They are doing ok with hybrid tablets though. Here in Germany it started to be more common to see hybrid tablets with W10 than Android on the retail stores.
So I still have some (tiny) hope of them succeeding with phablets with SIM card on them.
In any case, I am more willing to just adopt one of my Lumias when my S3 dies, than sponsoring OEMs that never update their devices.
Here in Europe I see Surfaces at every retail store, while Chromebooks tend to only be available online, sometimes I do spot one on the stores.
However I don't like them, personally I think they could have been a better proposal if Google had decided to leverage Dart, and offer a Smalltalk environment on them. Even if that required some kind of developer mode.
As it is, my trusty Eee PC 1215B is what I use for travelling.
I suspect a lot more marketing/co-marketing dollars go into the Surface from Microsoft than go into Chromebooks from Google and the device manufacturers.
My sense is that education is the only market where Chromebooks have been pushed at all aggressively. Like many things Google does, it's not clear that they have a really fleshed out strategy for the Chromebook.
They're also not really targeted for doing local development though people do use them in various somewhat unnatural ways.
Although they can't do everything I can do on my MacBook, they're often suitable for my needs when traveling and I appreciate the small size of the Asus Flip.
The Chromebook is pretty much failing outside the US education market, where there were non-technical reasons behind its success. Also, schools don't buy them retail.
The OEM trend is to design for Windows 10 and then offer a version of the same hardware as a Chromebook. This is a tough sale as people expect Chromebooks to be cheaper but they are not.
[They are not cheaper for two reasons. (1) OEMs pay very little for Windows 10 and they get a lot of that back by bundling crapware. (2) The Chromebook adds costs in hardware qualification and drivers etc, plus stockkeeping, distribution and advertising costs. The advertising cost is significant because Microsoft provides 'advertising support' for ads that promote Windows, but not Chromebooks.]
EDIT
Chromebooks were cheaper, back in the days when Windows laptops had 4GB of RAM and hard drives. Today, cheap Windows laptops have 2GB of RAM and 32GB or 64GB eMMC cards, so the Chromebook's price advantage has gone or even been reversed.
In any case, schools can easily set up Windows machines so that kids can ONLY run a browser and nothing else. See Windows 10 Education AppLocker.
By following Microsoft blogs, articles, BUILD presentations among other sources, I get the idea that this whole mess, going back to WP 7, was once again the result of their political wars between DevTools and Windows division.
They are doing ok with hybrid tablets though. Here in Germany it started to be more common to see hybrid tablets with W10 than Android on the retail stores.
So I still have some (tiny) hope of them succeeding with phablets with SIM card on them.
In any case, I am more willing to just adopt one of my Lumias when my S3 dies, than sponsoring OEMs that never update their devices.