When people heard that companies could acquire Chromebooks for $28 per unit as part of a monthly subscription, one popular tech and gadget blog said that they saw clear and present danger for other solutions providers that charge ridiculously high prices to provide machines to enterprise employees. Surely, Google’s Chromebooks are appearing more and more suitable to provide to enterprise customers. Granted, a Chromebook isn’t supposed to be a full-scale Windows or OS X-based affair, but Chromebooks are becoming more and more relevant every day as an increasing number of previously web-only apps add offline support. Now there are hundreds of “web”apps that work offline available to users of the new Chromebooks.

It’s obvious that business and education entities will spend less time and money updating, patching, maintaining, and managing a fleet of Chromebooks. With the Chrome operating system, an education user could log into the computer at the start of class, use it to take notes or complete coursework, and just log out at the end.

Enterprise and education users of Chrome OS laptops will receive access to a special console to administrate their machines, direct phone tech support (with Google rather than individual manufacturers), and an attractive warranty. A consumer user would typically contact the manufacturer of their Chromebook for tech support. That in and of itself will likely be worth the long-term price increase to institutions. Additionally, there is no need to purchase licenses for anti-virus, data encryption or data back-up software, all of which are huge thorns in the side of businesses.

For an educational institution like a high school or university with thousands of students, the cost of renting on Google’s plan month to month would probably more than make up for the increased cost over purchasing a machine. Although the Chromebook’s expected price tag of ~$350-400 is a relatively low price for a computer, especially as far as colleges used to purchasing new desktops and laptops every couple years are concerned, the access to direct Google support is a considerable advantage that should prove difficult for institutions to overlook.