alt Hacker NewsFellow sysadmin here. I'm glad to see somebody else thinking about the practical side of this.
Google should know better. Chrome has local administrator permissions anyway (w/ its updater) so they should have installed a single copy for the entire machine.
It's not cool to give a damn about the people who keep mundane stuff like desktop infrastructure, file servers, etc, working, I guess. The wanton disregard to even talk to a single in-the-trenches corporate sysadmin seems like malice.
Google has not ever cared about the real world implications of their browser decisions in the past. I can't say I'm surprised that they didn't start caring for this occasion.