{"id":3335,"date":"2011-05-13T17:03:13","date_gmt":"2011-05-13T17:03:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/?p=3335"},"modified":"2011-05-13T17:03:13","modified_gmt":"2011-05-13T17:03:13","slug":"chromebooknotebooktablet-as-a-service-on-google-competing-with-ibm-global-finance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/chromebooknotebooktablet-as-a-service-on-google-competing-with-ibm-global-finance\/","title":{"rendered":"Chromebook\/Notebook\/Tablet As A Service. On Google Competing With IBM Global Finance"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

So a lot of smart people have already written up the news from Google I\/O this week – notably our very own Stephen O’Grady in a piece entitled Google I\/O: The Android Story<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So I decided to look at something different. To try and provide some industry context<\/em>, if you like.<\/p>\n

In case you missed it Google this week announced it would soon launch its Chrome OS-based portables- or “Chromebooks”. The idea behind these machines is that they are a lightweight front end for cloud services – Chrome is Google’s browser, and Chrome OS is designed to be the lightest-weight operating system that can support a browser-based computing model. Boot in eight seconds? Of course its Linux, packaged. Chromebooks are network computers for an era when networked applications really are the norm. Chromebooks are designed to ride the HTML5 wave.<\/p>\n

Rather than storing data on a hard disk, it will be stored in the cloud. I am not sure how well a two day outage for Blogger, a Google service, in the same week advertises the model, but stuff happens. Lets just assume Cloud computing works for now.<\/p>\n

One of the really interesting things about the model Google is proposing is that client hardware will no longer necessarily be an asset to depreciate, rather it will be a service. Just like SaaS applications, the customer will be able to to adopt clients on demand, and turn them off accordingly. Google has announced the model will be rolled out to both schools and businesses, for $28 or $20 per user, per month for three years, respectively, with support.<\/p>\n

So far so good. Cheap, simple, easy to maintain web clients, taking advantage of a rich cloud services ecosystem.<\/p>\n

I was thinking about this model when it suddenly struck me – Google is effectively offering financing<\/em> deals. Which put in mind of recent news from IBM about tablet financing. Weirdly I can’t find the IBM press release to point to, but tablet lease pricing will be between $20-$25 (US) per month on an average of a 2-3 year lease. IBM will of course finance laptops or notebooks too, and is vendor agnostic. It has some interesting healthcare deals for tablets in the pipeline now.<\/p>\n

Of course, if you want to acquire hosted IBM apps for mail and collaboration – it will be happy to offer enterprises deals on LotusLive and Lotus Connections.<\/p>\n

Its not clear how we got here, exactly, the the end game remains the same- an enterprise can now go to Google or IBM and get a next generation client infrastructure for a little over $20 a month for three years.<\/p>\n

Its not clear the Chrome OS total cost of ownership stacks up. As Google’s own Tim Bray (on the android team) says<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Is a Chromebook, hardware and software all in and upgraded for as long as you pay $28\/month, cheap or expensive? From the point of view of an organization that\u2019s not IT-centric, seems like a real bargain. From the point of view of many mid-size IT shops, it smells like death and will thus be hotly resisted.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But I think the real kicker is perhaps a question of upfront costs, particularly as we migrate from one model to another. As Stephen notes in his post:<\/p>\n

Of the companies that court developers, it\u2019s difficult to conceive of one that\u2019s more generous with hardware than Google.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Never mind developers- when you have as much cash as Google of course you’re going to consider financing your customers<\/em>. This is another perspective on virtualisation… never mind the software, lets virtualise the upfront costs of hardware… But the $28 will need to come way down. Price competitive with IBM Finance and choice<\/em> won’t cut it…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So a lot of smart people have already written up the news from Google I\/O this week – notably our very own Stephen O’Grady in a piece entitled Google I\/O: The Android Story. So I decided to look at something different. To try and provide some industry context, if you like. In case you missed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[62,97,98,168,419,420],"class_list":["post-3335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google","tag-android","tag-chrome","tag-chromeos","tag-goog","tag-ibm","tag-igf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9wfjh-RN","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/jgovernor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}