[Mikeb85]

Chromebook sales are constantly rising.

With the eventual capability that they'll be able to run Android programs, as well as PNaCl and Emscripten borrowing from each other and getting better offering opportunity for tons of apps to be ported to the web, and then of course HTML5 and Js becoming the technology of choice for all sorts of apps, Chromebooks are the eventual future.

Maybe they're not the present, but they ARE the future.

And this is the main thing - for millions (hundreds of millions, maybe billions soon), a smartphone is their first entry to the internet. Probably an Android. When they see the Chrome logo in a laptop they can afford, and they already like the Android/Chrome ecosystem, they'll buy it, versus Windows which is associated with viruses, scams, piracy, etc...

Keep in mind Googles current business is still search. The net they're casting has nothing to do with the present, they're gunning for 7 billion people to associate them with computing, and to create the new future of computing.

Go to the third world. Yes some families have cheap PCs running pirated XP, but every kid has a cheap smartphone that they can connect to the internet with. They all have Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc...

[ssmoot]

> "Maybe they're not the present, but they ARE the future."

That reminds me of Sun in the early 90's.

I'm not saying you're wrong. But I don't think it's inevitable you're right either. Especially since browser UI toolkits are still stuck in the stone age compared to native counterparts.

Until that gets fixed, I actually think it's probably just wishful thinking.

[Mikeb85]

How ubiquitous is Java? Containers, VMs, etc..., ARE all the rage. Sun was correct as to what technology belongs to the future, they just couldn't position their company properly. Odds are we're all using technology that's part of Sun's legacy...

[ssmoot]

That wasn't the vision that I recall. Maybe part of some of it, but I'm talking about the Internet Terminal idea.

A lot of cool things came out of Sun. I don't think this was one. Have you tried Web IDEs? They're probably decades behind their desktop counterparts.

[Mikeb85]

> Maybe part of some of it, but I'm talking about the Internet Terminal idea.

I'm pretty young, so I was woefully ignorant of this. However the more I read about it, the more it sounds like 'Cloud computing' and 'internet of things'. In fact, Chrome OS isn't too far from their Java Internet Terminal idea.

> Have you tried Web IDEs? They're probably decades behind their desktop counterparts.

I have. My main IDE, and probably my favourite ever, is R Studio which runs in a Webview (or as a webpage) and uses Ace for editing. Two fairly popular upstart IDEs, LightTable and Atom both use web technology. I quite enjoy Caret as well.

Not sure why you think they're decades behind. If anything the fact they're as advanced as they are is impressive, given most have been developed only in the last few years, whereas Visual Studio, Eclipse, etc..., have been around much longer.

[ssmoot]

> In fact, Chrome OS isn't too far from their Java Internet Terminal idea.

That's what I was getting at. That was 19 years ago.

> Not sure why you think they're decades behind.

I was thinking in person-hours. I don't mean to belittle them. But I feel like these are mostly "JustAnotherTextMate".

[flinty]

any good sources on sun's history?

[Mikeb85]

Not really. Just Googled and found some old pages. Others could probably do better.

[sjtechie]

You mean like Atom? A lot of the web IDEs are pretty good nowadays. Not decades behind desktop software.

[ssmoot]

No. Atom is a text-editor with plugins. It's no more a competitor for IntelliJ than UltraEdit was a competitor to Visual Studio.NET. (IMO)

But I was actually talking about in-browser environments like CodeAnywhere.

[rbanffy]

Depending on the language and stack you choose, a text editor with a terminal and a REPL may be all you need. I spend most of my day switching between emacs, a terminal and a browser.

[Mikeb85]

Atom is in-browser. It just so happens to ship with its own browser (Atom-Shell is based on Chromium)...

[akhilcacharya]

Are there any decent modern ones at all? I'm looking for a few, but don't want to re-invent the wheel.

[kowdermeister]

There are orders of magnitude more UI kits for HTML/CSS then there are for native.

[cwyers]

Is that because HTML/CSS UIs are more robust and advanced than native UI frameworks? Or because native UI framekits solved all the problems that the vast cornucopia of HTML/CSS UI frameworks are still struggling to solve? Or because everybody looks at all the HTML/CSS frameworks, decides none of them solve their problem, and decides to write their own?

[kowdermeister]

It's because it's so easy to create your own. HTML/CSS is very accessible, well tested by lots and lots of small communities.

There are many HTML/CSS frameworks that are doing really great job and not struggling at all. It all depends of course on what you want to do, but finding a good kit that solves your problem is definitely not the bottleneck of creating a modern HTML UI based application.

[aikah]

> There are orders of magnitude more UI kits for HTML/CSS then there are for native.

of course you need them because working directly with hTML/CSS is total crap.

[ssmoot]

I don't think you can compare Angular with Cocoa.

[ntakasaki]

>Chromebook sales are constantly rising

Where are the real shipping numbers from Google then? Surely they must know the numbers? Why won't they release it then? The only reason I can think of could be that they aren't all that great.

[Mikeb85]

You do realise that Asus, Lenovo, HP, etc... sell Chromebooks, right? Google sells very few branded as a 'Google' product.

The numbers are out there, but Google isn't releasing numbers because they're a tiny vendor.

[ntakasaki]

You mean Google does not know exactly how many Chromebooks are being sold by Asus, Lenovo, HP, etc?

[Mikeb85]

They probably do, but all those are public companies. They all report sales a certain way. Google isn't going to mess with reporting sales that other companies are making. That's irresponsible.

[jhall1468]

No. Why would they? You think Asus, Lenovo and HP are giving sales data to Google?

[jeromegv]

They do know about Android activations, it's not so far fetched.

[robotresearcher]

All the Chromebooks phone home regularly checking for updates, etc. Google knows exactly how many have been used and are in use now.

[acchow]

I don't have a Chromebook, but I think you have to sign into a Google account to use a Chromebook, so surely they have the numbers?

[kaared]

You can use it in guest mode without a Google account or other authentication. I don't remember if you need to explicitly set it up to do that, though.

I'm sure Google has the numbers since the Chromebooks/Chromeboxes auto-update (part of the whole point, really) so given that they likely have unique device IDs (or ethernet MAC addresses), the 'live devices count' would be rather easy to figure out.

[scholia]

"Chromebooks in Q3 2013 had at best a 1.2 percent share of the PC market and a 0.76 percent share of the combined PC-tablet market."

Latest IDC figures show Chromebooks continue to struggle http://www.zdnet.com/article/latest-idc-figures-show-chromeb...

[mkozlows]

Q3 2013 is a long time ago. According to NPD, Chromebooks had 14% market share in 2014, counting retail and commercial (read: education) channels. Growth was up 85% year over year, too, which is amazing in the context of a stagnant/declining laptop market.

http://betanews.com/2015/02/24/2015-is-year-of-the-chromeboo...

[scholia]

NPD is a less reliable source covering a much smaller market (not that any of them are reliable).

[scholia]

Chromebook sales are about 1% of all PC sales, says ABI Research http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/22/chromebook...

Different source, different paper, different journalist, same conclusion.

The idea that Chromebooks sell in volume is delusional, at this point, and downvotes won't make it any less delusional.

[Mikeb85]

You can spin it all sorts of ways. Keep in mind the 'PC' market includes all those legacy Windows XP computers which are languishing in peoples homes, businesses, corporations, etc...

Chromebook sales are a much bigger part of current PC sales. And vendors do keep expanding their Chromebook lines. If it was a failure they wouldn't.

[millstone]

The "PC market" refers to current sales. "Installed base" is the term for the metric that includes the languishing WinXP machines.

[Mikeb85]

Ah yeah you're right. The 1% came from some guy extrapolating Samsung's sales of Chromebooks to mean the whole Chromebook market...

[scholia]

Some guy being a professional journalist who actually made some effort to analyze the numbers.

I appreciate from the downvotes above that some people prefer to believe what they want to believe ;-)