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Firefox-Based Start-Up Gets Off The Ground
rudy_wayne writes "ZDNet is reporting that a new version of the Firefox Web browser is coming your way, but not from the Mozilla Foundation. 'When we launch our own services, in about a month or so, we'll be looking to offer the must-have companion to Firefox,' said Bart Decrem, Round Two CEO and a former staffer at the Mozilla Foundation. 'We see tremendous room for innovating on top of the Mozilla and Firefox platform, and we see ourselves as the first company outside of the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation that's fully dedicated to serving Firefox users.'
Round Two planned a corporate launch Monday night with the promise of bringing 'a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience.'"
Isn't there a risk for their company that anything they implement will be replicated by the open source community?
"'a new crop of products and services that will enhance your Firefox experience.'"
;-)
That sounds a lot like Ads and spyware toolbars!
If that happens, I will be returning to IE!
Well his last company, eazel (who developed nautilus) didn't last long either
is it? it must be if they think browser extensions are going to make money. people aren't going to shell out for things they don't really need.
what's the business plan?
i wish i was but oh well
... or I missed their business model completely.
While I understand that you may base a business on for instance ZOPE, here I have trouble to imagine how they want to earn from whom.
In a comment to a German version of the note (at best), someone thought they would later consult with respect to mass migration from IE to FF. Maybe.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
This story has no information about the "product" this "company" will soon be selling. It sounds like a company without any outstanding products attempting to get a little advertising. A search for "round two mozilla" on google doesn't seem to find anything either. What gives?
I got on the web when Mosaic was the way to do it. In all that time, I've never bought a single web browser (you could download Netscape for free from their site, yet it was sold in the store). I've never bought a plugin. I've always considered web browsers free. I think most people see the web that way. I don't see how these guys are going to make a profit.
Anything they come up with for Firefox will be copied by the OSS community and offered as a free download.
Good luck
Burn Hollywood Burn
Really? Because I see a huge need in the enterprise arena for some sophisticated permissions in firefox along with a central managemnet application for enterprises who want to deploy firefox. As long as the price is right I think it'd be huge. There are plenty of other things that I can think of that would sell well as additions to firefox's base. And as far as Open Source not being able to make any money... please go tell that to Red Hat and Novell and come back to me when your worth even just 1 thousandth what they are. I hate responding to trolls but sometimes it must be done.
Regards,
Steve
With Microsoft expected by many to offer antivirus software for free with windows, could they be beating them to the punch? I know that there are a lot of free antivirus packages (I use AVG myself) but if they can leverage Firefox's large user base then they might be on to something. I personally think that its a bad move to play Microsoft's game, which is effectivly making antivirus software worthless in the market.
Except for enterprise solutions, Symantec and McAffee could be in for a big hit in the personal antivirus protection department. Competition is an engine for innovation, but the most efficient engines for R&D come from within the firms that are actually selling the products and getting the most feeback. Something to think about, perhaps Symantec and Mcafee will continue to innovate and stay ahead of the curve.
Well, now that I opened the can of worms at both ends...proceed
I don't keep a lid on my coffee so when I walk around I look busy -me
Right, except you only copied/pasted the part that you wanted to. The quote is actually talking about how they are sponsoring those projects, providing servers, bandwidth, and money.
(Emphasis mine.) They're also supporting (again, from TFA):
They're also developing their own extensions (which presumably you can buy):
Now, whether that (and possibly other future products) is useful, sure, let's debate that. But don't read the article and completely misrepresent what's written.
-David Ziegler
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People will also pay for "fill dirt", or dirt taken from a construction site where they dug a big hole in the building process.
But the thing is, there's a reason that people will pay for dirt or manure or whatever. Dirt and turds have legitimate uses. If you have a big hole in your yard after tearing down the old shed out back, you need some fill dirt to fill in that hole. If you need to fertilize a field, go buy yourself some animal feces. People pay money for these because making enough dirt or crap themselves is prohibitively inconvenient (do you really feel like raising chickens or cows yourself just for their excrement?).
On the other hand, browser extensions - which appear to be all this new company offers - are much easier either to create by oneself or to find a free version that someone else has created. Yes, the usefulness might still be there in some cases, but when you eliminate the prohibitive inconvenience of self-production, it reduces the value of the commodity tremendously.
The only way I can see this company succeeding is if they have a lot of capital available to buy the extensions that other people have created in order to lock down the market, as well as to tie people up in farcical legal battles over patents and copyrights.
Come to think of it, maybe they could hit Microsoft up for some investment prospects.
Somehow, I don't think this product is targetted towards most geeks. It seems to me that they should be aiming at people who are starting to hear about Firefox. People have heard that Firefox is supposed to solve their security problems and introduce new features to make browsing easy. It's supposed to come with all sorts of cool extentions that you can download and customise your browsing experience.
Most of the cool stuff that geeks do with Firefox is free and easy; we install extensions at a whim, customise the security settings, and tweak about:config to our liking. The problem is, most people find these activties confusing and time consuming.
Extensions: Which one do I choose? How do I know which one has bugs? What do I do if it breaks the browser?
Geeks know that you: a) Try them all! b) Read up on some forums for past experince. c) Backup your settyings and do a quick re-istall!
Well, there you go. People think you need to be a super computer genius to do all of those things.
Perhaps this company could be useful as the AOL of the open source community.
Make a corporate-friendly, highly manageable release of Firefox: an MSI installer, so it can be easily deployed via Active Directory; management via Group Policy; default settings that don't make a mess of your roaming profile.
If Round Two did this, I imagine that they could make a decent income from organizations that are tired of IE but want something easier to deploy and maintain than Firefox.
Mozilla bug #74085, comment 113 expresses these shortcomings of Firefox better than I did and provides more information on the above issues.
Press Release:
Take Two based startup, Take Three, has just announced that they will be offering innovative enhancements to the community of Take Two users, who are themselves a small subset of the community of Firefox users, who are themselves a small subset of the community of Mozilla based browser users.
Take Three is currently seeking venture funding based on highly optimistic projections of a high percentage of signups from a subset of the Take Two subset of the Firefox subset of the Mozilla user base.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
Disclaimer: I'm one of the mods on The Extensions Mirror, which is now hosted by RoundTwo.
Folks, from what I have read on their site, RoundTwo is not appealing to geeks. They're not trying to force geeks to pay for stuff that they can get themselves, i.e. extensions and support and the like. I get the impression that they are offering extension support and bundling for corporations which want to adopt Firefox but also want a centralized entity that they can moan at when it doesn't work.
Their stance of 'adopting' extensions and providing infrastructure for the developers to leverage for that purpose is genius, IMO - it gives the extension authors the resources to improve and maintain their extensions, and it gives RoundTwo a direct line to the authors, which makes it far easier to get the author's attention if something is broken, which is critical if they really intend on creating Firefox 'distributions' with extensions bundled in, like what bdeonline is doing with Black Diamond Firefox.
Sure, they've got the usual amount of marketing jargon out there right now, but considering that they've been supporting Mozilla software for a while now, I suspect that this is going to be the core of their business model.
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
There are far bigger problems with using things like Firefox and Thunderbird in large organisations than just the (mostly phantom) CYA aspect.
As much as I love the apps, I'm considering switching back to IE and Outlook at work, mostly for the following reasons:
Added to all of these are the current lack of tools for the corporate sysadmins to deploy, configure and patch Moz family apps centrally, and avoid changes by lusers who don't know what they're doing that might break their carefully maintained system. Just moving all the profile data from the Windows-standard-that-hardly-anyone-really-uses location to something that fits in with a corporate back-up strategy is likely to be a chore.
Most of these aren't serious problems (if problems at all) for home users or small businesses where things are done informally. In a megacorp, things work differently, and until basics like the above are addressed, I'm afraid Firefox's chance of becoming the preferred browser is approximately negative regardless of any technical and usability advantages it may have over IE.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.