...in "commercial markets". As far as I can tell, that does not include consumer and would make the headline extremely misleading.<p>So a bunch of companies decided to buy ChromeBooks, presumably without asking their employees.
Bought Chromebooks (and Chromecasts) for all my tech-illiterate family members in order to cut down on having to provide tech support, and it's been amazing. No issues so far, and everything just works.<p>I think that actually is just fine for most companies -- less tech support, and does everything they need (collaborative documents, email, web searches, etc).
The floodgates will open when you can use one as the human interface to your Windows system in the cloud that you've uploaded all your apps and data to and can throw out all its local manifestations once and forever.<p>There's no longer any excuse or need for OEM Windows machines. Same is true of Mac systems but their walls will take longer to tear down. Nonetheless, fall they will.<p>Some day historians will only scratch their heads about this long detour away from thin clients that we've suffered for around 40 years and the phenomenon will become a rich research area for behavioral psychologists.
The success of Chromebooks should put a question mark over some of the newcomer mobile OSs. Chromebooks illustrate that the sweet spot for Web apps is a big screen, a keyboard, and a pointing device. That's partly because the Web was not designed for finger touch.<p>If your mobile OS relies on Web apps, you might want to think about adding Android compatibility, as Jolla has done even though Sailfish also runs Qt apps.
And yet, as Gruber points out, they are just a rounding error in web browser usage. [1] If they're that successful, why don't Chromebooks appear in usage stats?<p>1. <a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/12/28/chromebooks" rel="nofollow">http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/12/28/chromebooks</a>