The Chromebook idea keeps gaining momentum, slowly, but surely. So far there have been only about 500,000 sales of Chromebooks, which in the grand scheme of things is not a lot, and it’s less than 1% of the PC market, but in the same time it hasn’t been supported by a lot of manufacturers yet either, but mainly only by Samsung and Acer, and even they haven’t done a whole lot of promote it.
But despite the lack of promotion for it, the Chromebooks have been surprisingly successful. The Samsung ARM-based Chromebook has been #1 on Amazon in the “Laptops and Computers” category ever since it launched about half a year ago, for example. Not bad.
With the Chromebook Pixel, Google also showed us that they can build high quality machines that can compete with the best of them, and even win. Many have reported the Chromebook Pixel’s “four million pixel” display is the best on the market right now. I doubt this is the strategy that will sell the most Chromebooks, but it could play a role in getting Chromebooks popular.
However, don’t expect a huge uptick in Chromebook sales for the next 1-2 years. Analysts believe that in the short term, Chromebooks are no threat to the Windows monopoly in PC’s:
Since Google will still need some time to integrate its software, while Chromebook only has a less than 1% share in the notebook market, the sources believe the strategy may not have a significant effect on the IT industry in the short term.
This is not unexpected, of course, considering ChromeOS is still a relatively brand new OS, and a lot of people, even in enterprise, may not feel ready for the “100% web” vision, so things shouldn’t change that much within the next 2 years or so. But once Sundar Pichai manages to integrate Chrome OS with Android, we could see a much more useful OS that works well not just on phones and tablets (where Android excels), but also on PC’s (where ChromeOS is targeted today).
Once this idea gets fully baked, which should take at least another year or two, then not only the hardware for Android/Chromebooks would be top notch, but the software would be a lot more competitive with other operating systems, too, which could bring us that much closer to a world where we can actually choose Android/Chrome OS over Windows, for all our device needs.
[Via Digitimes]