Measuring whether or not a device is gaining market share is tricky. I remember iphone launching and weeks later, every website with substantial traffic had a noticeable number of visits from an iphone. Same with ipad.
At the start, there were more nokia n95s, blackberry's and other pre-iphone smartphones in the market. There were even more being sold as iphones were supply limited. But, none of these mattered because if you looked at it from a website's perspective, there were no visits. Sales don't matter.
There's something similar with ChromeOS. People like buying them and maybe owning them. They're cheap and novel and the idea is appealing. But, how many visits to your site come from a chromebook? Usually it's below the attention threshold.
I wonder if Firefox OS will be similar. IE, people could buy a $25 phone on a lark, to house a rarely used SIM or similar but not use it as their primary phone.
This isn't a problem exactly, but it might make it hard to gauge how important the platform is at any given time.
First, there's a lot of aggregated data available online. Second, I think the traffic stats for chromeOS are so small right now that it probably wouldn't make it out of the 'other' bucket on most sites that don't specifically target the OS as an audience.
Who is the ChromeOS audience anyway? My perseption is that it's pretty general: Students, 2nd computers, postmen, etc. A lot of tech-savy people seem to buy them as an extra machine or just for fun.
> But, how many visits to your site come from a chromebook?
A lot.
I sell SaaS where about half the customers are high school students. In my estimation, of the schools where all students are issued a device, about 1 in 4 schools opts for chrome books, and the rest use iPads.
For many reasons, I think schools should pick chromebooks instead of iPads. The laptop form factor is better, and iPads have such little memory, they cache nothing, and overload the network which is a the bigger problem for most schools.
Speaking of usage rates for Chrome OS - We monitor traffic for many small business websites (across a diverse range of non-technical sectors) and typically see Chrome OS rank behind Linux (but slightly ahead or on par with Windows Phone/Blackberry) within our Google Analytics reporting.
I do wonder if within the "education" industry (and of course across social media sites) Chrome OS usage is much higher as students are the typical customer.
At the start, there were more nokia n95s, blackberry's and other pre-iphone smartphones in the market. There were even more being sold as iphones were supply limited. But, none of these mattered because if you looked at it from a website's perspective, there were no visits. Sales don't matter.
There's something similar with ChromeOS. People like buying them and maybe owning them. They're cheap and novel and the idea is appealing. But, how many visits to your site come from a chromebook? Usually it's below the attention threshold.
I wonder if Firefox OS will be similar. IE, people could buy a $25 phone on a lark, to house a rarely used SIM or similar but not use it as their primary phone.
This isn't a problem exactly, but it might make it hard to gauge how important the platform is at any given time.