In an inteview last week (uncovered by TechRadar) during the Atmosphere Cloud Computing Forum, Google CEO Eric Schmidt stated that Google Chrome OS netbooks should price out at $300 to $400. He emphasized that the price is purely reflective of the hardware, and that the software will be free and open-source as planned. Schmidt hopes that PC manufacturers will bundle the software with laptops, and the company hopes to use the low-cost, portable, netbook market to drive their OS platform to sales success, and Acer has already stated their intent to have the first notebook available with Chome OS installed.
Aside from the market goals Shmidt has in mind, he"s also looking at the historic context in which the OS will be released. He expects Chrome OS to be the first OS platform to have an effect on consumer sales in over 20 years. Windows has clearly dominated that sector with OSX trailing far behind in second place. Schmidt is ready to take on the two heavyweights.Â
"If you think about it there"s not been a new successful platform in this space for 20 years, and I"ve had a few failures along the way[.] If there"s anyone who understands how hard this stuff is then it"s me personally and the team we"ve assembled is very good."
Expect to see the OS released at the end of 2010, and devices packaged with Chrome OS to be launched in the first half of 2011.Â