in charge of the school cafeteria and educating kids about a balanced diet. Am I taking crazy pills, or am I missing something and I misunderstood the situation?
- rrdharan 3y ago
  If you want kids to have laptops - which is really the questionable thing to begin with - then Chromebooks are safer and easier to secure against the typical kinds of threats a school cares about than Windows PCs and cheaper than Macs. I think a bigger question is why kids need laptops at all..
- yeahmaybe333 3y ago
  It's pretty much this way anyway, the largest shareholders of CC and Mc Donalds are also the largest shareholders of largest outsource catering providers.
- 1MachineElf 3y ago
  >a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting You could be describing Microsoft in 2023, e.g. Chromium-based Edge, Windows 11 start menu ads, Xbox Live background services being integral to Windows even on government/corporate computers, the unholy marriage of Bing & OpenAI, Windows Live ID, outlook.com, every corporation being cool with putting their data into Azure/Office 365, etc.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    How does whataboutism make an argument for the existing issue?
    - moritzwarhier 3y ago
      In this case I find the argument relevant. Why? In my country (and I assume it's similar in others), Microsoft has and traditionally always had schools, hospitals and governments, pretty much the whole public sector in tight grip. There is a lengthy history behind that which includes numerous reasons. Parent comment was making the comparison because GP pointed out the absurdity of forcing kids into Google ecosystem and exposing them to data harvesting. When the original story was about MS and they behave in similar or the same ways, I believe that it's very relevant. Two wrongs don't make one right though: students at a public school, their data as well as their mindshare, should not mandatorily be sold to the highest/lowest bidder.
- wmf 3y ago
  Google, Microsoft, and Apple are all evil in their own ways. Chrome OS is significantly more reliable than Windows, macOS, or desktop Linux and Chromebooks tend to be cheap (although Windows craptops are catching up).
  - justinclift 3y ago
    > Chrome OS is significantly more reliable ... Only for the first 2-3 years, at which point it expires and the kids need a new laptop.
    - bzzzt 3y ago
      Some Chromebooks go far in the 2030's with update support so it's not a given anymore.
- thehappypm 3y ago
  Because they're the best tool for the job. It's not like we're replacing healthy lunches with Coke. It's either Chromebooks, or expensive, clunky, virus-prone, impossible-to-administer Windows PCs.
  - vbezhenar 3y ago
    Why not OpenBSD? Free, secure and great to learn UNIX.
    - anotherhue 3y ago
      There's more important topics on the curriculum than 1970s OS design. Clear speech, thought, language skills, comprehension, critical thinking, mathematics, geography, history -- you know, life's syscalls.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        > Clear speech, thought, language skills, comprehension, critical thinking, mathematics, geography, history Aren't books and a bottom of the barrel PC with internet access all you need to learn those? Why a Chromebook? NUC PCs are cheaper and it's easier to replace the mouse and keyboard that kids break.
        anotherhue 3y ago
        Because any second spent farting around with the machine instead of using it to learn about the topic at hand steals from the topic. Because teachers aren't sysadmins, because even if they were they aren't going to admin 30 different laptops that the students have installed god-knows-what on. This solution has to be military grade in reliability and simplicity and unless/until someone develops a hardware certification programme, a meaningful long-term-support plan, a remote administration solution, a security focused browser and a hosted identity system, all in a package that costs ~$200 new then it's going to be CrOS. Don't forget the marketing spend needed even if you did tick the above boxes. No one is complaining that their text-books are not turing complete, just stop viewing these devices as general purpose machines and view them as the child-focused-appliances that they are. Like Teslas.
- whyagaintango 3y ago
  It is also popular in some parts of Scandinavia. Why you ask? As a school teacher I can see - for ages no proper trained IT staff in schools - I know better linux, rpi than them. Heck they read IT news from cnet.com - managing+ security in local servers is very difficult - money for space - google edu is/was almost free - HIPAA equivalent rules - though everyone will talk and tell linux, libreoffice - the polishing and consistency of chromeos is great (for cheap $150 laptop) - ideally linux foundation or some one should have made a 'school appliance' but ...
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >- for ages no proper trained IT staff in schools Excuse me but how the hell is this a problem in Scandinavia? Don't you guys have the best schools in the world? Even in Eastern Europe 20 years ago we had sys-admins in schools, and we were told that Scandinavian schools do it so much bater because they fund them the way the US funds its military.
    - whyagaintango 3y ago
      Schools are ok. IT not ok. There is a mishmash of I hate/love google mantra. Some want to do local but most no have the skillset to run servers ZFS etc. Either some idiot in administration then does outsourcing to remote MSP that support Windows.
- rvense 3y ago
  The startup I work for sells to education customers in Scandinavia. It is my impression that schools are either "Microsoft schools" or "Google schools" (these are the terms used). The Danish data protection agency made some ruling against Google that ought to have meant, if the existing rules had been followed, that kids weren't allowed to use Chromebooks, but the schools said they couldn't teach kids without them, so the rules weren't followed. Yes, it's great.
- tapoxi 3y ago
  Because schools need cheap laptops that are easy to centrally manage by a single platform. Google also has a Workspace for Education suite that includes all the Google Docs stuff and teacher tools (Google Classroom). They also have a no ads or data collected policy. It's very enticing. There's no real competition. The closest is Microsoft but Windows machines are much more expensive to manage and have worse performance on low-end hardware. Let's imagine what HN wants - a Linux laptop running Firefox and LibreOffice. You're not going to get fleet management features, collaborative document editing, or built-in classroom management tools. Kids are still going to Google to search for things (and use ChatGPT).
- sliken 3y ago
  No mandate. However chromebooks when they came out were a HUGE improvement over low end windows laptops. They are crazy durable, include instructions for when you pour soda into the keyboard, are durable enough to be thrown, leave a mark on the ceiling, and still survive. They run well even on old hardware, 4GB ram is plenty. They also don't get viruses, don't require any local expertise, don't require backups, don't require any software licenses, no virus scanning, and have minimal requirements from central IT. If a student manages to kill one you can literally just hand them another and say login. So the savings in hardware costs, reduced support costs, and the "it just works" design is pretty attractive to school districts. Who'd have thought a $180 laptop could be durable, useful, no crapware/malware/ransomware, and last a decade? Sure it would be nice if it didn't depend on google, but nobody else was stepping up. My kid has had three over the last decade, the last we paid $50 to keep when she graduated. It's still being used years later.
pjmlp 3y ago
In US mostly. Here on this side of the pound, schools hardly give students laptops or similar, on the more fortunate ones there might be a computer room with desktops, and the really very fortunate ones might have some kind of tablets or laptops. And it is up to the families to buy their own kids computers, eventually some kind of state support might be available. Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away.
- pastage 3y ago
  You need to be more specific. Chromebooks are common in parts of Europe.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    This was already specific enough, > Chromebooks are usually left as a curiosity among Saturn, Media Markt, Blue, Vobis, Public, .... that gets routinely rebated until someome finally takes them away. Seldom see them in public in DACH and southern countries, on planes, trains, coffee shops, only rich family schools have laptops like on US,...
jasonjayr 3y ago
Microsoft Windows has all the pieces already to actually make this happen right now. AD, Group Policy, device lock down policies, "S Mode", etc. To be honest, what I think they lack is straightforward licensing in order to run an organization with these tools with high availability.

zer0zzz 3y ago

I’ve recently used a Samsung galaxy book 5g that goes currently for $260 on Amazon running windows on arm64 and I feel this could be an indicator of how they easily could do this.

verdverm 3y ago

would that make them our Edgelord?

KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
Gates must have been quite Edgy back in the day

happymellon 3y ago

Microsoft selling consumer Linux? That would be an interesting move.

1MachineElf 3y ago
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
- happymellon 3y ago
  They would really be doing nothing more than what Google is doing with Chromebooks.

TrueSlacker0 3y ago

Will that result in longer than a 5 year support life? A LTS Chromebook or EdgeBook would be wonderful.

cykros 3y ago

Microsoft has had the sense to let Linux become the dominant OS on its cloud provider. Where it's the right tool for the job at hand, I suspect Nadella's Microsoft would be perfectly fine with being built on Linux.