New Samsung Chromebook Points to Google's Updated Chrome OS Strategy

The arrival of Samsung's new Chromebook portable computer running Google's Chrome OS and selling for the strikingly low price of $249 is being misunderstood by some people. This device, at this price point, along with some of the bundled deals that come with it, signal that a number of Google's expected Chrome OS strategies have finally come to fruition. There will be more of these inexpensive devices that come with incentives. Here are the details.

It's no secret that Chrome OS has not been the same striking success for Google that the Android OS has been. In the past, I've written about several possible avenues that Google could take to rectify that situation. In this post, I suggested that it would be wise for Google to subsidize some of the costs and throw in free services for Chrome OS-based portable computers to seed a market for them. In this post, I suggested that Google could offer free storage incentives to accompany new Chromebooks through its brand new Google Drive service. And in this post, I suggested that Google could successfully position Chrome OS as a secondary operating system--much as many of us run Linux alongside proprietary operating systems.

With the arrival of the new Samsung Chromebook all of these concepts are coming together. When it comes to incentives, the new Chromebook sells for $249, but comes with $269 of freebies. There are several types of freebies, but here is the significant one: With a new Chromebook purchase you get 100GB of free Google Drive storage for two years (valued at almost $120). This is no skin off of Google's back to offer this, and some users will pay for their Google Drive accounts when the two years are up. 

And, as noted here, many people are looking at the new Chromebook for secondary use alongside another laptop or operating system. 

These trends signal the future of Google's Chrome OS strategy, where Chromebooks will come with valuable incentives and sell for prices that make it easy to run Chrome OS alongside other platforms. It sure took Google a long time to figure all of this out.