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On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.

I guess you never heard of the 1990s?

Of course I have. In 1996 and 1997 (and 2001) Apple posted losses, all other years profits (source: Wikipedia).

Mozilla (the "for-profit" arm of the Mozilla foundation) made about 72 million. While not bad, it's hardly "heaps of money" for a product used by too many millions to count. For a comparison, Mozilla's annual profits are roughly equivalent to what Microsoft profits in a single day.

MS employs around 93000 people (MS's own figure for mid 2009).

The headcount of the Mozilla foundation I can not found but it seems to be a dozen or two at most from what I find here and there.

So when MS is making some 500 times more money than Mozilla means that they are doing worse per employee.

Ugh. Uninformed post rated highly by fanbois...

Time and again MS is trying to enter a market, only to sustain huge losses in the beginning

Yeah, I'm with you. MS Word was a big loser at first against Word Perfect...

ow Bing, before the Zune (ended in failure), the Xbox (lost a lot of money, still alive though, can't imagine it has made them any money overall even if it would be profitable by now), and before I'm sure they lost heaps of money entering the office suite market with OpenOffice, the webmail market with Hotmail, and so on. Only their OS business has made a constant profit it seems. And Office is doing well as well. But that's it.

WTF? Microsoft's model has *always* been:

1) Be the platform everybody else uses.
2) Watch new companies prove business models,
3) Spend the money made in #1 like water to build in the (now proven) business model,
4) Advertise like crazy.
5) Profit!

On the other hand I have never heard about serious losses on Apple's side around the introduction of the iPod. Sure they lost money on some products, but not this kind of numbers.

I guess you never heard of the 1990s?

Sun has likely lost money on development of StarOffice, now OpenOffice.org, but their product is steadily making inroads and I don't think they are still pumping much money in it. If only because they're not such a rich company any more.

Didn't you hear that there is no "Sun" anymore. It's now called "Oracle"... how's life under that rock?

Netscape burnt and died, and from its ashes Firefox has risen. Making heaps of money, going strong, doing well.

Mozilla (the "for-profit" arm of the Mozilla foundation) made about 72 million. While not bad, it's hardly "heaps of money" for a product used by too many millions to count. For a comparison, Mozilla's annual profits are roughly equivalent to what Microsoft profits in a single day. I'm not saying this to knock Mozilla particularly, since I type this in Firefox 3.6. But this "heaps of money" thing is just.... you know.

"Competing on the world stage" may not be cheap, but I think it may help if Microsoft starts to develop their own products and their own ideas, instead of an "iPod killer", a "Google competitor", etc. That seems to me a failure from the start.

When has Microsoft done any different? See their business model above. MS's big deal with IBM was a resell of a hackish copy of a the dominant operating system - CPM.

...MS is not exactly a company that is innovative these days.

... or at any other point in its highly profitable history.

He has just a slight vested interest in pimping his wares, here.

Well, I don't know about other people, but to me, it's not really a question of the reader quality. It's just that there are so many reasons to boycott the entire Sony brand, and maybe just one reason to not like Amazon.

In fact, I might even say that with the exception of RIAA and MPAA, whenever any Sony product is compared with a competitor, Sony always loses because it's a brand that needs to be boycotted, with no regard to any technical merits whatsoever.

I know I might buy Kindle if it were a little cheaper (borderline at $200, definitely at $100). I know I will never use anything with "Sony" in its name, even if I was getting paid to use it.

They don't make any money from their browsers anyway!

Opera and Mozilla certainly do make money from their browsers. They both get revenue from partnering with search engines.

Anyway, by the time the antitrust case made it to court, Microsoft's decision to bundle IE with Windows had already devastated the browser market. After killing the competition off, IE was able to grab up to 96% share of the browser market. They came quite close to so totally dominating the browser market that they could ignore web standards entirely, as web developers would (and still do) bend over backwards to make their sites work with IE, no matter how buggy or nonstandard its behavior was.

"I find it really ironic that a certain percentage...of the Wikipedia core team feel that they should decide for the entire Wikipedia audience the advertising policy.

What happen to consensus people?!?!?! The truth is much of the consensus at Wikipedia occurs on mailing lists, IRC chat and discussion pages that the public a) doesn't even know about and b) are hidden behind technological walls that normal folks can't get past (i.e. IRC, discussion pages).

If the Wikipedia wants real consensus on the issue of advertising why don't we place a poll on the top level of the Wikipedia that asks people how they would like to fund the Wikipedia: a) by looking at one advertisement or b) by donating money. The reason they won't ever put that survey up!? Because 80% of people would opt to see an advertisement and the vocal minority that controls Wikipedia with an iron fist/IRC channel will block it."

"I find it really ironic that a certain percentage...of the Wikipedia core team feel that they should decide for the entire Wikipedia audience the advertising policy.

What happen to consensus people?!?!?! The truth is much of the consensus at Wikipedia occurs on mailing lists, IRC chat and discussion pages that the public a) doesn't even know about and b) are hidden behind technological walls that normal folks can't get past (i.e. IRC, discussion pages).

If the Wikipedia wants real consensus on the issue of advertising why don't we place a poll on the top level of the Wikipedia that asks people how they would like to fund the Wikipedia: a) by looking at one advertisement or b) by donating money. The reason they won't ever put that survey up!? Because 80% of people would opt to see an advertisement and the vocal minority that controls Wikipedia with an iron fist/IRC channel will block it."

I can't speak for the pre-2006 Netscape, but as far as the current Netscape organization is concerned, I have to disagree with you regarding transparency.

* The former GM, Jason Calacanis, blogged extensively about Netscape and encouraged other employees to do the same. He also called out other industry big-wigs for "not having time" to blog about their product.
* Many Netscape Anchors, Navigators, and developers have an active blog where they write about Netscape and/or are available to discuss it.
* There is the official Netscape blog where we detail new and/or upcoming features and ask for discussion and feedback.
* Netscape.com holds a weekly chat when there is guaranteed to be an Anchor in attendance.
* As developers, we are encouraged to be active in the community; we haven't been given any explicit "gag orders," so we're free to speak for Netscape (as I'm doing now) if the need arises.

Can the above be said to be true for Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, etc.? I'd have to say that of all the current players in the social news space, Netscape is one of the most (if not the most) forthcoming and transparent about their operations.

I can't speak for the pre-2006 Netscape, but as far as the current Netscape organization is concerned, I have to disagree with you regarding transparency.

* The former GM, Jason Calacanis, blogged extensively about Netscape and encouraged other employees to do the same. He also called out other industry big-wigs for "not having time" to blog about their product.
* Many Netscape Anchors, Navigators, and developers have an active blog where they write about Netscape and/or are available to discuss it.
* There is the official Netscape blog where we detail new and/or upcoming features and ask for discussion and feedback.
* Netscape.com holds a weekly chat when there is guaranteed to be an Anchor in attendance.
* As developers, we are encouraged to be active in the community; we haven't been given any explicit "gag orders," so we're free to speak for Netscape (as I'm doing now) if the need arises.

Can the above be said to be true for Digg, del.icio.us, reddit, etc.? I'd have to say that of all the current players in the social news space, Netscape is one of the most (if not the most) forthcoming and transparent about their operations.

And see mozilla lose out on the 50+ million bucks it genereates? http://www.calacanis.com/2006/03/06/firefox-mozill a-corporation-mozilla-foundation-made-72m-last/

Dont think soo.

how was this leaked?? It's been around for days on Weird Al's MySpace page, not to mention it was posted earlier this week on Jason Calacanis' (Mr. AOL/Netscape) blog:

http://www.calacanis.com/2006/09/18/wow/

Dell is probably going to get a lot of incremental profits from this deal! I would assume that the deal is comparable to the one that Mozilla receives for the Firefox default search engine box, i.e. some fraction of the paid advertising revenue from searches on Google.

Let's see, the Mozilla Foundation received something in the 7 figure territory last year from Google. Since Dell sells way more desktops than Firefox has users, plus this deal (probably) includes the Google toolbar which is far more valuable to Google than just being the default search engine, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a worth a couple hundred million dollars a year for both companies.

Not crazy huge money for companies the size of Google and Dell, but pretty good! Granted, we don't know what Yahoo or MSN would offer Dell as an alternative... so potentially Google is benefiting more from this deal, maybe.

Ever notice the &client=firefox qstring variable when you use Firefox's search box? You think they're tracking that for kicks? Or you could it have to do with AdSense revenue? 72 millions dollars worth of revenue to Mozilla in 05, last I read.

i guess it all depends on what you mean by "gain"

It was a classy move, however $10k, hardly seems like a lot considering they made almost $72M last year. http://www.calacanis.com/2006/03/06/firefox-mozill a-corporation-mozilla-foundation-made-72m-last/

How timely: Jason on YouTube. How do they pay for bandwidth? Beats me!

But that might be changing. Last year Jason Calcanis of Weblogs Inc. was touting his network's AdSense revenue, and noted the low per-click payouts for WIN's video game sites, several of which were inactive soon after. But Calcanis, who tracks AdSense trends very closely, recently changed his mind and launched the Joystiq network, which includes new sites focused on the Xbox 360, PSP and World of Warcraft. My guess is that Calcanis has seen the payout numbers improving.