 So we're here with Cloud Ready here at the Education Conference Bet in London. We are. So who are you? I'm Boris Smith. I'm the Product Director for Neverware, which is the company that makes Cloud Ready. And we saw Chromebook sweep the nation in USK 12 and wanted to bring the ability to install the same operating system on PCs and Macs up to 10 years old. So you're bringing this? We are conquering Europe. That's right. This is our next conference from NYC to London. So you're never aware, it sounds like you never want to do software? The goal is to imply that you can use the same kind of software for longer and longer to keep your hardware working for longer. So that's part of what Cloud Ready is for. We want you to be able to get an operating system that makes good on the hardware you already have so you don't have to go buy a new hardware just to get a new operating system for a new way of managing. So that's for you'll never buy a new laptop? Sure, yeah. It stands for a lot of different things over time. Because actually what's amazing is you can buy the first generation MacBook Air, right? That can even be operated to the new versions of the OS X. I won't update that version. Yeah, it should install Cloud Ready. Almost any laptop or desktop from up to nine years ago will run Cloud Ready, especially Intel based stuff like the MacBook Air. 2008. Yeah, all the way through 2008 and desktops even a couple of years earlier. And what you'll find is that Chromebooks and Chrome OS are designed to run on such underpowered lightweight hardware that in the end even very old laptops and desktops run very quickly because they have these fast Intel and AMD processors. How old is this one? This is a Dell Inspiron. This is only about three years old. It's one that we used to use in-house. Yeah, it is brand new. But usually Intel suggests people buy a new one already. At three years, they slow it down with meltdown and with other stuff, right? They ship a couple of bugs and they start to tell you that you need a new version and they start to ask you whether or not you want to take the time to install Windows updates which can also slow down a machine or cause issues that you don't anticipate. Cloud Ready and Chrome OS update every six weeks with security and feature fixes and we have new hardware compatibility to Cloud Ready at the same rate so that things are always moving forward and you don't have to think about it. So it was like everybody knew it. For example, Apple was slowing down the iPhone but it was like proven recently and Apple was like shamed in public. Does Intel do the same like slow down because they want to protect their old batteries or something? You know, I have no idea. My guess would be that it's so hard to update the firmware or the operating system on Windows machines until recently that they wouldn't have the options. Most people install Windows XP or 7 and just leave it there for as long as they can without touching it. Part of what this operating system and other things like Chrome OS are about is making sure that updates become automatic and always on. So you get the full Chrome OS access. Like it's the open source version. It's the full Chrome OS, right? I mean, it has all the latest stuff that Google does in their Chrome OS. It's in Chrome OS also. We run about six weeks behind Google in order to maintain stability and keep our changes stable and persistent. Otherwise, it's the entire Chrome OS open source project base. It's important to note that that doesn't include the Android app capabilities which are not open source yet but do exist on some Chromebooks. I don't know. What are they waiting for? I'm not sure, but they're not developing in the open. Otherwise, the Chrome OS project and the Chromium Browser are in the open and that's the experience that you get on these devices. Flash is okay? Flash is okay. We offer you a way to install it, but you don't have to if you're uncomfortable with that plugin being there. So that's a little different than Chromebooks, but it works the same way. How about all the video codecs? Video codecs are provided as a plugin in the same way that Flash is as is the Widevine DRM module. So if you want to watch Netflix, you can set that up and do it. So totally Netflix, Amazon, everything? Everything. And so somehow you captured the area of being the coolest and the best Chromium stuff, right? Sure. Maybe. There's not too many different options. There are a couple of people who were just as a solo side project providing Chromium and about three years ago, three and a half when we started developing this, we saw the need for something that would integrate with Google Management because the security and management of this platform is really powerful for schools. That's why we're at VET. And that's really where we've made our stand as being something that allows you to manage these just like Chromebooks. At one point, a few years ago, I forgot the name, something Hexer or something. Yeah, Hexer. For USBs, just a bundle to install the Chromium from that. So you just make it better and smoother than any? Yeah. Google doesn't do that? No. Google does not. Their team doesn't have the stated intent of providing compatibility with generally non-Chroma hardware. It is true that they have some Chromium boards that will work on x86 and AMD machines, but in the end, you have to build it yourself and you have to worry about the updates on your own or you can do something like Neverware, Cloud Ready, which is available both for schools licensed and managed or can be used in a home edition completely free for as many machines as long as you want. So a home edition means you don't get to have that thing that actually Google charges for the thing where you can manage many Chromebooks. Exactly. Google's device management, which is something that they charge per device for and works the same on Cloud Ready's education edition, is not available on the home edition. But if you're just using one or two machines or it's for your personal use, the home edition is a great option. So basically you're setting access to that management thing, the same one as in the Chrome OS? Yep. So it's basically the Google tools? Yep. They show up right side by side. Are you setting up the same price as in the Chromebook? Google sells the licenses. We actually help customers get access to them, but that's not our product. We just sell Cloud Ready and we let resellers and people sell those. So they have your own license? Yeah. Is your license in the Google? Cloud Ready is licensed and then you also need like on a Chromebook a managed license. How much is your license? Our license comes in a couple different options. It's all in US dollars right now, but you can purchase it for $15 per device per year or $59 on a one-time fee per device. We also have a district-wide site license option for $1 per student. If you'd like to convert a lot of machines, that tends to be our most cost-effective option. So we're right here at the Google booth. So you're speaking with them a lot, but I'm just thinking, what's it called, the Google console thing? The Google Admin console. Google Admin, the Chrome OS Admin thing. They should partner with you that people just pay that price and you get half of the money or whatever, you know, and the Google doesn't need that money. You know, I've tried to talk to them about those things. They're all very interested, but it's a big company and they move a little slower than us little guys. It's just bits on the server. It's already, they can just, you know. That sounds true, but what we like to point out is the cost of managing other devices and other platforms tends to even far exceed what Google is asking and whenever it's asking. So the best place to start is to start going more cost-effective and over time, we've partnered with Google. They're now our largest investor. We hope to make advancements in the partnership to make it easier for people to choose this platform. So people start to go on everywhere website and there's a thing where people can click and check what models are supported, but actually you support much more than those models right there. So at which point do you list it? So any machine that we have in-house that our QA team looks at sends compatibility from update to update every six weeks. We list on our official support of this, but hundreds of other models work and we add more all the time. So it's important to just give it a try. With the home edition, you can even boot off a USB stick so that you never have to worry about erasing data until you're sure we read you. Can you have a system in your office where you can automatically update the model and stuff? We automatically update things on our QA team, but the Chrome OS update is so easy that that's what we use. So we let the updates happen automatically testing to make it simpler, but in the end good old fashioned human hands make the difference and that's what we spend a lot of time doing. So does it run great on a 2GB RAM or even what? 2GB RAM is what we recommend. One will usually install and work, but it isn't what we consider to be the best experience. Anything with 2GB of RAM and that's Intel or AMD processors in the last nine years should run just fine and will usually install perfectly. So I would recommend people go on to for example right here people should go on like a on a gum tree website in the UK it's like an eBay and you can order a 2008 laptop for less than a hundred dollars and this would run great right? The R61 on there for a hundred dollars or sixty pounds is an officially certified model of the two hundred and fifty different models you can get with the guarantee that the cloud rating will work and there are tons of others on there. The performance is not too bad compared to like a modern cheap Chrome. Yup, because they put Pentium and Celeron processors and all of those even these Core Duo processors from eight, nine years back tend to be pretty fast and have a lot of horsepower. The fans are loud and the batteries are a little shorter I just want an Amazon and I bought a six cell battery for like ten pounds so you can just buy a totally new battery for fifteen dollars and then you have a seven hour battery life and you also have a big MacBook the first generation MacBook for a hundred dollars or a hundred and fifty it's like actually it's faster than whatever Mac OS is the experience it's actually great right? We have a couple on the certified list we use a couple in-house ourselves so if you can find a used or cheap MacBook if you know someone who's moving on from there don't let these machines go to waste they work great, they just need a better operating system I saw that you were not able to dual boot Windows because it's legacy that's correct so legacy BIOS machines won't dual boot you have to have a UEFI BIOS capable machine in order to dual boot we can mark those on our certified list and try one that's not on everything made in say the last five six years will have UEFI and a few machines older than that will have kind of experimental or early versions of UEFI because Ubuntu and Fedora and stuff they like people dual boot even legacy BIOS why don't you support that? so Chromium OS is built to make updates available and rapid as possible and that means it has 12 partitions by default so in order to have a 12 partitions system and then add Windows to it you have to be able to support large numbers of partitions and that rules out a lot of legacy BIOS systems in the implementations we are looking at so to provide a consistent dual boot experience we chose UEFI we're having automatic updates meltdown security yes we've started rolling out as many of the meltdown and spectra fixes that we've seen as stable we continue to look for both Linux kernel and Google side OS and browser fixes that will help mitigate that risk and because of the architecture of the OS we expect to be able to ship them faster than anybody else we haven't yet so I don't know what kind of difference you'd see but it should be less because the crossover between user space and the kernel space is a little bit smaller that's part of why the OS is already more secure but we haven't done the benchmarking yet we're mostly focused on getting the security changes out first and foremost I'm thinking the Windows is going to be 10% performance loss but you might be just 2% or 3% yeah I'm hoping so and I think when we have the chance we'll probably do some benchmarking and post it on our blog as a follow up so how many cloud ready users do you have in the world? no it's not a secret we support about 110,000 student seats in the US and around the world mostly in the US right now we also have in terms of our free version over a half million unique machines that have powered on cloud ready at some point in the last two and a half years so yeah we're always excited to see more people using it even if you're just going to check it out for a day we're taking a look at it so you know it's out there you said you are watching role? I'm the director of product here so I'm not the founder but I've been working with the cloud ready team kind of connecting engineering to what people want and helping make sure everything goes we don't have a CTO but I work closely with our director of engineering and we're always out there talking to people and working with our team I would say that the hardest thing that we run into is the fact that there are a lot of different variations of hardware out there and there's a big distance between folks who want to use the oldest possible hardware and some folks who want to use the newest possible hardware enthusiasts tend to be either very interested in the ancient kit or very interested in the newest thing they can find and those tend to be different but we've worked hard to do a little bit of both and we're continuing to try we're based in New York City where there's not a lot of space so we probably will not get into the business of boxes moving out of our space but we would love to work with a reseller just buy all the old MacBooks and even just buy them all and send them out to the company and make a box of each Chromebooks are pretty expensive so you'd have to convince everyone that a brand new Chromebook is not what they need I think we maybe need to wrap up