Cloud Life: Day 1 – A Pixel Arrives

I love Chrome. I’ve use Chrome exclusively for several years now and vehemently refuse to use anything else (Sorry Firefox). As such, the idea of the Chromebook has always appealed to me. Previously, I got my hands on a Cr-48 and took the Acer AC700 for a spin. So when the Chromebook Pixel was announced, I was quite excited. Though I didn’t jump right into buying one… until today.

Today, my brand new Chromebook Pixel arrived and it is time to take it for a test drive. But first let’s answer the obvious question: If the Cr-48 and the AC700 didn’t work out for me, what is it about the Pixel that will? For one, the Pixel is an honest-to-god computer, not just a netbook on steroids. The second difference is more personal… I work in the cloud.

For those that don’t know, I currently work at Okta, which is an Enterprise Single Sign-on solution for the cloud (SaaS). We’re a very cloud first company, so much so that I (the IT Manager) have no servers. Everything we do, from email, to phones, to file storage, is in the cloud. While I buy nice MacBooks for the staff, we treat them as disposable; everything should be/is in the cloud.

So this brings me to the reason why I bought the Pixel. How fully can I (from a business perspective) live the cloud life? I already know that it isn’t possible to seamlessly switch from OS X to ChromeOS; we do use some installed applications, like GoToMeeting, which do not work on ChromeOS. Heck, just simply finding new workflows will cause some headaches. It’s worth a try though.

Thus, today starts my first day on the Pixel as my almost fulltime machine. I will use the Pixel as much as possible, reporting in when I find snags as well as when I find alternatives/solutions. However, I can’t afford to let the experiment stop me from getting my job done.

I’m looking forward to this experiment. Who knows… our next batch of sales reps might just start with Chromebooks instead of MacBooks!