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I found the ad hilarious. Google is an ad company. A brilliant ad company, but still an ad company. As far as I know, this is something that is not on most cons

I found the ad hilarious. Google is an ad company. A brilliant ad company, but still an ad company. As far as I know, this is something that is not on most consumer's minds. The scroogled ads are pretty good for microsoft standards. My concern is less with the data collection, and more with the lack of native application support. If it looks like a laptop, consumers like my parents will think they found the best deal in the world when they come across it. I have talked both of them out of buying one because it won't run the work applications they need (they wanted to use it to replace their aging laptops). If it was a tablet, I'd have no problem with it. Consumers are used to the idea of tablets as toys (and don't expect them to run office and their workplace's custom windows apps). As a programmer, I really don't want another platform to write native apps for; there are so many already. I'll learn it if they get enough market penetration. I don't know enough about the native APIs for the chromebook; how different is it to write a chromebook app than an android one? Is it web only? Are you really cut off from any functionality if you aren't around wifi?

btian 13y ago
No. Google is a tech company. Ad is a way to sustain the company. Just like News Corp is a media company, not an ad company.
- RodericDay 13y ago
  Oh please about 97% of Google's revenues come from advertising. People need to know this.
  - rejschaap 13y ago
    And a circus is a ticket printing company, 95% of their revenue comes from selling printed tickets. I really don't know why they still bother with the elephants and acrobatics...
    - Guvante 13y ago
      Bad example, tickets are a direct thing. Ads are usually not considered a direct part of the website. For instance while most online comic sites have ads, ads are not the point. From the user perspective ads aren't the point of www.google.com, but from Google's perspective it is.
    - ogreyonder 13y ago
      You... might want to reconsider that analogy. Claiming that News Corp is a media company is somewhat tenable. They sell "media" direct to consumer, among other things, and media is an end product. Claiming that Google is an ad company is, similarly, tenable: they sell ads. Showing ads is the end product. You may just have been making a joke, in which case I apologize for the lengthy response, but claiming that a circus is a ticket printing company in no way relates to either argument. Tickets are categorically not a product. Nobody would care if a circus uses tickets or stamps or facial recognition. They are a means to admittance to the end product. The show. That's why they bother with the elephants and acrobatics. Google, on the other hand, is in fact an ad company. They sell ads for the vast majority of their revenue. That's what they do. They dabble elsewhere and are expanding to new areas which is totally fine. Just look at the history of Nokia--ever heard of Nokia the paper company or Nokia the galoshes manufacturer? However, as a company that is exploding with cash from the ad business, Google has clear priorities. They maintain their current revenue and use their fantastic capital for other stuff that at the very least won't hurt that business. More likely, they invest in things that will further it by collecting your information and showing you ads. Like the Chromebook. All that said, the Scroogled campaign is silly and not an effective way to raise that issue.
VLM 13y ago
"how different is it to write a chromebook app than an android one?" I almost bought my wife a chromebook for christmas, I researched this a bit for fun. Might buy one for myself too. Basically you google for "how to write chromebook app" (or Bing, LOL who am I kidding no one uses bing) and eventually get to https://developers.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index https://developers.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index You probably want "packaged app" which unsurprisingly turns out to be "how to write a chrome browser app" I thought it was all pretty interesting and have a few ideas to try. "I really don't want another platform to write native apps for" Careful careful, thats how cobol programmers and the like get stagnant and then unemployable. I'm not saying dive in head first, but sticking a toe in to see what the water is like, is perfectly reasonable. Go have some fun. In practice, lets be realistic, its 2013 soon 2014, 99% of "apps" use web pages as the presentation layer. I'm not going to write anything to use gmail or hangouts or google drive or facebook or a bazillion other end user applications. 99% of her time osx is just a Chrome bootloader for my wife, so I'm thinking of moving it out of the way...
- jasomill 13y ago
  Maybe so, but lots of people use the remaining 1% for most of their work, and some of us prefer the OS X (or Windows, or X11) desktop environment to the browser for most applications. I sure do, though I also generally prefer well-designed Web pages to native mobile apps for accessing information on the Internet.
  - VLM 13y ago
    I totally get what you're saying, I'm just saying for the vast majority of people who mostly live in a browser, "switching" into a browser doesn't have much meaning because they're already there, this just works a little better for them. There exist a couple remote desktop apps, rdesktop rdp vnc whatever. And I have a perfectly good virtualization compatible server in the basement, so in the unlikely even she needed a "real" desktop, its not hard to remotely access. The biggest problem with chromebooks is the good ones are "always" sold out and the bad ones have weird issues like the video drivers are not compatible with normal codecs so do whatever you want as long as its not youtube / netflix / prime video / whatever. And that is a problem. If you're sold out of the good stuff, you don't need to buy advertising.

btian 13y ago

No. Google is a tech company. Ad is a way to sustain the company. Just like News Corp is a media company, not an ad company.

RodericDay 13y ago
Oh please about 97% of Google's revenues come from advertising. People need to know this.
- rejschaap 13y ago
  And a circus is a ticket printing company, 95% of their revenue comes from selling printed tickets. I really don't know why they still bother with the elephants and acrobatics...
  - Guvante 13y ago
    Bad example, tickets are a direct thing. Ads are usually not considered a direct part of the website. For instance while most online comic sites have ads, ads are not the point. From the user perspective ads aren't the point of www.google.com, but from Google's perspective it is.
  - ogreyonder 13y ago
    You... might want to reconsider that analogy. Claiming that News Corp is a media company is somewhat tenable. They sell "media" direct to consumer, among other things, and media is an end product. Claiming that Google is an ad company is, similarly, tenable: they sell ads. Showing ads is the end product. You may just have been making a joke, in which case I apologize for the lengthy response, but claiming that a circus is a ticket printing company in no way relates to either argument. Tickets are categorically not a product. Nobody would care if a circus uses tickets or stamps or facial recognition. They are a means to admittance to the end product. The show. That's why they bother with the elephants and acrobatics. Google, on the other hand, is in fact an ad company. They sell ads for the vast majority of their revenue. That's what they do. They dabble elsewhere and are expanding to new areas which is totally fine. Just look at the history of Nokia--ever heard of Nokia the paper company or Nokia the galoshes manufacturer? However, as a company that is exploding with cash from the ad business, Google has clear priorities. They maintain their current revenue and use their fantastic capital for other stuff that at the very least won't hurt that business. More likely, they invest in things that will further it by collecting your information and showing you ads. Like the Chromebook. All that said, the Scroogled campaign is silly and not an effective way to raise that issue.

VLM 13y ago

"how different is it to write a chromebook app than an android one?" I almost bought my wife a chromebook for christmas, I researched this a bit for fun. Might buy one for myself too. Basically you google for "how to write chromebook app" (or Bing, LOL who am I kidding no one uses bing) and eventually get to https://developers.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index https://developers.google.com/chrome/apps/docs/index You probably want "packaged app" which unsurprisingly turns out to be "how to write a chrome browser app" I thought it was all pretty interesting and have a few ideas to try. "I really don't want another platform to write native apps for" Careful careful, thats how cobol programmers and the like get stagnant and then unemployable. I'm not saying dive in head first, but sticking a toe in to see what the water is like, is perfectly reasonable. Go have some fun. In practice, lets be realistic, its 2013 soon 2014, 99% of "apps" use web pages as the presentation layer. I'm not going to write anything to use gmail or hangouts or google drive or facebook or a bazillion other end user applications. 99% of her time osx is just a Chrome bootloader for my wife, so I'm thinking of moving it out of the way...

jasomill 13y ago
Maybe so, but lots of people use the remaining 1% for most of their work, and some of us prefer the OS X (or Windows, or X11) desktop environment to the browser for most applications. I sure do, though I also generally prefer well-designed Web pages to native mobile apps for accessing information on the Internet.
- VLM 13y ago
  I totally get what you're saying, I'm just saying for the vast majority of people who mostly live in a browser, "switching" into a browser doesn't have much meaning because they're already there, this just works a little better for them. There exist a couple remote desktop apps, rdesktop rdp vnc whatever. And I have a perfectly good virtualization compatible server in the basement, so in the unlikely even she needed a "real" desktop, its not hard to remotely access. The biggest problem with chromebooks is the good ones are "always" sold out and the bad ones have weird issues like the video drivers are not compatible with normal codecs so do whatever you want as long as its not youtube / netflix / prime video / whatever. And that is a problem. If you're sold out of the good stuff, you don't need to buy advertising.