Microsoft is advertising for Google, by accident: Chromebooks

I was watching a Microsoft advertisement a bit ago, belittling Google Chromebooks for not having Windows or Microsoft Office.  I think it was a huge mistake.

Why would it be a mistake since Microsoft makes their money from Windows and Office?  The general public didn't know anything about Chromebooks previously.

If Google has bought TV advertising time, I haven't seen any results of it.  So, here we are with ridiculous advertising berating Chromebooks (You're not going to get to Hollywood with that!) simply because they don't have Microsoft products on them.

It might start people thinking.  (I know it's a long shot but it could happen.)  I tried to give away a computer with Ubuntu on it.  The person I was asking said that people "needed" Windows.  When I asked further, they didn't play games.  I'm just not sure what's so necessary about Windows, if you're doing e-mail, writing a document of some sort, or browsing the web.  A five year old machine running a Linux-based distribution should be able to do that just fine--without Windows.

Microsoft has been diminished in so many ways.  While Windows 7 signalled an upswing in software quality, finally, they haven't had much success since then.  Windows 8.1 should be the operating system all current Windows users (with capable machines) should be using, but I don't see that happening so quickly.  Their tablets' prices had to be cut drastically, and the company initiated some acerbic advertising against Apple to help them.  It's not necessarily witless but I can't see that it's helping.  Having Nokia in their pocket has stemmed their losses in Windows Phone operating system, as Samsung and HTC recoil.

If schools would accept Linux-based operating systems, instead of Windows, Microsoft might lose its grip forever.  Competition is always a good thing, though Monopoly should only be a game.  Now that Microsoft has informed us about Google Chromebooks, they might have people asking "Why, Windows?"

Sales to Stores

Apparently, quite a few Chromebooks are making their ways into stores, even if they aren't making it into people's hands.   When I saw the article on MacRumors, i had to take a look at the comments because the fanatics can often be so ridiculous, and so they were: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1689854

One person actually made sense about recommending a computer for the person who mostly does web browsing and e-mail.  It is difficult to recommend a US$1000 computer for that when a US$300 Chromebook will work nearly as well for those things, and you don't have to worry about Windows malware, either.  Is the US$999 MacBook Air a well-designed computer, similarly priced to computers based on Intel's Ultrabook classification?  Absolutely.  It even has a slight graphics hardware boost over them.  Could a high school or university student simply wanting to do work do well with a Chromebook?  Absolutely.

Update 2014.02.07: I saw another Microsoft advertisement targeting Chromebooks, though they didn't show one this time, which is smarter for them.  They discussed how you couldn't load MS Office.  Seriously, though, that's a plus to me.  By now, we should have intermediate (non-proprietary) file formats that don't require Microsoft at all.   There was an Open Document Format, as I recall, but can it be forced to be the standard output, so that it can used in schools and offices without having to jump through hoops?

A lot of the reason people are using Microsoft products in schools is because Microsoft gave the schools so many free licenses to "freeze out" any other software supplier.  It's a good deal, but isn't it underhanded, and shouldn't it be against the law?  If it's a gift, should there be strings attached?

Looking forward to Ubuntu Linux 12.04

Remember being a small child on Christmas morning?  I know that not everyone had that experience but it always surprised me because I was obedient so I never found the gifts ahead of time.  Surprises are many times a good thing.

A few releases ago, the Canonical people decided to go their own way and cover up GNOME by putting their own desktop, Unity, out front.  It has been a somewhat painful transition for me.  I liked GNOME for its simplicity (as opposed to KDE or Windows), although it might have been too simple at times.  It reminded me of the earlier days of graphical user interfaces, when GEM and Macintosh ruled in the mid to late-1980s.

I don't use Unity every day, unfortunately.  Being forced to use something, you're much better at it, of course.  I spend most of my time in Mac OS X, which is a love-hate relationship.  I'm not a fanatic of any operating system by any means, but it's been almost 12 years since the public beta test of Mac OS X and it doesn't feel any more usable.  Some days, it's just downright unfriendly and I wish I had an alternative.

I've been using Ubuntu since 07.04.  It started as an experiment to see what the Linux fanatics were saying was better than anything else.  Well, unfortunately, it wasn't better then, and it was not all that good at all.  The installations would leave a few things to be figured out by the end user.  Grandma wouldn't have been happy when she couldn't get an internet connection.  Linux would have been perfect for the grandmas of the world who only used a web browser, e-mail, and the occasional letter writing application.

I think the 10.04 was the first release that seemed good for grandma.  Now, with Unity, are things better for her?  I think if I'd switched her machine, she'd be cursing me.  My mum was that kind of person.  She'd say "I hate that !@#$ computer!" quite frequently.  My uncle gave her a laptop computer as a gift and she gave it back the next year.

In any case, I'm looking forward to what the next Ubuntu distribution will bring.  I haven't been checking the website regularly, so it will be like a Christmas morning surprise.  I'd really like to switch, though I have paid software that I'd rather would run on my machine instead of using something that looks as though someone was testing it.  I won't give my photography to a half-baked application.  I can't sell it if it's not the highest image quality I can provide.  I saw that Corel was providing an application but their software quality isn't exactly high.

Here's to an interesting Ubuntu 12.04 release.  I hope they find new friends to install it.