This YouTube video is clearly done by someone who’s both never worked in schools, and never been at a level that meant you had to deal with budgets. Schools are purchasing less Chromebooks because funding for them dried up in most cases. During the pandemic a rush of federal and state funds kicked in and companies like CDW literally 10x their CB sales over night. Beyond that a ton of schools invested HEAVILY in technology and apps over the pandemic. Now that 99% of classrooms are back in person that spending has gone towards facility and in classroom tech upgrades which Chromebooks and Google apps aren’t part of. Beyond that a lot of schools during the pandemic had facilities they realized needed upgrading. Any leftover state and federal funds from those have been getting shifted. ESSR funds are a great showcase of this. Early ESSR 1 and 2 funds went towards CBs, Zoom/Meet licenses, and other cloud based solutions. ESSR 3 funds are being shifted towards facility upgrades and repairs. Beyond that schoology/Canvas/Blackboard aren’t really GSuite or even classroom competitors. Hell in most districts I’ve worked in we had two or three of them at the same time. While Google isn’t as talked about right now it’s not like it’s going away. Schools just aren’t reliant on cloud based solutions ATM. I suspect (and am already hearing it from clients) that in 2024 lots of districts will have ballot initiatives to increase taxes for local schools to fix facilities, but new textbooks, and replace existing and aging in classroom tech. Google doesn’t offer any of those.

Linux is wonderful. They should try it.

I’m not a K8 admin, but having worked with both Google and MSFT, from an admin’s perspective at least. GSuite sucks.

It’s one of those platforms that think they focused on end-user first (which to be fair, they did) and then decided mhmm wait a moment… we can also sell this suite to enterprise so lets make an admin panel and all those enterprise features. They suck, they absolutely suck. Like 900 different panels to set permissions for users, outdated FAQs that don’t make sense, etc etc.

M365 sadly is the golden standard for enterprise

I wouldn’t put a lot of stock into this video. It conflates different things that were deployed separately years apart and used differently. I’m not willing to waste more of my time, but just looking at the rest of the video titles and graphics, the source seems suspect and prone to sensationalizing for attention.

First, the mention of cost is deceptive because Google Suite for Education was free when initially released (as the fundamentals tier is today) for qualifying schools (and basically every public school qualified). Google Suite for Education wasn’t treated by every school as a competitor or replacement to the Microsoft Office Suite. It was complementary. The initial benefit wasn’t Google Docs or Sheets. It was the free student and instructor Gmail and Drive storage accounts, allowing students to save Word documents to the cloud and share them. That Google Docs was a decent alternative to Word was useful when not every student could afford a computer with Microsoft Office and any computer with a web browser could use it, so Macs and PCs were complementary, not competitive, devices.

Google Classroom is different than Google Suite for Education, so conflating them as the video did is odd. Google Classroom is the learning management software like Canvas, Blackboard, or Brightspace. But it’s not really marketed as an alternative to them with the same features because it wasn’t intended to disrupt their markets. Classroom is more appropriate for K12 and the expensive LMSs are more likely to be found in higher ed where institutions can afford the higher licensing fees.

I won’t defend Chromebooks for advanced uses, but they weren’t intended to be full replacements for laptops, so you don’t even have to. The video presents this realization of the limitations of Chromebooks on the part of the educators as a failure of Google rather than the technology needs advancing over time.

Like with anything else when it comes to technology, different needs and use cases will have different solutions. There isn’t one operating system, piece of hardware, cloud suite, or mobile device that is best for everyone’s needs.

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

https://piped.video/watch?v=3FjFg_5st8w&list=WL&index=11

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.