Conventional wisdom in the IT industry says that Google's Chrome OS is another of the search giant's failures: a bold experiment that like Buzz, Wave, Knol - among others - seems destined for the dustbin of history. Chrome OS, some will tell you, is dead if only Google would admit it. Certainly, sales of Chromebooks, the premium netbooks running Chrome OS, have not exactly been stellar. Analysts at IDC believe that fewer than 300,000 units have shipped to retailers, while some estimates put sales by Acer and Samsung during 2011 as low as 5,000 apiece.
