[carrier_lost]

"remember that all the non-tech people ask the tech people they know what to use. And tech people are who set up their family's computers, deploy software widely on business networks, etc."

As a techie who has set up and/or fixed many non-techie family & friends' computers and devices, I hear ya. 110%, loud and clear. :-)

However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.

It's not hard to buy a phone or Chromebook online, log into your Google account and be ready to go.

It's not like the old days when you would have to go to your grandma's house and install a better web browser, antivirus, etc. Most things just work now, for most people.

[ocdtrekkie]

Another aspect to consider is platform support. Look at Google's newest successful platform, Google Assistant. If developers weren't excitedly writing integrations for it, wouldn't it be dead already, with Alexa in the room? Since many new tech services are built as platforms, developer interest and support also becomes a key requirement.

[toast0]

> However... I wonder how long this will remain true. More and more devices are ready to go out of the box and kids are being taught to use Google products in school.

If the Google products change too much, the curriculum will become so wrong as to be unusable. My school taught me Microsoft Word with outdated versions on outdated computers; but that was OK because the book matched the computers; when you eventually run into a more recent Word, you have to dig around to find where they moved the menus and controls, but the core concepts still work. With Google's tendency to move stuff around willy-nilly, I expect the curriculum to become unusably stale --- once you have the core concepts, you can search them out; but if you're still learning, it's really hard when step a of every step in the process is find where they moved the things you're being taught.