overclockingrocks :
Chromebook is an amazing concept and I'm really considering buying one. However I wonder if they will go the way of the netbook ie be popular for a year or two and then everyone goes hey we can do this stuff on a tablet or hey I'm paying $250-300 for a tiny underpowered laptop when I could have a full sized laptop with more power for the same money. With that said would this stop me since I already own a powerful laptop and a desktop and a tablet? NOPE! I like innovative products and the Chromebook as a concept is no exception. For the masses though I can see this whole thing fizzled out by 2015
Netbooks was a good concept but they lacked in performance and MS made sure it had sub-par specs with their lisencing agreements. Beyond that manufactureres would throw in bloatware which would hinder the performance of the already measly hardware and shoot up the boot time on the slow laptop hard drives. Realistically they were just painful to use with how slow they were for the average consumer unless they knew how to disable/delete the bloatware and fine tune everything to get decent performance.
Chromebooks on the other hand you can't install bloatware, no security software to worry about, updates happen automatically to everyone. SSD is in almost every one, combined with a stripped down OS you get good performance out of some pretty measly hardware and excellent performance out of anything halfway decent. It's built on the "KISS" philosophy (keep it short and simple) and it just freaking works and you don't have to do anything. I own the Samsung Chromebook and it just freaking works, never had to do any real maintenance to it besides restart it occasionally to let it update, but I could do that whenever I feel like it and the machine won't force me or nag me about it.
So realistically I don't see Chromebooks going the way of the netbook anytime soon. It's pretty much the ideal laptop you want if all you want is the internet and not much else. And that need fits the mass majority of the consumers.Don't believe me the Samsung Chromebook is still #1 best selling laptop on Amazon, and has been so for over a year now.
As for people who compare Chromebooks to tablets I bet have never used a Chromebook and have never actually tried to do any actual work on a tablet. Doing some actual work on a tablet is quite an painful experience I wouldn't wish the fate of typing up a paper or even class notes on anyone (I am in college the people who try to use tablets for that stop after a week or two). So I don't see tablets taking over Chromebooks either. Even those Tablets with keyboards as they are quite a bit more pricey, and at that price point you should be comparing it to ultrabooks.