DigiTimes reports that desktop PC vendors seemingly turned their nose up at Google's Chrome OS during executive chairman Eric Schmidt's speech in Taiwan on Wednesday. He was reportedly promoting Chrome OS as a high-profile option to Windows 7 and Ubuntu, focusing on the software's fast boot time, a lack of virus issues and the fact that it will be offered free of charge. He urged vendors to give Chrome OS a try.
But unnamed vendors on Wednesday said that if Google really wants to cut into the PC sector, then it will need to provide more resources and support than it has with the current crop of Chromebooks. As it stands now, there has been very little demand for Chromebooks since Acer and Samsung launched their versions back in June. The former company reportedly only sold 5,000 units by the end of July, and the latter Samsung was said to have sold even less than that in the same timeframe.
According to the unnamed vendors, the problem Chrome OS faces is that it's still too idealized. Consumers and businesses have yet to fully embrace cloud computing, storing documents and media locally on their physical drives. Popular applications are just now shifting over into the cloud by way of HTML5, but most highly-used and long-standing applications like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite are still installed locally and used offline.
The vendors also indicated that Google is mainly pushing Chromebooks in the enterprise market, yet its cloud-based Google Docs applications doesn't meet the needs of enterprise users. On a consumer front, Chromebooks become problematic for users who have a poor connection to the internet, or don't have a connection at all -- the "lite" cloud-based advantage suddenly becomes a huge disadvantage.
That said, it's no surprise that vendors aren't too keen on using Chrome OS as a major desktop platform. While many services and applications are indeed moving up into the cloud, the majority of the enterprise and consumer base hasn't quite shifted away from physical media even though cloud computing is the "trend of the future."