Aren't Chromebooks the best selling laptop on amazon or something?
It's around 5-6 million units sold anually, but, as Google themselves said, Google don't make any money of off them.
Samsung, Acer, etc, who produce the units do, but again, in total it represents a tiny slither of laptop profits due to the small margins. Most Chromebooks (70%) go to the education market as cheapo laptops.
They suffer from the gulf state problem where they make so much money from one thing that nothing else will ever be important enough to really be successful.
E.g. with all the billions developing Android, buying Motorola etc, they still make the large majority of mobile ad money on iOS devices!
Edit: Also, in the past Google would pay Firefox to have its users use Google as the default search engine and Google gets the equivalent of this for free with each Chromebook sold.
It's 2015 and companies compete for user timeshare, not dollars.