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The back to school timeframe was good to Google’s Chrome OS devices. On Tuesday, ABI Research said it estimates that Chromebook shipments rose 67 percent in the third quarter of this year over the prior three months. That should help Chrome OS momentum for the full year as well, with the research firm suggesting a doubling of Chromebook shipments in 2014 as compared to last year.

Shipments certainly don’t equal sales, of course. I literally just walked out of a Best Buy — yay Amazon Voyage purchase! — and saw Chromebooks sitting on shelves. So it’s difficult to gauge exactly how many Chromebooks have been sold in the past quarter.

Still, it’s promising news for [company]Google[/company], which continues to push Chromebooks in both the education and enterprise sectors. In fact, most Chromebook sales are actually through commercial channels and not consumer retail stores. NPD, for example, noted in July that Chromebook sales comprised 35 percent of the entire commercial sales channel.

Although all signs have pointed to Chromebook sales on the rise for the past few years, [company]Microsoft[/company] may be blunting that growth. Of late, the company has aggressively pointed out that much of the simplicity and speed of deployment features offered by Chromebooks are also available with Windows devices. And since eliminating the license fee for Windows 8.1 with Bing, Microsoft’s hardware partners are now starting to debut Windows laptops that are priced equal to or lower than Chromebooks.