The airplay vs BT one is one of the more stupid statements. Quality products meant for the home and battery-powered portable products are not the same market niche. Comparing them is ridiculous.

I have a netbook and use it all the time. It is light and does what I need it to do including vpning into work and thumping servers when they need it.

I have a nook color that dual boots honeycomb and ice cream sandwich. You get a $20 microsd, dump a rom on it, insert it, wave hands, and voila.

moothemagiccow: Batteries in speakers? This is a bad idea.

This is what i say about all wireless computer stuff.

Unless you keep your keyboard and mouse on the other side of the house from your monitor and tower, it only has drawbacks and no benefits.

MusicMakeMyHeadPound: Bleh. By hard drive I meant SSD drive. There are no moving parts in my netbook.

Not even the keyboard or the monitor hinge? Or the quartz crystal driving the whole show? Or the SD card ejector? Or the wi-fi disable slider?
/Are you from the future?

J. Frank Parnell: This is what i say about all wireless computer stuff.

Solar keyboard that I use on my Media Center PC. Works like a champ. Even charges under lamp laight. I use the ten key for mouse. It'd suck on a real desktop, but it's just fine for DVDs and Netflix.

narkor: This is an awesome way to redefine failure.

Meh, if you can spend .001% of your revenue to send one of your five top competitors into a tizzy trying to compete with a product, then you do it.

You're right that they're throwing a whole bunch at the wall to see if it sticks. That's a lot of how you innovate - you create a product for which you believe there's a market, then you figure out how to monetize it. Or you can acquire companies at a premium after they've demonstrated the product and the market. Or you can evolve existing products in new markets.

The "see if it sticks" approach is required for Google's ambitions. You can't be afraid to fail - in fact it's a normal and necessary part of the process when incubating new tech.

Samwise Gamgee: How about the other side of the room?

Yeah, if you've got a big screen that makes sense.

I just see so many people with wireless everything, sitting not even a foot away from their tower. Doesn't make any practical sense.

TsukasaK: Almost every app you can think of has an online equivalent with very high degrees of feature parity.

Every time I open a spreadsheet in Google Docs, it requires significant work just to be able to read it. It really reminds me of the Docs to Go app I have on my phone. I simply cannot imagine having to do actual work in that environment.

airplay is amazing -- it just works.

plug stuff in -- my itunes can play it anywhere.

my ipad can play music from my desktop in my room to my speakers in my kitchen while I'm sitting in my living room.

that is worth it.

TsukasaK: Babwa Wawa: Every time I open a spreadsheet in Google Docs, it requires significant work just to be able to read it.

Probably because whoever sent you the spreadsheet is using that godawful Microsoft 2010 XML spreadsheet format. It works perfectly on the older revs.

/realize I sounded like Linux_Yes up there
//don't care, shiat format is shiat.

shiat format or not, they need to do a better job rendering it. The reality is that most people use Excel. The current situation is an absolute non-starter for organizations that need to share data with organizations that don't mandate the use of google docs.

MusicMakeMyHeadPound: GAT_00: I got a netbook a few years back for $250. Why the hell does Google's cost $300 after discounts?

Also, there is one decent cheap tablet in the Nook Tablet. By basically every review, it's better than Kindle's, and is a decent price/capability middle ground than you'd expect. Plus it's really easy to hack so you're not running the limited OS it comes with.

Ouch!

My netbook was $90 - came with Lenovo's rebranded SuSe, an SD card reader, 2GB hard drive and a pair of USB ports. This was before Microsoft shat all over the market, obviously.

Useful little thing - I pack it in my camera bag on trips.

I don't understand the people who shelled out $250 - $300. Why didn't you just get a full blown laptop for that price?

You couldn't find a laptop that inexpensive at the time, and they were all substantially larger in size. I got my EEE 701 in 2007. Still works just fine, runs as fast now as it did brand new.

My Google spreadsheets look great, though they take time to render the charts.

Then again, they were created as Google docs from the start, not translated from Excel.

/I might pay extra for a tablet that can't play Angry Birds.

TsukasaK: Thank Microsoft for not having an open spec. You basically have to reverse engineer the whole damned thing.

Oh I'm entirely sure that it's all Microsoft's fault (I'm completely serious about that, despite what I have to say next). If I'm a decision maker on what office suite to standardize on, I'd still reject it based on the incompatibility. Even if I could justify the productivity hit, it's a signal to me that Google is not investing, and therefore is not terribly interested in this product line. Yes, it's work to make xlsx files render right in gdocs, but it's been out for five years now, and it's not entirely undocumented.

I'm a fan of google's but they cut product lines they're not interested in, and they will leave customers with their pants down. This is an indication of under investment and a therefore lack of executive sponsorship. If they want me to sign up to gmail as a paying customer, sure, I'd listen to what they have to say. I know that gmail is a core part of their strategy, and so it's not going the way of google wave. Their behavior around gdocs indicates that it's a half-measure designed to make Microsoft go fetch.

TsukasaK: Company policy where I work to save XLS sheets in the '97 format. And this is a huge organization.

I work in a company of about 50,000 people. There is no way that anyone could effectively enforce such a policy across the field - it's just one of those ridiculous things that you can imagine happening at shiatty companies like HP or Walmart. Dictating file formats for an entire large company is beyond the pale in terms of micromanagement - if it's done at all, it should be at the level of much smaller business units, and only when there's a damned good reason for it (saving the company $150/year/user isn't one of them).

But for the sake of argument let's say that you could do it, and that it was a good idea. You can't enforce that outside the bounds of your company. A Google Docs migration would result in a massive productivity hit for anyone who has to deal with partners and customers, probably one that would eat up whatever I'm saving within a month.

TsukasaK: A fair point, but I have never received an Excel document that couldn't just as easily have been a CSV (meaning even Google's brain-dead implementation of Microsoft's brain-dead format works great).

I spend probably 10 hours a week working in spreadsheets that could never work as CSVs. all formulas, vlookups, macros, drop downs - all that shiat gone? It's unfathomable. If you've never worked in a spreadsheet that couldn't be saved as a CSV without losing functionality, you've never worked in a spreadsheet.

TsukasaK: Push out a group policy registry tweak to make the default Save As... menu option to be the recommended one. Probably no need to even issue an official announcement about it.

Your user population is comprised of either idiots, or people smart enough to get around administrative antics like that without you knowing about it. I hope never to work in a place where most people don't know how to get around GPOs that inconvenience them.

fluffy2097: You'd run into a few formatting issues with existing documents being reverted to an older format, but it's minor.

Minor to you is massively disruptive to others.

Overuse of GPOs is a major reason why nearly all my colleagues ran rogue workstations when I joined the org five years ago. Security was a mess, and there was absolutely no way they could have survived a vendor software audit. They finally wised up, cleaned the corporate image to something reasonably usable, eliminated GPOs that had nothing to do with security and stability, and now about half of us are back on corporate images.

It's hubris to presume that you know exactly what everyone else in your company needs from a general computing perspective. To act on that knowledge and prescribe restrictions based on it is absolute craziness.

/former sysadmin