I got a note from a contact at Acer last week saying the company’s
Chromebooks are selling well. Curious, I asked who is buying them.
The answer seems to be customers in education and a few übergeeks.
On the consumer side, Chromebooks are filling the role vacated by netbooks.
Remember those? Low-cost, underpowered notebooks that were all the rage up until
mid-2010, when Apple introduced the iPad and — as with the great Cretaceous
meteor and the dinosaurs — wiped them out in one blow.
Chromebooks, for anyone who needs reminding, are low-cost nearly
“stateless” (i.e., no limited hard drive) notebooks that run Google’s Chrome OS
and need to be connected to the cloud to function fully.
My Acer pal said one class of Chromebook buyer is average consumers, who
appear to be looking for a low-cost system for their kids or a lightweight
secondary device to take outside the home. There also seems to be some interest
from educational institutions, specifically elementary and high schools. She
reported that at education shows in the past few months one of the top topics
was Chromebooks.
And not just because her company is selling them, she asked her daughter’s
elementary school to take a look at Chromebooks as it prepares to roll out a 1:1
computing initiative. She observed that “literally, all the apps and computer
work she does on a daily basis for school can be done on a Chromebook.”
I note that my own kids are mostly using Google Docs in school and browsers
for pretty much everything. Although my boy does some gaming that works better
with a local client, my girl could do everything in the cloud. Our school system
has standardized on Google for software and Apple for hardware. But that Apple
hardware is expensive, and a conversion to Chromebooks would be easy on top of
the existing infrastructure.
So, the education segment represents a great target. Secondary schools love
the easy remote management, the low cost, and the security of a stateless device
that doesn’t need to be maintained or upgraded.
Another class of consumer that seems to like Chromebooks is übergeeks,
highly tech savvy people who own a number of devices and want a secure and
somewhat untrackable PC-like system that doesn’t keep cookies, browsing history,
and other dirty little fingerprints that tell where the user has been.
So, how big a market is this anyway? Acer recently made a public statement
saying that 5-10% of its U.S. PC shipments are Chromebooks these days. My
friends at IDC supplied Acer’s most recent four quarters of U.S. data, and
although Acer’s unit shipments are off by double digits — almost 50% in 4Q12 —
they still managed to put 4.1 million units into the market during the last
year.
Okay, so 10% of 4.1 million is 410,000, and 5% is 205,000. Chromebooks
start at $199. The latest Acer C710-2055 is available now in U.S. retail and
from authorized resellers for $279.99. So, let’s make $240 an average price
(because we don’t have enough information to weight the model any other way than
a linear average). A little multiplication and we have annualized sales of
$49.2-98.4 million. Not a princely sum, but enough to take care of a few of
Acer’s bills.
Other firms in market with Chromebooks include Samsung, which has several
units available through BestBuy and Amazon.com.
Hewlett-Packard introduced one this past February. With only a month’s
sales, it’s still too early to tell how it’s doing, but it represents a bet on
the category by a vendor looking to diversify its endpoint categories beyond
PCs.
Lenovo seems not quite to have brought one to market yet, although there
has been a launch event. By the look of it, Lenovo is expecting modest volumes.
The company is also targeting the education segment initially.
If, using some cowboy math, we double Acer’s contribution by mixing in
Samsung’s, and double it again for everything else, including Google’s own house
purchases, then we’re talking about a $200-400 million market, not enough to
hoist a victory flag on yet. We can double it one more time to account for rapid
adoption in 2013, and it becomes $400-800 million, almost enough to pay a CEO’s
salary.
The conclusion here is that, after a rough start, Chromebooks are beginning
to find their sea legs. Like the rise of high-mobility devices (i.e.,
smartphones and tablets), the establishment of Chromebooks in the market is
further evidence that the traditional PC model — a Microsoft Windows machine
with a powerful x86 processor — is running its course.
The new Acer unit has a Celeron — one of Intel’s less powerful chips — and
the Samsung systems sport either the company’s own homebrewed Exynos processor,
an ARM variant, or a Celeron. Google, of course, supplies the operating system
and many of the cloud services and software, the rest coming from Google
partners.
http://www.windowsanyway.com/windows-7-product-key-c-628.html
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