Apr 3, 2011

I just came back from a mini-hackathon session with my friends at a local McDonalds near my house, mostly everyone there was around the age group of 20-30, and almost 50% of them were using Laptops. There were easily around 50+ people there, so I casually walked around spying at what people were doing with their laptops, and true enough most of them were just using their Web Browsers.

Category: Operating Systems

Posted by: reshwindblade

Below is my observation of going to that same McDonalds for the last 6 months ( I think I made easily around 40+ trips in the last six months, or maybe even more ).

Here is some of the interesting things that I found out during those 6 months.

1) most people there who bring laptops are easily college students, maybe more than 18 years old but confirm below the age of 30

2) McDonalds is attracting a different crowd, it is no more a place for small kids, but more for a teenage-college level hang-out place

3) Wi-Fi seems to be the most important thing. When the Wi-Fi is up there are tons of people there, the momment the Wi-Fi goes down ( this McDonalds has a bit of problem with the Wi-Fi, no idea why ), everyone just quickly leaves.

4) Majority seem to leave Facebook open when they are there. ( Mostly the girls )

5) There are people who just come there buy the cheapest thing ( or some even nothing at all ) and sit there just to use the internet.

6) Most of them use Google Chrome, followed by Mozilla FireFox as their web browser. I think I can conclude that the younger generation here in Malaysia all hate Internet Explorer, seriously it is a rare sight to see anyone below the age of 30 using Internet Explorer these days.

7) Even those who bring smartphones straight away take it out and connect it to the net once they sit down. How i know this is because, I always broadcast an SSID from my Android Phone, and I see tons of people using Iphones try to connect to it.

As you can see most of the things that these people do, revolved around 1 thing, access to the internet and once they are connected to the net, they depend on a web browser to do their browsing. So I think Google may really be on to something when they are focusing their entier effocts or making the broswer as the operating system. I don't 100% agree with Google on this, as I feel the browser is important but there also should be a market for offline / native apps, maybe you can say I only agree 70-80% . But, nevertheless it is still interesting to see people are depending on browsers more ( Open source once which work on Linux even, I guess till will make it easier to convert those windows Users ).