• The Wall Street Journal, Friday, July 10, 2009 2:09 PM

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Larry Page talked about the origins of the company's new Chrome OS, revealing that for six years, Schmidt balked at the idea of taking on Microsoft in one of its core areas. Schmidt notes that when Page and fellow cofounder Sergei Brin confronted him about building an operating system, Google was still a small company. "Having come through the bruising browser wars, I didn't want to do that again," he said.

However, eventually, Google hired some Firefox developers to build a demonstration for Chrome. "It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind," Schmidt said. "I think we just wore you down," Page joked. "I just gave up," Schmidt replied. "But there is no question I am hugely supportive of Chrome and Chrome OS. They are game-changers. They change the way you think about your computer."

Page described Chrome OS as basically indistinguishable from a browser. For example, netbooks loaded with Chrome will boot up almost immediately and store data on the Web instead of a hard drive. "I wanted the operating system to kind of be out of the way," Page said. "If you live your life in the browser maybe you don't want all the stuff that came from Eric's generation," Page added jokingly.

Meanwhile, Page and Schmidt positioned Chrome not as a direct competitor to Microsoft's Windows, but more as a platform that will expand the market for netbooks. This of course calls into question the future of Android, Google's mobile OS, which is also being expanded to the netbook market.

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