Vendors to debut Chrome-featured smartbooks later in November
Global brand vendors are expected to launch their new generation smartbooks featuring the Google Chrome operating system (OS) later this month (November), while Google also plans to launch its own-brand Chrome notebook …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the first hardware wave for Chrome OS, and it arrives in the middle of Google's broadest expansion year yet: the company closed its $750 million AdMob acquisition in October, spent at least $1.6 billion on 40 companies through nine months of 2010 per its quarterly filing, and has spent the past week widening its consumer surface with Google Maps 4.6, real-time Latitude updates, and opening Goo.gl to everyone. Now the operating system itself moves onto devices — global brand vendors debut Chrome-powered smartbooks this month, with Google planning an own-brand Chrome notebook alongside them.
There is no prior corpus history for Chrome OS hardware, so this piece marks the starting line rather than a step in one: the open question it sets up is whether a browser-first machine can sell against conventional notebooks, and how vendors react once their OS supplier becomes a hardware rival.
First-order effects
- Global brand vendors put Chrome OS machines on shelves in November, giving consumers a retail alternative to Windows-based netbooks for the first time at scale.
- Google's planned own-brand Chrome notebook makes the company a direct competitor to the same OEM partners shipping its software — a channel conflict baked into the launch.
Second-order effects
- Vendors carrying both their own smartbooks and Google's own-brand device must decide how much shelf space and marketing to concede to the supplier-turned-rival, shaping which Chrome models get promoted.
- Cloud-first smartbooks need less local storage and processing than traditional notebooks, pressuring component and pricing assumptions across the low-end portable category.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, operating-system value shifts from per-device licensing toward services and advertising — consistent with the AdMob deal — meaning hardware margins matter less to Google than keeping users inside its ecosystem.
- A successful vendor-plus-own-brand model would establish the template for web companies distributing first-party hardware through partner channels, blurring the line between platform provider and device maker.
The trend: Web-services companies are extending from software into first-party hardware to control the full stack, with Chrome OS smartbooks as the opening move.