Netbooks pretty much ‘flopped’ (compared to expectations) though; amongst other things because limited battery life, keyboard too small and not being able to do everything one can do on a laptop.

Now, because Intel chromebooks ship first, the big ‘masses’ of consumers will perceive chromebooks as ‘another netbook with short battery life’. Keyboard issue has not been solved; maybe a picoprojector can solve this. But the ‘foldable’ keyboards which you reported about seemed clumsy as well.

And if it resembles laptops – most people will still expect Windows. Unless it’s clear it’s a limited ‘smartphone-like’ OS, a bit like iOS on the iPad. Only if Google does lots of marketing to ‘educate’ people about a ChromeBook not being a laptop, but a kind of “Android-smartphone” in a more familiar laptop casing, will they succeed.

Probably you can provide us with the number of netbooks sold (think you posted them a few days ago), I’m pretty sure they don’t compare to the billions of mobile phones having been sold.

Which is only meant to say you shouldn’t project Android-sales to netbooks; both are entirely different products in the minds of users.

1. Making web/cloud based products that are free, but require the barter of your privacy so they can profit from it. And
2. Convincing people to spend a lot of money for the privilege to be a “Beta Tester” for them.

I could wrong, but Chromebook sounds like yet another half-baked product where the hype doesn’t fit the reality.

Now, the iPad 2 : Okay, that product could do in the PC industry. 

Governments regulating global taxes for contents is not new. Radio has a flat fee where radio stations have to pay per second based on the size of their audience, then the radio stations are allowed to play whatever song they want without asking the song creators for permission. Who’s complaining about how radios work?

Libraries don’t pay anything, the state pays writers based on how many times their books are borrowed at the library.

Public TV channels in Europe can mostly use whatever music they want in their TV shows (with some rules perhaps not including the newest music), they just have to pay a flat fee per second for the amount of music they use.

Lots of European countries have taxes on hard drives, mp3 players, where those pay a flat fee per amount of storage, that money goes to music artists based on how popular they are on radio and measured elsewhere.

I think the Government could mandate a global tax or a tax on your Internet Connection Speed, and demand even better stats are reported from Google and others based on popularity and ratings from all the users who would stream all that content on the web.

And at the same time, if there comes such a new $10/month or so unlimited content tax, then all the content creators on the web who currently work for free, who put their videos on YouTube for free, who blog for free, they would all suddenly also get paid through this solution (based on their popularity and ratings) so this will be great for our open source and free culture in general, much better.