very interesting info on your post reagrding the growth of Chromebooks in 2015
0 Tech Predictions for the New Year
THE DAILY TECHPINION
TIM BAJARIN / January 2nd, 2015
For the last 26 years, I have taken a stab at predicting tech trends. Here is a link to my predictions for 2014. Note I was half right when I predicted Google would spin off Motorola to its own company. They instead sold to Lenovo. Interestingly, three years earlier, Ben and I predicted Google would buy Motorola and it what happened.
Ben and I also predicted last year PC sales could actually grow again in 2014. This has turned out to be basically true. In 2013, the industry was -10% in total PC sales. This year, they will only be off by -2-3%. Part of the reason for the slide in PC demand in 2012-2013 was people were still trying to figure out if a tablet could replace a PC. Now that most understand they still need a PC or laptop, demand for PCs has seen an uptick in 2014 which is why the decline is smaller. If you followed my yearly predictions from the beginning, you may also remember in the late 1990’s, I said within 10 years Apple would be the largest CE company in the world. I remember that because I got so many comments telling me I was an idiot.
With that in mind, here is what I see as some major trends for 2015.
I believe 2015 will be the year of the Chromebook[/b. What is bizarre about this is, in the late 1990s, Larry Ellison, along with the CEO of Bell South, announced what they called the network PC. Bell South believed we would have high speed, ubiquitous bandwidth by early 2000 and Ellison felt that all a person needed was a device that connected to the internet — thus the Network PC. 15 years later, this particular vision is gaining ground — Chromebook’s were the top selling PCs during the holidays. While Chromebooks could never replace PCs in business, the education market and low end consumer markets are buying up Chromebooks in huge numbers. By the end of 2015, we should see them eating into established PC markets and impacting growth of the laptop segment.
