There has been some focus on Google’s failures of last year and they included the Google Chromebook in that. I am not going to argue that they are wrong – they are very right. The Chromebooks are not capturing the public imagination and are making their way into the niche arenas of people who have the most important requirements as being complete security and cloud storage. – in other words almost no one.
The key problem is that when customers are looking for a general purpose computing solution, they are very happy with a full featured laptop and spending £200 to £400 is ok with them as long as it does have flexibility. Chromebooks do not have that flexibility and were being sold at the upper end of the price range that the vast majority of ordinary people want to spend. In other words, they are stupidly expensive and do too little.
The niche below the general purpose computing solution is being happily filled by most people by either smartphone or low cost tablet and ultimately Chromebooks will need to gain features that normal laptops have or they will disappear via a slow death in my view.