chromebooks

I just got done reading "Whatever you do, don't buy a Chromebook http://t.co/HrZk8" from Galen Gruman and while he brings up some good points but some I disagree with, or more correctly don't see as a problem in my testing

1. The web isn't good enough to be your information center.
Well arguable I don't travel that much but I sort of forgot that my email wasn't local and I was a big proponent of outlook's cached mode. Partly because without it my 1.8G mailbox was unusable. With gmail though it's fast enough to be on the web. Note: Much of my time is actually on my wireless 3g which in central Maine is 2 bars of EVDO rev A. Not exactly super fast but worked fine.

Most of my stuff was only on my laptop because I was too lazy to store it somewhere else, which since I last backed my laptop up in 08 was really a disaster waiting to happen. The fact that I can't store things locally is actually good for me.

Internet security? Really? Are we still having this debate. Now I would be a little nervous if the CIA was using the public internet to do stuff, but I'm not exactly worried about my data being targetted by other countries. For what we do the cloud providers to at least as good a job as we do, which is pretty darn good. Could the Chinese, Russian or US government, get in and steal my data, probably. Am I going to stay up at night worrying about that, probably not.

2. The browser in a box isn't good enough

Well I've been 100% web for a few months and with very few exceptions haven't used a real PC since then. (I do use it for calendaring and some email but that's more of a sympton of how we did ouy initial google POC than anything else).

Google Docs does more than enough to suit me, but I also don't do any crazy spreadsheet stuff like some finance folks do. If I needed to do a fancy powerpoint, I'd use sliderocket over google presentations, but it's still in the cloud.

I do miss having dual displays and can see why some people would miss bluetooth but even on my Dell I never used an external keyboard and mouse. I just never wanted to get used to it and then not have it when I went to a meeting.

The best reason for me to like the chrome book though was a story that happened to me last weekend. My girlfriend had her laptop and was surfing on the internet looking for gardening sites and kept getting "Your machine has been infected" malware messages. So after a few times I suggested she try my cr-48. She could get to everything she needed, was faster than her laptop (which admittedly is an 8 year old piece of crap) and she got away from the issues of getting infected. Plus since she was logged in as a guest, none of her banking info remains on my work machine.

VDI, at least last I looked was too expensive, better off to just issue laptops, IMHO of course....

Printing is an issue. No argument there, but I don't print that much. The last thing I was going to print was directions and I decided it was easier to simply use the GPS on my android phone, who knew?

Battery life and bootup time rocks on the cr-48. I used it all weekend on one charge, not for solid 48 hours of course, but, 8 hours is a reality. My laptop I could stretch to 4 or 5 which was still pretty good. My ipad was about the same 8 hours, but not having a keyboard ruined the ipad for me.

3. Can Google deliver a polished product?
I'll agree the UI in gmail annoys me sometimes, I mean really I can't sort my email on subject or sender? Really? But they also have some very cool features that make me want to deal with the clunkiness, like priority inbox and folders. Collaboration with Google Apps is awesome! Since most of what I do is that, I'll trade not having some of the features that I rarely use for the ability to collaborate in real time with my peers easily.

Are there things I'd like to see better, of course, but every product has that... I for one will keep my chromebook.

But I think Galen missed the best benefit, no IT management really needed. I don't need to have a dedicated patching person or figure out how to backup laptops. Of course I could just turn on windows updates and really should have figured out backups long ago. I don't need AV and anti malware, at least not yet. And I don't need to worry about data at rest issues (assuming my cloud providers do)

I still think taking a longer term vision on where IT is going makes the chrome books make more sense...

Microsoft cloud

We had a great day today in Waltham, well once we got past the tipped over sheetrock truck on 95/93 interchange. Sitting on 128 for an hour was not great.

Wed reviewed Microsofts' Office 365 and azure offerings and I can honestly say that they seem to have a good story on how to get your existing Microsoft infrastructure in the cloud. Exchange is an easy move to the MS cloud and in the next year you will get new features more quickly than the on-premise versions. Very cool.

Office 365 allows you to change your licensing model and have "viewers" have a less expensive option that can be accessed anywhere from "any" machine. "Any" is somewhat misleading since it does need to be a current browser and a standard OS with silverlight support, or at least it didn't work on my joli OS based web machine. Someone more savvy than me might be able to get it working, but after an hour the challenge stopped being fun.

Even SQL seems to have a good roadmap of getting to the cloud. I'm not really a SQL guy but it looked pretty cool from what I know.

And Windows Azure also seems pretty cool, though having to rebuild applications for the cloud means legacy applications will probably stay where they are and new ones will be built on Azure instead. I'd rather there was a "upgrade to cloud" button somewhere, but I'm sure some partner somewhere will come up with one someday.

All in all it was exactly what I expected, which is the problem. It's not really disruptive. If you read my post on google's cloud vision, it was a drastically new way of running IT. It gets rid of clients (essentially) and lets me get out of managing clients and servers and all the things that go with it, like antivirus, patching and even backups. It lets me stop running IT and starting moving the company forward instead.

The MS one is a much easier migration with much less risk. In fact if done correctly most users would never even know they are in the cloud. If your CEO comes to you and says "We need to go to the cloud" and you are thinking "Ugh, who did he go golfing with that put this in his head", the MS vision is perfect for you.

OK that's a bit harsh, there are a lot of reasons to avoid a big change on a largely unproven technology vision.

If you are trying to shake things up though that doesn't do it. Sure it helps shift infrastructure costs to a monthly subscription cost, which frankly is a numbers game, IMHO. It also gets you out of managing servers and patches for the applications you move to Azure or Office 365 (sharepoint, Lync, Exchange) and it gets you "somewhat forced" regular upgrades. You have the option to wait up to a full year before being forced to upgrade. It's not bad, in fact for some people it's a great fit. I just wonder if it is enough of a change....

Microsoft cloud

We had a call yesterday with one of the Microsoft PM's for exchange online and I may have to re-define my take on the MS cloud strategy. It seems like they may actually have one after all.

OK that may be a bit harsh, but when we had talked to them before they really didn't seem to get it. In fact they would say things like "You don't want innovation, you want better QA", or "Cloud fixes the licensing challenges". While Google's message was a lot crisper.

I'm thinking now that MS just hasn't done a good job sharing their cloud strategy throughout the company. Of course with 8 billion products it's got to be hard to share all that expertise. (Yes I made up the 8 billion number)...

The product manager yesterday though said things like "Cloud will always get the new features first", "We plan on releasing new features monthly to the online version", and showed us some cool features that are coming down the line that rival what we saw with Google.

Which puts me in an awkward position. Up until this point, going google was a no brainer, but now it requires some thinking... Sigh.