This may be the holiday season Google has been waiting for with their Chromebook computers. With everything moved to the cloud, the computing requirements for today’s laptops are much less than what they used to be, and that strategy is paying off.
Venturebeat reported over the weekend that Chromebooks saw a major surge this holiday season. The Google ecosystem allows users to do just about everything they need in the cloud. Obviously there is gmail, however the Google Drive suite offers desktop computing solutions like word processing, spreadsheets and even presentations. The backend of Google Drive functions like DropBox and Box.com but with more free storage up front (15gb).
Google’s Chromebook developer partners have made a cloud based solution for things like creating movies and photoshop. Now, that the top PC manufacturers have bought into the Google economy, it’s paying off.
Google had already increased their market share to 21% for notebooks and 10% for all computers and tablets, in numbers reported by NPD in November.
The Google Chromebook news isn’t good for Microsoft who depends on their Wintel PCs for a big chunk of their profit. Google is able to practically giveaway the Chromebook operating system, similar to the way that they do with Android however Microsoft must continue to sell Windows at a premium in order to maintain their profitability.
The minimal hardware requirements coupled with the free operating system mean that manufacturers can charge a lot less to get Chromebooks into user’s homes. For example, Venturebeat reports that Amazon sells Chromebooks starting at just $194 (Samsung), and $199 (Acer). The leading Wintel machine by Asus is $439.
Amazon announced on Thursday that two of the top three selling notebook computers this holiday season were Chromebooks from Samsung and Acer (noted above) the third was the Asus Transformer book. A second Acer Chromebook with 32gb of onboard storage, double that of standard Chromebooks, safely held down the number 7 spot in Amazon’s top 10 notebooks.
Microsoft was hoping for a bigger showing this year with their Windows 8 operating system however NPD’s Stephen Baker pointed out ” “Tepid Windows PC sales allowed brands with a focus on alternative form factors or operating systems, like Apple and Samsung, to capture significant share of a market traditionally dominated by Windows devices,”
In addition to their lower cost, Chromebook users love their quicker bootup time, easier sleep time and the fact that their cloud based data can be easily shared across a variety of devices.
