New life for Chromebooks and Microsoft?

Microsoft has been making some major pivots over the past few years to expand their reach and “playing well with others” when it comes to cloud based services. One of the biggest, and honestly most surprising, changes has been altering the rendering engine for Edge to the Chromium engine. There’s lots of speculation as to what this will mean for Edge in the future but I think it will have a greater impact on Chromebooks when it comes to working with Office 365.

With the primary browser platforms all running under one common engine, the developers on the Office 365 will have a much easier time writing applications that work across multiple machines, be it Edge on Windows 10 or Chrome on a Chromebook. As a Microsoft user who counts on his Chromebook I couldn’t be happier. While G Suite (Google’s office platform) has some strengths, it still doesn’t compare one-to-one with Microsoft’s offering.

You’ll hear the argument made that Microsoft’s pursuit of “Windows Lite” or “Lite” or whatever they’re calling it will take a chunk out of the Chromebook market but honestly that’s not the play for the long game. Microsoft is about the cloud now and hardware is just a way to get there. It doesn’t matter the tool, what matters is what you do with it. Personally I like the thin client approach of a Chromebook coupled with the power of Office 365 and Azure. You’d be hard pressed to find a combination that offers the same level of flexibility, power, and accessibility.

I’d wager we will see more and more changes in Office 365 over the coming months that work equally as well on Chromebooks as they do Windows 10 machines. It’s to Microsoft’s benefit to do this because if you can run Office 365 equally well on both hardware platforms, why wouldn’t you get a subscription?