Gartner has released a new study that says the market for Chromebooks is changing amidst rapid growth. They predict sales of Chromebooks during 2014 will increase to 5.2 million units which would be an increase of 79 percent compared to 2013. Gartner says by 2017 those numbers will triple to 14.4 million units. Meanwhile, Gartner says buyer demographics are changing. As recently as 2013, the vast majority of Chromebooks were being purchased in the education sector that accounted for 85 percent of sales. Gartner thinks that will shift with more than half of sales going to consumers during 2014.
Gartner analyst Isabelle Durand sees the Chromebook market intensifying as more vendors jump in since “the PC market is no longer growing strongly.” However, Durand sees a glowing weakness for Chromebooks at present, the business market. She says, “by adopting Chromebooks and cloud computing, businesses can benefit; they can shift their focus from managing devices to managing something much more important – their data.” Whether that translates into even more demand for Chromebooks remains to be seen.
Despite all this growth and potential, Ms. Durand still sees Chromebooks as a niche product for at least the next five years. To get past that stage, she believes they not only have to improve the way they interact with the cloud, they have to be faster, support faster connections, and have larger drives. With these improvements, she thinks Chromebook manufacturers may be able to make a compelling case to even more end users.
source: Gartner
