Shipments of Chromebooks outpaced Macs in the US for the first time in Q1 2016, that’s according to data from IDC shared during a session at Google’s I/O developer conference today.
Jared Harrell // BuzzFeed News
Following his RFK award acceptance speech last night, Tim Cook this evening made a surprise appearance at Apple’s new Upper East Side retail store in New York. Apple is set to kick off its Hour of Code program in all of its retail stores tomorrow, but the Upper East Side store held its first session today.
In 1995, two years before his return to the company, Steve Jobs gave a characteristically blunt answer when asked why Apple found itself struggling in the early to mid 1990s. The issue, he said, was that Apple had gotten greedy.
What ruined Apple wasn’t growth … They got very greedy. Instead of following the original trajectory of the original vision, which was to make the thing an appliance and get this out there to as many people as possible, they went for profits. They made outlandish profits for about four years… What that cost them was their future. What they should have been doing is making rational profits and going for market share.
Much has changed since then, of course. Apple has a substantial market share in both the personal computer and mobile markets, demonstrating that the two goals – growth and profitability – are not mutually exclusive. This is not an ‘Apple is doomed’ piece, nor anything like it. But I do wonder whether the company is once more putting short-term profits ahead of long-term brand loyalty … ?
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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.
