Google: Digital Creative Agency Fred & Farid replaces Macs w/ Chromebooks

Google loves to highlight its work getting Chromebooks into the hands of business customers and a lot of the time that also means a switch from Windows and Microsoft Office products to Chrome OS and Google Apps. It’s not as often, however, that we hear about companies that decide to replace their Macs with Chromebooks. Today Google published a guest blog post from CIO of digital creative group Fred & Farid Group about the company’s decision to do exactly that, replace Macs with Chromebooks for around 60 percent of its employees:

Macs are a popular choice among the creative team. But I soon realized not everyone needs a Mac, especially the 60 percent of our employees who work in office roles like marketing, sales, IT, and administration. We recently rolled out 10 Samsung Chromebooks in a small pilot and plan to have 200 employees on Chromebooks by the end of the year. Our decision to adopt Chromebooks wasn’t based solely on price — though we expect to save a significant amount compared to deploying Macs — but also a desire to have faster collaboration. When you have a Chromebook, you think less about downloading stuff to your hard drive and more about sharing information in the cloud. With Google Drive, we’re able to store, sync and share all our important files easily, whether it’s when we’re on our Chromebooks or on our phones and tablets on the go.

Like with those switching from Windows, relying on mostly Google Apps is one of the reasons the company decided Macs weren’t necessary for many of its employees: We use Google Hangouts for all our voice communications — we don’t even have phone lines in our offices anymore. In the Paris office alone, we conduct more than 50 Hangouts each day. Of course, we also use Drive for document sharing and Calendar for scheduling.

More on the Google Enterprise Blog here.