With Chrome OS Flex, Look Before You Leap

Google made news with its "Chrome OS Flex" offering, which turns a PC into a Chromebook.

Some like the idea, seeing a way to reduce licensing costs. Others like the idea because it offers simpler administration. Yet others see it as a way of using older PCs that cannot migrate to Windows 11. 

Before committing to a conversion, consider:

Chrome OS Flex may not run on your PCs Chrome OS Flex works on some PCs but not all PCs. Google has a list of supported PCs, and the list is rather thin. Google rates target PCs with one of three classifications: "Certified", "Expect minor issues", and "Expect major issues". Google does not explain the difference between major and minor, but let's assume that major issues would be such that the Chrome experience would be poor and not productive.

Microsoft has a large knowledge base of hardware and device drivers. Google may be building such a knowledge base, but its current set of knowledge is much smaller than Microsoft's. The result is that Chrome OS Flex can run on a limited number of PC models.

Your employees may dislike the idea The introduction of new technology is tricky from a management perspective. Some employees will welcome Chrome OS Flex, and others will want to remain on the old, familiar system. If your roll-out is limited, some of the employees in the "stay on the old OS" group will feel relieved, and others may feel left out.

My recommendation is to communicate your plans well in advance, and focus on the ideas of efficiency and reduced costs. Avoid the notion of Chrome OS as a reward or a perk, and talk about it as simply another tool for the office.

Google is not Microsoft Switching from Windows to Chrome OS Flex means changing a core relationship from Microsoft to Google. Microsoft has a long history of supporting technologies and products; Google has the opposite. (There are web sites dedicated to the "Google graveyard".)

Google may drop the Google OS Flex offering at any time, and not provide a successor product. (If they do, your best path forward may be to replace the PCs running Google OS Flex with Chromebooks, which should provide the same capabilities as the PCs.)

Look before you leap My point is not to dissuade you from Google's Chrome OS Flex offering. Rather, I suggest that you consider carefully the benefits and risks of such a move. As part of your evaluation, I suggest a pilot project, moving some PCs (and employees) to the new OS. I also suggest that you compile an inventory of applications that run locally -- that is on your PCs, not on the web or in the cloud. Those applications cannot run on Chrome OS Flex, or on regular Chromebooks.

It may be possible to replace local applications with web-based applications, or cloud-based applications, but such replacements are projects themselves. You may want to start with a pilot project for Chrome OS Flex, and then migrate PC-based applications to the web or cloud, and then migrate other employees to Chrome OS. Or not -- a hybrid solution with some PCs running Windows (or mac os) and other PCs running Chrome OS Flex is possible.

Whatever your choose to do, I suggest that you think, communicate, evaluate, and then decide.

The future of Firefox

Use of Mozilla's Firefox browser is declining (at least as a percentage of market share), and people are concerned.

Some are concerned that we will lose an option in the browser market. Others are concerned that the demise of Firefox signals a forthcoming decline of open-source software. Mozilla, of course, is concerned about its business.

I'm not sure what Mozilla should do in this situation. I do have some observations:

First, people select browsers (and other things) for one of two reasons.

1) They want to use the specific product (in this case, the Firefox browser)

2) They don't want to use the alternatives (in this case, Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome, Safari, etc.)

To improve its market share, Mozilla will have to either provide a product or service that people want to use, or be an alternative to a product that people don't want to use. Mozilla must either make a better browser, one that people look at and think to themselves "yeah!", or wait for people to dislike the other browsers on the market.

When Chrome appeared on the market, people used it, I think, for the latter reason. At the time, Internet Explorer (IE) was the most commonly used browser (sometimes by corporate dictat) and people did not like it. Chrome was not Internet Explorer, and by using Chrome, one could "poke Microsoft in the eye".

But that was then. Now, people use Chrome because they want to. People might have chosen Chrome after using Gmail, and may have had favorable opinions of Google due to the 1GB space for mailboxes, which was quite large at the time. And Gmail was free!

Whatever the reasons, people like Chrome. Mozilla does not have the tailwind of people disliking their current browser.

Waiting for potential customers to dislike their current product is not a viable strategy. People may be unhappy with some of Google's practices, and that may drive some away from Chrome (and some of those to Firefox) and Mozilla has been advertising along those lines.

But dislike of Google is probably not enough. Mozilla needs "a better mousetrap".

And I'm not sure how they can build one.

Goodbye, Capslock!

The newly-announced Google Chrome OS has proposed the elimination of the venerable Caps Lock key. Many folks are outraged, but I am content to see the Caps Lock key ride off into the sunset.

To truly understand the Caps Lock key, one needs to know the history of computer hardware, programming languages, and the typewriter. The notion of Caps Lock started with typewriters, which allowed their users to shift between lower case and upper case letters with a "shift" key. (Most typewriters had two shift keys, one on either side of the main keyboard. Depressing the key moved the key assembly up and changed the impact area of each key from the lower case letter to the corresponding upper case letter. The "Shift Lock" key engaged a mechanism that kept the key assembly in the upper position, allowing the typist to easily type a series of upper case letters.

The early data terminals duplicated this capability, but with "logical" shift keys that changed the keystrokes from lower case to upper case. Very early data entry devices, such as IBM keypunch machines from the 1950s, her only upper case and therefore needed no shift or shift lock keys. Very early IBM systems such as the IBM 1401 used a character set that had only upper case letters. Later systems (although still early in the computer age) allowed for upper and lower case.

For computers, the distinction between upper and lower case was important. Early (pre-1970, for the most part) systems worked only in upper case. Data terminals that allowed lower case input were a nuisance, since the lower case letters were ignored or rejected by the programs. Programming languages such as COBOL and FORTRAN (and even BASIC) expected the programs to be entered in upper case. For these systems, the Caps Lock key was a boon, since it let one type large quantities of text in upper case.

The mavericks that changed the world were Unix and the C programming language. The pair allowed (and even encouraged) the use of lower case letters. Soon, compilers for Pascal and FORTRAN were allowing upper and lower case letters, and doing the right thing with them.

By the time the IBM PC came along, the computer world was ready to accept upper and lower case. Yet there was enough inertia to keep the Caps Lock key, and the IBM PC kept it. Not only did it keep it, but it added the Num Lock and Scroll Lock keys.

Yet the Caps Lock key has outlived its usefulness. I don't use it; I haven't used it since I wrote COBOL programs back in the late 1980s. The varied tasks of my work expect upper and lower case letters, and long strings of upper case are not used. Tools such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Microsoft Visual Studio for C++ or C# do not need blocks of upper case letters. The modern languages of C++, Java, and C# are case-sensitive, and using them requires upper and lower case.

I say, let go of Caps Lock. We can do what we need with the rest of the keyboard. (Actually, I think we can let go of the Num Lock and Scroll Lock keys, too.)