And for our next trick, says Google while literally wheeling out a humongous tablet ... Google's latest tablet, the Jamboard, weighs 93 pounds (42 kilograms). It could inflict grievous bodily harm if it toppled onto you. But Google made sure to have the four-wheeled stand that supports the unwieldy screen certified by safety testing firm UL. "UL was worried about it tipping over in an earthquake," said Prabhakar …
Absolutely. The downside on chalk is dust and the screech, the downside of white boards is the slightly odd look the writer gets after 45 minutes with those pends. We always intervene when we can see them surreptitiously sniffing their writing implement (almost wrote tool there :-)
Whiteboards are wonderful tools for brainstorming and collaboration ... as long as everyone is on the same site. Our problem is that we have distributed teams ranging from US to Europe. We occasionally travel to conferences but a 3 day visit to the States from Europe is around $2.5k per person. Doing that every month or even every quarter for a team of 12 soon adds up. So one of these whiteboards in the telepresence room would probably pay for itself relatively quickly.
We tried to set up a collaborative conference with a pseudo whiteboard earlier this year. I reckon the cost of trying to cobble together a touchscreen TV, WebEx, video cameras etc came to about $1000 worth of man hours easily.
because we get a copy of everything on it too.
I do have an Android phone and an Android Tablet. I don't do anything important or corporate. The phone is used as a feature phone with no data or wifi. The tablet rarely has Wifi on, I use it for a few trivial apps that don't need Internet and collaborative note taking using Jota app.
Let's see, about $1,000 for a decent 4k TV, about $1,000 for the rest of the hardware (computery-bits, touch interface, camera, etc.), and we'll go crazy here and allocate $1,000 for all the software that Google provides.
I guess the other $3,000 is to make it reassuringly expensive?
A bargain compared to the MS one though. But established Office Equip. makers have had whiteboards that you can write on (with real white board markers, fire video projector at and save results as file and print) for well over 10 years. Lots of colleges have them.
You forgot the server side of collaborative and conference software and the relevant local and remote processing. You definitely cannot do the processing needed for real time conferencing on a bog standard smart TV chipset. You are off (in terms of processing power requirements) by an order of magnitude if not more.
The correct comparison is a high end HD conference suite (which does only a fraction of what this can do) which cost north of 20K and are installed into fixed conference rooms. Definitely not something you can just wheel into a room somewhere, power up and get stuff done.
The problem is - most companies have no clue on how to leverage any of these so they end up as toys in the exec and marketing suites instead of being abused 24x7 by the engineering teams to ensure that there is no such thing as a TimeZone team split.
I suppose Google is making this because they get to watch the screen while you're using it. Google's business is personalized and interactive advertisements - nothing more. Everything Google does ties back to supporting that in some way. Even the self-driving car is physical manifestation of their search engine with paid ranking.
>Google's business is personalized and interactive advertisements - nothing more.
Er, no. If you are a business, you can pay Google for email and office suite* - no ads. So your statement is demonstrably incorrect.
Given this article made explicit mention of a $250 / year subscription fee for this device, it would appear that the grasp of your opinion is greater than the reach of your knowledge:
*Unlike Google's consumer offerings, which may show ads, we do not collect, scan or use your G Suite data for advertising purposes and do not display ads in G Suite, Education or Government core services - https://gsuite.google.com/intl/en_uk/faq/security/
"we do not collect, scan or use your G Suite data for advertising purposes and do not display ads in G Suite."
So they do scan it for other stuff then?
Never believe ANY company when it states it doesn't do X, but omits Y
Like all those wonderful fat free products, conveniently omitting they are rammed full of sugar.
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Is that the extremely rare meeting where you are allowed to say "I'm sorry, but your talking bollocks?"
Although, if you have given up on promotion, have fun in meetings...just query a buzzword, it's great fun.
"We need to put this into the cloud!"
"The Cloud?"
"yes you know, the Cloud!"
"Oh a hosted solution, bit like Hotmail?"
"No the cloud, not like Hotmail, like Salesforce"
"Oh an online service, where all the data is hosted by someone else?"
"Yes, exactly"
"Like Hotmail then?"
And so on...
"Sorry <This Google Product, API, or Initiative> is officially deprecated and will stop working after <either two weeks before you discover it or three months after you base your entire product strategy on it>. See our deprecation policy in our Terms of Service for details."
All the folks at that meeting look either totally confused or bored, must have been a real meeting.
They have totally missed the point, the output from this type of meeting isn't the crappy list and weird diagram it is the product of the discussion written up by the mug who was volunteered to take notes. Also, who can ever remember what the diagram means 5 seconds after walking out of the room?
Of course, there is truth even in the grumping. My guess is that Google, Microsoft, et al., spend a lot of time in environments that your typical developer could only dream of, if only because many work for banks, insurance companies, and other less hip and more bureaucratic sectors. Even in software firms outside of Silicon Valley (and probably inside, too), the general stickiness of management overhead, whiz-bang initiatives that went nowhere, and cynicism and/or aloofness towards the fresh blood that comes in pervades and beats down the most optimistic of folks.
This board isn't for you.
It was designed for those small firms that have some kind of charismatic founder that hasn't been ground to dust by repeated rounds of VC funding, bludgeoned to death by a rebellious board filled with CEOs and CFOs from more conservative industries, or taken to the cleaners by an ex or three, plus the piece(s) on the side that wanted something to stay quiet. It was designed for the kind of firms in Silicon Valley that MS or Google are likely to visit with their new ideas to prove they are still "hip" and "with it" in the technology space. And it might work in some agencies like marketing, advertising, etc. where you're more likely to find "quirky" leaders who drink a lot, fraternize in disturbing ways, and otherwise serve as reinforcement that they are able to help MS and Google stay relevant.
Perhaps I'm a cynic too, perhaps even though I'm in one of those "fun" firms I find it a little hard to sand off the edges that were honed through years in finance and health care. But I can see some benefits to the board in my current job, if only because I find drawing pictures and diagrams on the fly works a lot better than text-heavy descriptions, and collaborating helps in a space where a bunch of people know a little bit because we're all a new-ish hires and haven't had to venture too far beyond the specific project or team we were hired for.
What about a minor earthquake? All it takes is a shoddy stand for a piece of kit worth $x000 and you have to wait for insurance to pay out for a new one.
I can understand why so many are cynical, I've seen too many iterations of this type of tech be bought and installed in meeting rooms to much hand clapping and how it was going to change things only to never to be used or some idiot ruining (i.e.by using the wrong whiteboard pen on it).
Maybe this is the true game changer or maybe not. There'll always be another bright spark idea touted in a year or so that'll catch some execs imagination in how it'll make their meeting room slaves more productive (maybe an overseer with a stout whip idea will by re-invented).
You've never actually been in an earthquake, have you? Or been hit by a falling TV or monitor...
Actually, by far the greatest source of injuries and deaths in earthquakes are toppling furniture, falling fixtures and fittings and the like.
See. for instance, http://www.earthquakecountry.org/step1/ .
"Does it have a camera for selfies ?"
- Wouldn't that be 'groupies' (not to be confused with 'willing' rock band followers). Probably has special functionality in which a hard edged middle age woman appears on-screen and berates the meeting room as a whole if they are not trying hard enough and makes them touch their toes to her satisfaction.
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