Where are the real shipping numbers from Google then? Surely they must know the numbers? Why won't they release it then? The only reason I can think of could be that they aren't all that great.
They probably do, but all those are public companies. They all report sales a certain way. Google isn't going to mess with reporting sales that other companies are making. That's irresponsible.
You can use it in guest mode without a Google account or other authentication. I don't remember if you need to explicitly set it up to do that, though.
I'm sure Google has the numbers since the Chromebooks/Chromeboxes auto-update (part of the whole point, really) so given that they likely have unique device IDs (or ethernet MAC addresses), the 'live devices count' would be rather easy to figure out.
Q3 2013 is a long time ago. According to NPD, Chromebooks had 14% market share in 2014, counting retail and commercial (read: education) channels. Growth was up 85% year over year, too, which is amazing in the context of a stagnant/declining laptop market.
You can spin it all sorts of ways. Keep in mind the 'PC' market includes all those legacy Windows XP computers which are languishing in peoples homes, businesses, corporations, etc...
Chromebook sales are a much bigger part of current PC sales. And vendors do keep expanding their Chromebook lines. If it was a failure they wouldn't.
Where are the real shipping numbers from Google then? Surely they must know the numbers? Why won't they release it then? The only reason I can think of could be that they aren't all that great.