The new Chromebooks by Acer and Samsung may look like regular notebooks on the surface, but Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president of Chrome, said that the parameters for every last detail, down to the individual components, were set by Google.
“We verified every component,” he said at a press event at the Computex trade fair in Taiwan.
This is an unprecedented degree of cooperation (though some critics may use the word ‘control’ instead) between an operating system provider and a hardware vendor. Normally it is the job of brands like Acer and Samsung to decide what parts and components go into their devices.
This was necessary, Mr Pichai explained, because under the new subscription-based model that Google will sell Chrome to businesses and schools starting this month, Google has pledged to ensure web security and to regularly update Chrome through the internet. This meant that the internet company had to ensure that its systems were safe even at the hardware level.
Mr Pichai denied, however, that such a level of specificity on the hardware side would slow the pace at which new Chromebooks were launched or limit the scope for hardware makers to come up with innovative new designs for the devices.
“You are just seeing the start of this program so we are very narrow in dimension, but we plan to broaden that . . . we plan to add lots of options,” he said. He also announced that Google is establishing a new center in Taipei with an unspecified number of engineers to work closer with hardware contract manufacturers makers on the island, partly to address this issue.
Other details include an affirmation that Mr Pichai’s team is “completely and squarely focused on [putting Chrome on] notebooks for now”, meaning that a Chrome tablet is still relatively far off on the horizon, and that there are no plans to converge or otherwise merge Chrome with Google’s far more established and successful Android operating system.
While there is little doubt that Google could quickly bring in lots of manpower and resources to scale up their work on Chrome with different hardware vendors if they so choose, one thing is clear – development of new Chromebooks will happen much more at the pace of Google than at that of the hardware makers.
