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Schmidt on Chrome OS: The PC Industry is not Like the Phone Industry

Posted on 05. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey in News

Everybody’s working for the weekend, so it kind of flew under the radar last week a quote by Google CEO Eric Schmidt about the reluctance to try another Nexus One-type branded phone, or say, Chrome OS device for that matter.

Speaking to the Telegraph, Schmidt said, ”we have a reference spec for Chrome OS, we have a couple of hardware partners all lined up and the open source is all out there. It’s on schedule and it will happen later this year. Let’s see how well those partners do first. My guess is we won’t need to. The PC industry is different from the phone industry. The PC industry is used to working with Microsoft, whereas the mobile industry was not used to working with software.”

Now the mobile industry is working with software, and that software called Android sure is working out well.

What Schmidt said is really the same thing that we’ve been hearing since Computex. Acer, HP and (although not listed as an official partner) Dell are the three most likely companies at this point to put out Chrome OS devices in Q4.

Back to the topic of software. Because the fact that we’re hearing that Google is ramping up its music and news services only seems to solidify how important user experience is going to need to be to make these Chrome OS machines an ultimate success. We’ve seen a bit already of Picasa adding some cloud computing functions, and there will be no surprise that we will see more of this as we move along the third quarter.

So, in its continued fight against Apple’s massive dominance in apps, Google keeps those Chrome Apps in an ever-evolving state.

Tags: Acer, android, Dell, Eric Schmidt Chrome OS, Google CEO Chrome OS, Google Music, Google News, HP, Microsoft, PC industry Microsoft, PC industry not like phone industry, Picasa Chrome OS