We teamed up with Spiceworks recently to write a report checking in on Google Chromebooks, mostly around their market-share and usage. It was a nice experiment to see how our two pool of data and analysis could be meshed together to investigate how IT is operating in the wild.
Spiceworks looked at 71,159 companies worldwide to see what OSes were on their desktops, which gave us some good input on Chromebook usage. Our own ChangeWave surveys have been tracking consumer and corporate buying intentions around Chromebooks (and other end-user device, “PC”, OS selection as well) for sometime, giving us a good mix of data to figure out how Chromebooks are doing.
Here’s the 451 Take:
When we look at the available data and the value proposition for Chromebooks, it doesn’t seem half bad, and, perhaps, not as far-fetched as a browser-only PC seemed when Google announced Chromebooks in 2011. As on-premises applications continue their slow migration to the cloud, and users continue to glom onto non-Windows platforms like iOS and Android, the end-user device landscape is increasingly fragmenting. Although Chromebooks’ market share is likely less than 5% (if not 3%), the broad, big-name-filled Chromebook ecosystem is nothing to sneeze at, and end users are more open than ever to new PC paradigms. Additionally, there’s an intriguing intersection of interest between Chromebooks and desktop as a service when it comes to supporting corporate Windows applications on new PC platforms. We’ll continue watching Chromebooks carefully, as well as the other end-user device platforms that are finding purchase in the fragmented PC era we’re hurtling toward.
Unlike most reports I post here, this one is free for non-clients, so you can read the full report if you’re one of the unlucky ones who’s not a regular 451 readers.
Google Chromebooks at work in the fragmented PC era (451 Report)