In some sense this demonstrates a point about key markets. Chromebooks have market share that's not important, beyond sales volume for a variety of reasons. It's a secondary machine, a non-work machine, a machine for the unsavy, etc. People who don't need much from the laptop. It has few apps, and the ecosystem isn't that important. Companies don't run on it. Companies don't even really run on Google docs very often. These products remain non essentials with little to no lock-in.

You could argue that kindle is a computer too, but it doesn't really matter either way.

I think you are forgetting a gigantic market that is worth billions upon billions of government funded cheese: schools. Chromebooks have the education market down. Damn near every single school that wants to upgrade its tech is getting a chromebook. Schools need google docs. Schools need a low cost machine so that they can buy a thousand of them. Schools need something incredibly locked down. Schools are a source of income that is not only great but also gets people used to using google products as that is all they have learned (you ever wonder why Adobe and Microsoft work so closely with education?). To say that chromebooks have an "unimportant" market share is just flat out wrong.

This is an important point. The experience that people have as children defines their understanding of technology to some extent. Getting children used to your hardware and software is a major investment in the future. And lucrative school contracts are an investment in now.

> Getting children used to your hardware and software is a major investment in the future.

I disagree. Apple tried this in the 1980's in the U.S. It was a disaster, no one bought Apple computers for home use and the company almost went under. Apple didn't come back to life until they came out with the iPod. It didn't hurt that they later got a booster when MS released the sh*tshow know as windows 8.

I'm pretty sure the school market is not terribly lucrative. I thought that Chromebooks were dumped on schools to try to build momentum and familiarity in children. So when they grew up they would be Google Docs / Chromebook users.

Closed source in education is unethical. Full stop. We can argue about the rest of the world.

I think you forget that only US schools buy their students computers.

That isn't true. I know of many schools in Norway and Sweden that buy iPads or Chromebooks for their students. Although it is admittedly not universal

Probably Switzerland does that too. That's still very small fraction of the whole world.

I don't know where you get this idea that Chromebooks are secondary machines.

For everybody that I know who owns one, it's their primary machine.

Remember that you can run Docker natively on a Chromebook and you need a VM on both windows and Mac

They're marketed as such, I imagine to avoid antitrust of "general purpose computers" like the iPhone, despite both being generic computers

Nit: Docker runs just fine in WSL on Windows.

WSL runs on a lightweight VM:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-version...

WSL is not native. You don't get native perfomance for especially disk reads

Could it be related to the offers giving away free Chromebooks, for example when purchasing Samsung products: https://www.samsung.com/ca/offer/chromebook/

As a subjective observation I've seen quite a lot of ads for those giveaways.

I suspect that has a lot to do with how “disposable” Chromebooks are. What’s the average lifespan for a Chromebook given to middle school students? I can’t imagine it’s very long.