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In some sense this demonstrates a point about key markets. Chromebooks have market share that's not important, beyond sales volume for a variety of reasons. It'
by netcan 5y ago
In some sense this demonstrates a point about key markets. Chromebooks have market share that's not important, beyond sales volume for a variety of reasons. It's a secondary machine, a non-work machine, a machine for the unsavy, etc. People who don't need much from the laptop. It has few apps, and the ecosystem isn't that important. Companies don't run on it. Companies don't even really run on Google docs very often. These products remain non essentials with little to no lock-in.
You could argue that kindle is a computer too, but it doesn't really matter either way.
- alexb_ 5y agoI think you are forgetting a gigantic market that is worth billions upon billions of government funded cheese: schools. Chromebooks have the education market down. Damn near every single school that wants to upgrade its tech is getting a chromebook. Schools need google docs. Schools need a low cost machine so that they can buy a thousand of them. Schools need something incredibly locked down. Schools are a source of income that is not only great but also gets people used to using google products as that is all they have learned (you ever wonder why Adobe and Microsoft work so closely with education?). To say that chromebooks have an "unimportant" market share is just flat out wrong.
- KptMarchewa 5y agoI think you forget that only US schools buy their students computers.
- dagw 5y agoThat isn't true. I know of many schools in Norway and Sweden that buy iPads or Chromebooks for their students. Although it is admittedly not universal
- KptMarchewa 5y agoProbably Switzerland does that too. That's still very small fraction of the whole world.
- Breza 5y agoThis is an important point. The experience that people have as children defines their understanding of technology to some extent. Getting children used to your hardware and software is a major investment in the future. And lucrative school contracts are an investment in now.
- tharne 5y ago> Getting children used to your hardware and software is a major investment in the future. I disagree. Apple tried this in the 1980's in the U.S. It was a disaster, no one bought Apple computers for home use and the company almost went under. Apple didn't come back to life until they came out with the iPod. It didn't hurt that they later got a booster when MS released the sh*tshow know as windows 8.
- HWR_14 5y agoI'm pretty sure the school market is not terribly lucrative. I thought that Chromebooks were dumped on schools to try to build momentum and familiarity in children. So when they grew up they would be Google Docs / Chromebook users.
- datavirtue 5y agoClosed source in education is unethical. Full stop. We can argue about the rest of the world.
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoI don't know where you get this idea that Chromebooks are secondary machines. For everybody that I know who owns one, it's their primary machine. Remember that you can run Docker natively on a Chromebook and you need a VM on both windows and Mac
- nathanaldensr 5y agoNit: Docker runs just fine in WSL on Windows.
- __potts__ 5y agoWSL runs on a lightweight VM: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-versions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-version...
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoWSL is not native. You don't get native perfomance for especially disk reads
- 8note 5y agoThey're marketed as such, I imagine to avoid antitrust of "general purpose computers" like the iPhone, despite both being generic computers