150 million sold netbooks in 3 years is not a flop. A netbook is a laptop, just cheaper one. In which netbook is a name Intel decided to use to try to prevent too violent disruption of their core market which are expensive processors. So intel forces so-called netbooks to have small 10″ screens, low 1024×600 resolution, no HDMI, limited hard drive capacity, windows starter only, also Microsoft enforces their crappy rules on what the hardware can be to use that 30 dollar Windows starter licence. All those restrictions are removed from Chromebook, including the most popular Chromebook will be ARM powered as it’s better, much better.

 OTOH: Billions of mobile ‘almost smart’-phones have been sold before both iPhone / Android entered the market, proving demand for mobile phones.

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.

It’s hard if not impossible to compete with free and open source. Microsoft could open up a cloud centric ARM Powered version of Windows 8 under the name Azure OS and give it away for free, but do you think that is likely?

 When the state gets involved, the state of affairs is anything but free.

Sure, proven by every single Android smartphone ever released that has been much bigger successes than every of those manufacturers has ever hoped.. 

I’ve never said that Google is bad on web services and streaming video. However, products where Google has to collaborate with hardware manufacturers, that’s where Google’s reputation and record is mixed at best.

Your forgot about the parts where Google hosts more than half the worlds bandwidth on youtube, provides the fastest growing browser, has more than 10x more servers serving free web services than any other company in the world, makes the fastest growing smartphone platform that is taking market share everyday away from ipad and iphone.

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. 

How else do you get every content owner to agree to be part of some $5/month music subscription or some $10/month unlimited movies subscription? Netflix is probably nice, but it doesn’t include about 90% of the movies out there.

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.

They certainly should show lots of stuff. But with the politics involved, perhaps Google asks them to wait for those first two products to be released before more is shown. At the last 2 years of Computex I’ve filmed lots of ARM Powered laptops, but them running Android was not an optimally convincing experience, and while Ubuntu 11.4 for ARM is probably super awesome, Canonical just hasn’t got the same amount of cash to back the platform up. I think the opening of the ARM Powered Chromebook market will also open it up for huge amounts of Ubuntu versions too. As Google suggested, those can be jailbreaked and perhaps Google even supports some kind of secure warranty-backed multi-boot on the Chromebooks, where you can dedicate a few of the GB on the SSD to store/install or even come pre-installed with any alternative ARM Powered OS including the latest Ubuntu. That way, hard core users who absolutely need certain apps can always dual-boot into an alternative OS and play around with that, but that it would not mess with the Chromebook’s secure-boot and that the Chrome OS is always staying right there as the default 8-second bootup.

Only once? You still don’t agree that the iPhone 6 will run Android?