Google Starts Giving Away Free CDs With Chrome At Best Buy

At I/O last month, Google announced that it would soon start selling Chromebooks at Best Buy and the first of these Chromebook displays have now found their way into Best Buy’s brick-and-mortar stores across the United States. One thing Google didn’t say at the time was that it would also use these new Chromebook displays to hand out CDs with its Chrome browser on them. As Google+ user Clayton Pritchard found out, though, that’s exactly what Google is doing. The CDs, says Pritchard, hang underneath the Chromebook demo units and come “in really cool plexiglass cases held together by magnets.”
Google obviously took this idea of giving away free CDs straight out of the NetZero and AOL playbook (disclaimer: AOL owns TechCrunch). While it may seem odd that Google is giving away physical CDs in this day and age, chances are that many of the mainstream consumers who still shop at Best Buy haven’t quite moved away from shrink-wrapped software either.
Despite Chrome’s ongoing success, Google is clearly willing to put its marketing efforts behind the browser to make it even more mainstream than it already is today.
As for the Chromebook displays themselves, Pritchard writes that the one he saw was manned by a “Chrome Expert” who was pretty well informed about the product and likely worked for a third-party company and received his training directly from Google.

Photo credit: Clayton Pritchard on Google+