Over the past year, Chromebooks have made a reemergence, but as a more affordable, budget laptop. Both Samsung and Acer released models prior to the holiday season, with the former of the two’s priced at $250 and the latter at $199. During the holidays, both were believed to be some of the most gifted items of the year, especially considering that Samsung had trouble keeping up with demand for its Chromebook for months. Analytical data has recently suggested that Chromebooks haven’t been selling as well as originally thought, though.
Web traffic watcher NetMarketShare suggests that Chromebooks have barely made a dent in the web traffic charts. The data suggests that the Chrome OS powered devices accounted for only .02 percent of total web traffic. Google’s goal with Chrome O.S. is to make it an always on, always connected device, but if it’s accounting for that small of a chunk of the data, then it looks like that goal may be a failure. But, you also have to take into account how huge the web is and how many devices you have accessing it at any given time. ZDNet points out that Chromebooks have combined to account for “7/10 of one percent of the usage of Windows 8 PCs worldwide.”
In terms of sales, Chrome O.S. has supposedly been doing very well, accounting for 20 percent of notebook sales under $300. “In terms of sales volume, we have been extremely impressed with how the new Chromebooks are doing at retail,” said Stephen Baker, an industry analyst with the NPD Group in Port Washington, N.Y.
Baker goes on to suggest that Chromebooks are not only eating away at low-cost PC market share, but also at tablet marketshare. “We think that Chromebooks are just as competitive with low-cost Android tablets as they are with low-cost Windows clamshell PCs. It’s selling at a pretty decent rate for a product that retailers have been reluctant to support,” he said. “We’re pretty impressed with how well it’s done.”
One analysts believes that some of the struggles Chromebooks have had can be attributed to early mistakes by Google. Rob Enderle, president and principal analyst with the Enderle Group, says that with the orignal Chromebooks, Google tried too hard to compete with netbooks, and actually did a worse job. “Google thought people would go for cheap so they reinvented the netbook and did a worse job of it than the original makers of the netbooks did,” Enderle said. He described some of the early Chromebooks as “crippled” and said that people weren’t “willing to pay 350 bucks for something that just connects to the Internet.”
Time will tell if Chromebooks prove to be successful. What do you think of recent Chromebook models? Let us know down in the comments!
Source: PC World