• Bloomberg News, Friday, July 10, 2009 2:05 PM

In an interview with Bloomberg Television, Google CEO Eric Schmidt claimed that the company's new Chrome OS would eventually be on "millions" of personal computers and might eventually take users away from Microsoft's Windows. "It's certainly possible" Schmidt said. "It's certainly also possible that Microsoft will change its strategy to address that."

Faced with a slowdown in online advertising, Schmidt noted that Chrome OS would help the company drive more users to its sites, particularly its search engine. "We make money as people adopt the Internet and broadband and use these new powerful operating systems," he said during an interview at the Allen & Co. media conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. "We know that they eventually do more searches and click on more ads."

Meanwhile, Schmidt also said that YouTube, the top U.S. video-sharing site which Google acquired for $1.65 billion in 2006, would soon start contributing to Google's bottom line. "I'm much more optimistic about YouTube crossing profitability than I was, say, a year earlier," Schmidt said. "We've done a good job of managing YouTube's costs, and revenue is now growing fairly nicely." He added that display ads, a market that Google entered aggressively through its acquisition of DoubleClick, would be the company's "next billion-dollar business."

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