and ran smack into a brick wall when Mary Ellen from accounting was on vacation one month and her five-minute trick in Excel wasn't performed because she was out of the office. I even saw a company do this as part of their monthly payroll process. Sometimes, spreadsheets are relied upon too much-I can't tell you the number of times I have seen organizations use a spreadsheet as part of a business process because it was easier to export data, transform the data in a spreadsheet, and spit the new information out to another step in the process. Yes, you can do analysis in databases, but to do so on a daily level can require very complex queries that are not as easy to generate as linking data to a spreadsheet and analyzing the numbers there. Of all of the productivity suite applications out there-word processors, spreadsheets, presentation generators, and (shudder) desktop database apps-spreadsheets are the one class of where numbers actually get crunched. Right now, I don't think the application set for the Chromebook will be sufficiently robust to be a Windows killer in the business environment. But one of this five reasons listed doesn't quite resonate with me: "Lot of Applications." To me, that's the one piece of the Chromebook offering that, if not brilliantly successful, will bring the whole thing crashing down. Vaughan-Nichols like the device, too, and makes a darn good case for it. (Keep in mind, this is coming from a Dad about to send his oldest off to college this Fall, so my penny-pinching neurons are in hyperdrive right now.) $240/year doesn't sound like a lot, but add that to an average of $720/year cell phone bill, plus whatever Internet connectivity costs that might exist if the student doesn't live on-campus and has free connectivity from the school, and it gets up there. The student pricing at $20/month may be a little steep without some parental assistance, though. (Of course, you will need to add $5/month for Google Apps for Business to the monthly bill, too.) Larry Dignan over at ZDNet, likes the business subscription pricing of $28/month. There are good arguments, mind you, in favor of the Chromebook. After reading their concerns and praises, and pondering the implications over the weekend, I have to reluctantly say, I don't think this thing is going to work out so well. Since the announcement of Chromebooks last Wednesday, many of my colleagues have been pondering the potential success of the new cloud-only netbook device when it hits the shelves on June 15.
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