A recent blog on the New York Times described how Chromebooks are gaining in the U.S. education market (K-12). I have wrote quite a lot about Chromebooks on this block, and this article tells us that progress has been made on the part of Google. Of course, the market that is described in this article is quite small with only 13.2 million units annually, in comparison to over 300 million PC units (excluding tablets) sold worldwide, and as far as I know, Chromebook’s success in K-12 education has not expanded to other markets (including international). Nonetheless, this is good news for Google.
The comments section is also very good, with some specific examples of why certain schools decided to purchase Chromebooks instead of iPads or Windows PCs.
My broad-view understanding is that Chromebooks are serving pre-existing needs that are mainly administrative by nature, and are best understood as sustaining or efficiency innovations. The blog post and the associated comments strengthen my view.
The real problem as I see, it is that there is a huge amount of potential in bringing technology to the classroom, but there is still too little investment in terms of hardware, software, curriculum and teaching skills. Sustaining and efficiency innovations won’t take us there. They don’t provide administration with good reasons to invest more; they only give us reasons to spend less. We need empowering innovations (such as which the iPad promises to bring) for that.
Data shown in this article
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Naofumi Kagami 