> "It's possible that Chromebooks are just a shitty idea." I'm inclined to take that explanation. This is a classic case of "how can we make the customer do wh

> "It's possible that Chromebooks are just a shitty idea." I'm inclined to take that explanation. This is a classic case of "how can we make the customer do what we want" instead of "how do we make our customer's life better". Yeah, Google's profit is all in ads, so it wants you to spend as much time on the web and as little time on native apps as possible. Guess what Google: your customers don't care about your bottom line. They want the best device, for the lowest price. So here are our two contenders: - A "broken laptop" that can't do everything the user wants it to do. It can only go on the web. It uses a strange OS that nobody is used to but yet does not seem to offer any benefits. - A full-featured laptop/netbook that gets the same battery life (if not better), runs a common OS everyone is already familiar with, runs all of their apps (and the ones their friends are running too), and does the web thing just as well. And checking out Chromebooks and Dell/HP netbooks... They're even the same price. So here's Google, offering substantially less value for the customer's dollar, and people are standing around shocked that it's not working. The core question here is: is this product better than what it seeks to replace. And the answer, IMO, is an emphatic no. It's missing many features people have come to expect from such devices, and for that it's not even cheaper. Google needs to turn this upside down and work from the customers. At the end of the day, as long as you don't have a monopoly, the users do what they want, you cannot push a product that has a shitty value proposition and expect people to latch on. That's insanity.