Google's tepid Chromebook reviews meaningless: It's all about business

Let’s face it. Google Chromebook buyers—whether via Acer or Samsung’s netbook—are going to be a self-selecting bunch. 

Consider:

• CNET’s reviewsays the Samsung hardware, battery life and start-up times are great. However, CNET won’t recommend the Chromebook “until and unless Google improves the Chrome OS.” The biggest beef is opening ZIP files, photo editing in the cloud and the need for a constant Internet connection. But here’s the problem: The Chromebook isn’t for folks that want offline capability sometimes. In other words, the Chromebook is for the consumer that’s all cloud all the time.
• Engadget acknowledges that the Chrome OS has real limitations at this time. The upshot: Engadget is betting that Google will fix the OS over time.
• And then there’s Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. He’s an open source guy that’ll live in the cloud and not blink. Vaughan-Nichols liked the battery, life, hardware, keyboard and knocks naysayers complaining about being offline. After all, you can save music, documents and video to the local solid state drive. It’s not ideal, but the Chromebook isn’t a doorstop without a net connection. Bottom line for Vaughn-Nichols is that the Chromebook is a nice complement to his laptop.

Everyone agrees that the Chromebook needs to be cheaper.

In the end, consumers will vote with their dollars and I have a tough time seeing folks drop $500 on a browser-based netbook when there are shiny tablets everywhere. Of course, Google fans will be all over the Chromebook, but that’s a crowd of an undetermined size.

The real kicker here is that it really doesn’t matter what consumers think. The Chromebook could flop at retail and the only companies that will care are Samsung and Acer (and maybe Best Buy). Meanwhile, it’s possible that Samsung and Acer don’t care about consumer sales. Why? The Chromebook is an enterprise play and Samsung and Acer will happily take the business sales.

As noted before, the Chromebook will be attached to Google Apps deals.IT execs will give Chromebooks a whirl via pilots and mix and match devices. The corporate Google Apps customer is a natural audience to the Chromebook. In the end, Google doesn’t have to sell the Chromebook to the masses just to the CIO looking to minimize her desktop management costs.

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Samsung Chromebook bill of materials costs $322

If you’ve wondered about the profit that Samsung makes for selling each one of their Chromebooks, you have to wonder no more. According to the folks over at iSuppli, who gave the Samsung 3G Chromebook a tear down, it costs $322 to obtain the parts to make one of these Chrome OS-powered notebooks, while it retails for only $499. That’s not a very large profit margin for Samsung, when compared to the XOOM or iPad that costs only $278 and $235 respectively that sell for more than the Chromebook. And we haven’t even included the costs involved used to pay for other factors such as workmanship and marketing of the device.

The Chromebook is made from a $86.37 motherboard, a $58 display, a $48.20 battery, and a wireless $42.85 chip. All the parts are soldered onto the board as well, which means this won’t be a notebook that you’ll be updating on your own.

Do you think that knowing how much it costs to build the Chromebook and how much Samsung makes will help convince consumers to pick up the device? I guess we’ll have to see how many units of Chromebooks are shifted in order to see how much Samsung will make.

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VMware buys Digital Fuel to make cloudonomics easier

VMware bought Israeli startup Digital Fuel Monday in an attempt to give VMware customers better insights into how their IT investments measure up. Israeli newspaper Globes said VMware paid $85 million for Digital Fuel.

The concept of “cloudonomics” is centered on the aspects that make cloud computing a more cost-effective delivery model, but might well extend to the numerous considerations that organizations must take into account when determining if cloud computing is the right choice for any given workload. The latter concern is exactly what Digital Fuel’s “IT Financial and Business Management” software aims provide customers.

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IBM unveils high performance computing cloud offerings for enterprises

Technology firm IBM, US, has announced new high performance computing (HPC) cloud offerings to help clients tackle advanced scientific and technical computing workloads like analytics, simulations for product development, climate research and life sciences.

The HPC cloud offerings are projected to allow clients to link computing resources across their organisations into a single, high performance, private cloud while providing system administrators the flexibility to set priorities based on business or technical needs.

According to a paper written by Lawrence Berkeley Lab as part of its Magellan Project, in order for cloud computing to be cost efficient for scientific use, clouds must be optimised for scientific applications. IBM is currently the only major vendor to offer a private cloud solution tuned for HPC users, according to the company.

By knitting disparate systems together into one centralised resource, clients can expect to gain easier access to more computing that can be used to support their most important business priorities. For instance, instead of segmenting computing resources by department, life sciences organisations can now pool systems from across the organisation. They can then devote the systems as needed to their most pressing, intensive projects like drug discovery or analysis of massive amounts of genomic data without the need to seek outside resources. 


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Mobile wallets and cloud computing are future for retailing industry

According to various experts, mobile wallets and cloud computing will be the next big technologies to hit the retailing industry.

Therefore it is important for retailers to invest money in these technologies to get prepared.

Mobile phones with an embedded NFC chip will allow consumers to pay with their smart phones at the point of sale. It’s a trend that many have forecast for some time, but is now finally coming to fruition.

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Quadrant 4 Systems Launches Cloud Computing, shares close in green

Quadrant 4 Systems Corp (OTCQB:QFOR) gained 38.26% at the end of today’s market close. More than 95K shares were traded compared to an average daily volume of approximately 2.5K. The stock prices surged in anticipation of some potential news to be released by the company. Exactly, at the close of the market today, the company announced the launch of a set of new initiatives for Cloud Computing, Data Management and Managed Services for the financial, health care, and retail verticals.

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Multiplayer Browser Gaming on Chromebook?

Good question. While there are massive multiplayer online games for Chrome like Dead Frontier, Dark Orbit, and EA’s Lords of Ultima, you may be wondering if you can play your favorite MMOs on a Chromebook. The resounding answer from beta testers of the CR-48 test notebook (the prototype of the Chromebooks coming out in June) is that yes, any game you currently play in your browser should be 100% compatible with Chrome OS.

Games like RuneScape, Battlestar Galactica Online, and Free Realms should play just was well in your Chromebook’s browser as on other PCs and Macs. Though we obviously haven’t tested it personally (the first retail Chromebooks won’t go on sale until June 15th), the games may even play better than they do on Windows and OS X because of Chrome OS’ optimizations and lightweight operating system — good news for people playing free online games in their browser.

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