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by jrockway
2116 days ago
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Remember that Google has to convince OEMs to get behind their experimental free OS instead of Windows. They can't say "hey, you can have the OS for free, but now you need to keep specialty embedded engineers on staff until we say it's okay to stop maintaining drivers, which will be never" when Microsoft will probably happily negotiate down the cost of a Windows license to near $0 and pick up the driver maintenance as well. The question then is, why bother with OEMs? But it's necessary to drive adoption: nobody wants to get fired over their choice of laptop vendor, and nobody ever got fired for picking Dell / HP / Samsung. But if you pick the weird upstart OS and anything goes wrong, you'll be blamed. So the OEMs exist to attach their credentials to the transaction -- "we'll be happy to sell you whatever laptops you want; you can have our Windows laptops for $2000 each or Chromebooks for $200 each". Now you at least have some excuse if things go bad -- "HP misled me! But we saved $1800 per student" or whatever. When taking on a huge established incumbent, price and technical merits are not enough, and you can't go it alone. I don't think I'm looking at things from a "10 foot engineer's view" when I say that it will be very difficult to take on a company with 80% market share and 40 years of industry experience with your new Linux thingie. The OEMs are crucial there -- they have sales contacts, they have a brand that people trust, and people need to gradually warm up to the fact that there's a new OS in town that might save them some money. The cost there is that OEMs don't always do everything you want -- they have their own business to run and don't really need you to stay alive. |
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I think this argument held for the first year or two of Android, where they were a small player in the market.
...It simply doesn't hold today, where Google is a monopoly in mobile and one of the largest platforms in the education laptop space. OEMs live or die on Google working with them. Sales reps from major PC OEMs try to convince me to buy Chromebooks when I call them about Windows machines I need to buy.
There's no realistic claim today that Google doesn't have the clout or leverage to ensure their OS is supported properly. It's a choice.