What are the chances for a success of the Google Chromebook?
There are 5 main segments today: Workstation, Laptop, Internet tablet, smart phones and mobiles phones. The Chromebook will have to compete with these, and possible create a new segment. But I think 6 segments is at least one too many, and one of them will be marginalized. Unless the Chromebook do not out-compete either the Laptop or the Internet tablet, I think it may be that the Chrombook is the one that will be marginalized. (Aside from that, I think workstations and "dumb" mobile phones are also going to be marginalized soon.)
An important question is if the Chromebook is right in time. For it to succeed, people have to accept that everything is done in the cloud. The cloud services are improving quickly, but is it quickly enough? It is a paradigm shift, and it may take time to get used to it. I think this paradigm shift will win eventually, but the success of Chromebook is more uncertain.
Why is Google investing so much into Chromebook? Google's revenue comes mainly from Internet advertisements. They prefer people to use Internet services for their daily businesses, instead of legacy applications downloaded to the PC. The perfect world would be if everyone only use a web browser. And so, a perfect world for Google would be if everyone use a Chromebook.
People are not going to change to Chromebooks just because that is what is best for Google, especially if the pricing is not competitive. I think Google will have subsidize the Chromebook to succeed. An alternative solution to a Chromebook would be to have a separate keyboard that can be attached to an Internet tablet. That looks more attractive to me, personally.
