Stefan Mileschin

Once touted as Google's great white hope, it appears that Chromebooks are becoming a great white shark to the company's bottom line.

Chromebooks first appeared two years ago and it was believed that low-cost devices running cloud-centric Chrome OS could kill off Windows.

For a couple of years we have not known how well Chromebooks had been selling, but now figures out from NetMarketShare indicate the numbers are so low that they make Ultrabook use look impressive by comparison.

NetMarketShare reported that the percentage of web traffic from Chromebooks was roughly two percent of a single percent.

Some dubbed the Chromebook a "Windows killer" when it first came out.

How that was likely when the first batch did not sell more than 5,000 is anyone's guess. But to be fair, the Chromebook could have done a lot better.

Lenovo and HP have added low-cost Chromebooks to their lineup and last year Samsung introduced a $249 ARM-powered Chromebook which looked a bit like a MacBook Air, or an Intel Ultrabook. Google even had a crack at selling its own model - an expensive Chromebook Pixel, with a high-resolution touchscreen.

The Samsung model topped Amazon's list of best-selling laptops last winter, but hardly any Chromebooks have appeared at all on the list of operating systems monitored by Net Applications.

http://news.techeye.net/business/chr...gles-ultrabook