When Google first announced its plans to offer a lightweight, browser-like operating system, pundits had a field day. Why go up against Windows? Why not use Android? Fast-forward to today, and you’ll find that sales of inexpensive Chromebooks are climbing faster than almost anyone expected, particularly in schools. It makes sense, of course – why should a school spend twice as much on a Windows machine when a cheap Chromebook can get the job done?
For personal use, Windows notebooks and Apple’s MacBook laptops are seen by many as the obvious choice over Chromebooks because they are so much more powerful and flexible. As it turns out, however, Chromebooks’ biggest weakness might also be their greatest strength.
In a recent post on ZDNet, longtime mobile industry reporter James Kendrick discusses the responses he gets when discussing Chromebooks. In a nutshell, they’re mostly people shouting about why a “full OS” like Windows or OS X is better than Google’s Chrome operating system.
As Kendrick notes, however, the very fact that Chrome is not a so-called “full OS” could be its biggest draw for personal use.
“I work, you might even say I live, in the Chrome browser all day. It doesn’t matter what OS is running behind the web pages, it’s Chrome front and center,” Kendrick wrote. “This is why the Chromebook works so well for me. The lack of a ‘real’ OS as the engine behind the Chrome browser is actually a good thing for me. My Chromebook runs Chrome faster, smoother, and without hiccups, better than my fast Macs and Windows PCs. I can still do lots of ‘PC’ activities in Chrome; with web apps it’s much more than a browser. But the pure browser experience is excellent on a Chromebook.”
Kendrick’s full post is a very interesting read, and it’s linked below in our source section.
