So a bunch of companies decided to buy ChromeBooks, presumably without asking their employees.
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Electronics-Laptop-Comput...
It's a shame because the numbers do actually show a very large increase in ChromeBook sales, but the tech press has focused on numbers that exaggerate and distort that.
I think that actually is just fine for most companies -- less tech support, and does everything they need (collaborative documents, email, web searches, etc).
My suggestions to consider using OS X rather than Windows have never worked because there are no low-cost OS X options.
There's no longer any excuse or need for OEM Windows machines. Same is true of Mac systems but their walls will take longer to tear down. Nonetheless, fall they will.
Some day historians will only scratch their heads about this long detour away from thin clients that we've suffered for around 40 years and the phenomenon will become a rich research area for behavioral psychologists.
The Android + Cloud model gives you a highly uniform user client which access all the fiddly bits in the Cloud. Until there's an absolutely bulletproof way of providing those services at the individually-provisioned level, that's going to win out for the vast majority of the public.
I'm not saying that the services have to remain as centralized as they are presently -- with Google owning everything (though this provides certain efficiencies). A more federated model in which there are multiple app and/or service providers to choose from _could_ come into being, and the present surveillance environment might help such an environment emerge, but the efficiencies of size and scale (as well as the very thin margins of such services) make this a stretch.
I've been watching a number of projects, most notably FreedomBox, for some time. They're pretty much precisely what you've described: cheap, self-contained, self-provisioning systems based around Linux (usually Debian and its excellent provisioning system), but there's been little noise out of the projects and progress seems slow at best.
If I could run my own servers (on an existing high-speed and highly reliable connection) without much hassle, it really would be quite attractive.
[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pix...
If your mobile OS relies on Web apps, you might want to think about adding Android compatibility, as Jolla has done even though Sailfish also runs Qt apps.
I would assume it is different from laptop, netbook, ultabook and tablet.
