Depends what they are coding; developers working with PaaS platforms using one of the many cloud IDEs can certainly use it.
> Writers are not gonna migrate from Word to something like this, because either they were already using Google Docs and are fine with their crappy old netbook, or they like Word and are gonna stay with it, because writing is still just plain better in MS land.
If they are using Google Docs on an existing laptop/netbook, well, eventually its going to need replaced, and if that's their main use, ChromeOS presents a lot less distraction than traditional desktop OS's for that use role.
We've recently shifted to developing directly on a development instance on EC2 and haven't looked back. The IDE we use supports editing over SSH, so we simply treat the machine as if it were on our laptop. The best part is access anywhere. Last week I set up a local-only development box and everything was going swimmingly -- until I needed to work from home. I realized just how amazing being able to work from anywhere truly was.
There needs to be a balance. If I can't use my IDE on a chromebook, that obviously won't work. But if I can have access to my tools locally that manage remote service and data -- I'm golden.
I'm curious, what IDE are you talking about? I have the Samsung ARM Chromebook, and I've been forcing myself to learn vim so I can do development on a remote system over SSH, or on a local chroot environment. For my day job, I'm a Windows developer, so I'm used to the Visual Studio tooling.
I wonder if Brackets has any aspirations for a Chrome OS port. It's already a packaged JS app, but I don't know how portable their device API layer is.
Depends what they are coding; developers working with PaaS platforms using one of the many cloud IDEs can certainly use it.
> Writers are not gonna migrate from Word to something like this, because either they were already using Google Docs and are fine with their crappy old netbook, or they like Word and are gonna stay with it, because writing is still just plain better in MS land.
If they are using Google Docs on an existing laptop/netbook, well, eventually its going to need replaced, and if that's their main use, ChromeOS presents a lot less distraction than traditional desktop OS's for that use role.