The Ultimate Cheat Code for Your IT
Hi. I'm Max Clark. This is 20 minutes max and we're gonna talk about the ultimate cheat code for your IT and your help desk and your operations. And if you're running Windows, that answer is what we call DaaS, terminal services, virtual desktop, desktop as a service, Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix, Horizon, VMware Horizon. I mean, like, Zendesk VMware horizon I mean it doesn't matter what what what the what the technique what the terminology is what the what the branding is the important thing is is Daz is awesome and Daz is the ability for you to virtualize your desktops and not purchase expensive computers and not have to go touch those expensive computers or have those expensive computers get you know have to be replaced every every 3 years or be broken or have to be updated one at a time or have to worry about data that's being downloaded to them so DAS gives you all these wonderful advantages so there's DAS and Daz is Windows Windows so if you're running Windows think Daz Windows Daz Windows Daz Windows Daz Windows Daz Windows Daz.
Speaker 1:Okay. So then the next one that we have is we talk away you know people running Mac you know macOS I use I'm a Mac user I've been a Mac user for a very very long time which is funny because I started my career as a Windows certified engineer but you know I came over to Mac with the OS 10 and and the you know creation of this like, UNIX subsystem which was just awesome for me there are some options to virtualize Mac it is not common. It's not something that you probably want to go down the path on. It's not it's not the operating system isn't set up for it. It's not equipped for it.
Speaker 1:People that that co locate and give these, you know, like Mac minis and Mac Mac Studios, you know, in a data center that you can connect to, you know, with different protocols, Like, you know, it works but whatever. Right? It's probably not what you want. Like, if you've got a Mac based fleet and you're trying to do this unless you're actually literally doing iOS development in, Xcode. Like, okay, We actually back up.
Speaker 1:If you're doing iOS development Xcode, then yes. You probably wanna do this because you get faster compile times. You can do all these sorts of things and you get virtual. If you're not doing iOS development in Xcode and you just want to virtualize a desktop or provide access to a desktop for your team, you probably don't wanna virtualize a mess, you know, or or you can't even virtualize a Mac desktop. You probably don't wanna provide remote access to Mac desktops for this.
Speaker 1:Just just use a Windows DAS based platform. Save yourself a lot of aggravation. Or or or you can do number 3. And number 3 is an interesting thing that's happening number 3 is Google Workspace specifically it's actually not Google Workspace what am I talking about it is Google Chrome OS now this is the most fascinating trojan horse played out over so many years that we've kind of witnessed unfolding and Google Chrome owns the desktop the browser it is the dominant browser on the desktop now on mobile devices if you're an iOS you're using Safari like maybe you're weird and you put Chrome on but is using the Safari rendering engines. You're still using Safari.
Speaker 1:And you've got Chromium based derivatives like Microsoft Edge, which is still a Chrome browser. But anyways okay. So we've got Chrome. Chrome owns the desktop. So almost everything application wise is moving to a browser based experience, right?
Speaker 1:So you know, there's still thick clients, you know applications like, you know, okay if you're using Google Workspace and for your email, you know, it's possible that some people are using superhuman, you know to interact with it fun thing about superhuman is it's it's an electron interface so you can actually run it inside of the browser versus you know you or you could run it as a client right as an application you know there's there's calendar apps there's all these sorts of things you know there's extensions on top of workspace like maybe running front you know which you know has has advantages and disadvantages anyways the point there is is chances are what you interpret as your operating system being Mac OS isn't really your operating system your operating system is really the browser that you're using to interact with all the applications that you're using on your desktop so as more and more applications go from being installed on the computer to being browser delivered applications those browsers are those browser delivered applications are being delivered via Chrome so what's the actual operating system right I'm recording this in a podcasting platform running inside of the Chrome browser Okay.
Speaker 1:So you've got the Chrome browser and this let's go back to our so now we've got the Chrome blab browser, which is the de facto UI application interacting with all these websites. That is the dominant browser running on every single desktop. It's running you know it's dominant browser on Windows it's a dominant browser on Mac etcetera. Google came out with this thing called Chrome OS a while back and Chrome OS is exactly what it sounds like it is the Chrome browser upscaled and you know I mean okay it's not don't don't attack me fine whatever it's technically a little you know like this Linux thing but for all intents and purposes what you need to think about is let's just think about it is like a chrome browser running on a on a desktop right it's a desktop version of the chrome browser Google has slowly been giving us functionality and things like the ability to run Android apps inside Chrome OS, which is pretty cool because it gives you a much wider base of applications. But what's neat about this thing is is now you can give your your company, your team desktop environment based on the browser that they're already using to interact with it.
Speaker 1:That includes an MDM functionalities and includes a secure boot functionality that includes a secure restore app you know functionality that is essentially managed so if you're on workspace you can license chrome OS enterprise and you can manage these things at scale and the secret like this undiscovered secret is it actually is good like This isn't like some like oh, it's not good kind of thing now what gets bad with it is a good majority of the hardware being sold for Chrome OS is garbage. Like, I don't care what it is. If you're going out and you're buying a laptop for $300, it's garbage. It's just it's garbage. Don't buy $1,000 Chrome laptops.
Speaker 1:Or sorry, a $300 Chrome laptops. Like, if you're buying laptops for people actually give them real laptops, quality is much better. They'll be much happier. It'll be much happier. Now Chrome OS doesn't do, client server terminal services in the way that like a Windows DAS environment does.
Speaker 1:So, know, you still have this operating system that's running, you know, applications being delivered. But if you're using browser based applications to interact with everything while your data is resonant and main and maintain it in your actual, you know, whatever whatever those applications are and where they actually reside. So why do we care about this? Well, we care about this in, we care we care about this for lots of reasons. But I'm gonna I'm gonna sum this up here in a in a really kind of succinct way.
Speaker 1:We care about this in terms of productivity. We care about this in terms of downtime. And when I say downtime, I'm talking about, like, if you have you have employees and you are paying them to work and to do something for you. And if they can't work and do something for you, you're paying them to sit around and do nothing. So downtime is very expensive.
Speaker 1:It's a soft cost. We talk about it for a long, long time. Nobody really actually qualifies it. It doesn't really like, you know, oh, we're paying this many people this this average salary. And so therefore, for every hour of outage, yada yada yada.
Speaker 1:But the reality is is you're paying for loss of productivity, but you're also paying for loss of capacity and loss of loss of future, you know, leverage. Right? So, like, if you're a if you're a CTO and you're trying to produce product for your business to actually generate revenue for your business, if you lose all of your developer pipeline, like people literally can't code for you. What happens if you lose 2 weeks or 3 weeks or 4 weeks of product of time? Like like what?
Speaker 1:Let's talk about in sprints. What happens if you lose 1 to 2 sprints worth of productivity? Yeah. You still have to pay all your developers and they're really expensive. But what does that mean for you in terms of like your organizational plans and what the business is trying to actually achieve?
Speaker 1:So all these things, you know, we can we can get into it. We can talk about it from like it's more efficient for your IT team to manage. It's easier to onboard and off board people. We can talk about it from, like, you know, cost, you know, shipping equipment. We can talk about all these different things.
Speaker 1:What we really need to talk about is protecting and mitigating risk and using these as a technique to lower and mitigate risk to maintain consistency and predictability, and what the business can actually do, and and how, you know, people working for the business can actually operate and maintain. That's just a little follow on. If you haven't looked at Chrome OS, it's it's awesome. The thing that's really nice about Chrome OS is, they now certified and have a little USB thumb drive installer. So you can take your aging, you know, fleet of of computers, they support almost everything.
Speaker 1:It's pretty incredible and you can you can put this drive in and you can reboot the box and you can end up with the Chrome OS on the desktop. And this PC that maybe aged out 5 or 6 years ago will now work perfectly fine for for many years to come because it's a relatively lightweight operating system. It's not doing much. It just needs to give you a browser interface and you're good to go. So I don't even remember where I started this honestly.
Speaker 1:I kind of got into a tangential rant which which happens sometimes. Sorry. Anyways, I'm Max Clark. That's, maybe about 10 minutes, but it's 20 minutes max. And I hope this helps you.
