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Google and Mozilla: Partners, Not Competitors
Much has been said about the (perceived) rivalry between Chrome and Firefox, but Google engineer Peter Kasting had enough when he read an article trying to discern Google's true motives for signing a new Firefox search deal. Kasting posted to Google+ to clarify what value the company sees in funding a "rival" browser. Quoting:
"People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It's very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That's it. It's completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done. The end. So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla: Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web, and they're spending their resources to make a great, open-source web browser. Chrome is not all things to all people; Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well."
So it's very easy to see why Google would be willing to fund Mozilla
That is true, but not for the reasons stated. Google is paying Mozilla around $100 million of commissions per year. By the very nature of the deal that relationship is poisoned. Note that Peter is an engineer, and it is very easy to say they want "better web" and stuff like that, but if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product, and they really want to do that, but they can't because they would lose users. Google profits from the deal, but at the same time they would want to improve their own market so they don't need to pay anyone else in future.
Nope. Google understands that diversity is good. If there's just Chrome vs. SomethingElse then the company behind SomethingElse might gain advantage by introducing incompatible features. If there's Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera vs. IE vs. .... then there is less probability of this happening. And Google really depends on the open Web.
And Google seems to be more than capable of actually competing with other companies rather than locking users into their products.
And $100 mil.? That's just a small change for Google.
I find it hard to believe anyone really thinks letting Mozilla die would be a benefit to Google. It doesn't take a doctorate in Sociology to know people like choice. If they are limited in choices the more likely the choices become "the greater between" style evil. eg Nutscrape v. Internut Exploder. There were fans on both sides. There were haters of the other side. And more importantly, there were haters of both because there were little alternatives (at the time). What Google wants is not to get any of that hate. Keeping them a player and a partner improves the real game, traffic to Google. How people get there is unimportant.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Nope. Google understands that diversity is good.
You got modded insightful but slashdot just had a story about that very thing, What do we do when the internet mob is wrong?
Extraordinary claims requires extraordinary evidence. Until such time, there is no reason to believe that its about anything other than the money.
If there's Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera vs. IE vs. ....
Well you just blew it right there. Google always defaults new services to browser sniffing and disallowing Opera, even though when Opera pretends to be Firefox that things just work. Could that be because of a small market share, and thus no money inventive, so try hard to get Opera users on Chrome? Yeah.
"His name was James Damore."
Google engineer demonstrates why he's in engineering rather than marketing or sales. Details at 11.
Google is spending $300 million / year to:
- Make sure that users of the popular Firefox browser continue to see Google's search engine, and thus Google's ads by default.
- Make sure that Firefox users continue to NOT see Microsoft's ads by default.
End of story. There's no magnanimity here, no making the world a better place. Just business. For that, $300 million / year sounds like a bargain.
Think about it. How much do you think Google pays Apple to make sure that Google is the default search engine for Mobile Safari? Think that Apple does that for free? Same exact deal with Firefox. But throw in a quaintly deluded engineer's explanation of things.
People seem to think that Google is some kind of non-profit charity, powered by rainbows and idealism, with a unicorn as their CEO (and a pony as VP). You can't buy that kind of brand loyalty and PR. It's thoroughly amazing, and, yet, also disturbing, because along with it comes a reluctance to pay any attention to criticism. It doesn't help that Google's detractors, for a long time, were spammers, SEO professionals, shills, and other assorted scum.
I liked Google a lot back when it first became popular. It was clearly the best search engine. They eventually started diversifying into all sorts of things, while always collecting more and more information on their users. Fine. That's how they make their money. I don't begrudge them their demographics information, but if you listen to the average person, Google is doing all this out of the kindness of their hearts, to better make a utopian society, and the whole advertising / data collection business is a distasteful, necessary evil that Google engages in, because they need to fund their good works. And that's if they even recognize that there's a trade going on here. A lot of people, if they see no price attached to something, think that it's completely free, with no associated loss of privacy as a price. Nothing is ever free, in that absolute sense. Even if there's no price, it's still got an opportunity cost.
Microsoft or IBM would literally kill to have this kind of PR. Yes, literally. I think they would outright murder a homeless man tomorrow, if they thought it would buy them this kind of sentiment from the public. Apple is about halfway there, but I think that it's more likely that Apple is a nascent religious cult, as opposed to the true believers lining up to join Google's utopian society.
It seems like it's getting increasingly difficult to find software projects that don't have some ideological drive behind them. You can't just use a program. You're buying into a worldview. Oh well. I guess it could be worse. At least we're not stuck with IE 4 and Netscape Communicator.
An AC comment in the previous story said very much the same thing: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2583644&cid=38441032
Is it really that hard to believe that someone has to come up with far fetched ridiculous reasons like anti trust (anti trust with browsers makes no sense, chrome is never going to become a monopoly on the desktop and with growth in mobile it doesn't matter anyway)?
There is nothing underhanded and Google doesn't need to do anything underhanded. Sure there's some marketing speak in Kasting's post. But the bottomline is this does suit google's own business plan, the web's their space, they're not interested in competing with Mac OS and Windows directly. And they can't rely on IE and Safari being the interface to the web, they want to push them in the direction where Google wants to go and where their strength lies. Mozilla does it just fine because open works in Google's favour.
There's also another very simple reason.
Eyeballs.
It's the same reason that Microsoft has advertised on Slashdot. By making the deal with Mozilla they get to be the default search engine on one of the most popular browsers. That is a lot of eyeballs. Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the next contract replaced Google with Microsoft. Ad agencies go where the eyeballs are, does this really surprise anyone?
> google is not out to help you. they are out to make a profit
the two motives are not mutually exclusive
>google wants lock-in
how exactly are they locking anyone in? they provide functionality to export your information out of their system. for everything they offer, there's no shortage of alternatives. i just don't see the 'lock in' that you're blathering about.
>CLEARLY have our interests at heart.
well, you could argue that NO company has your interests at heart. If so, how do you function in this country believing that?
The entire business model of Google is "Web as a Platform."
Of course they're trying to increase the web and make it better, faster. They're trying to make the web compete with full-fledged Operating Systems. Google doesn't care what browser you use, as long as you're using one that lets them develop their own infrastructure and deploy their own products.
Google has no reason to try and "crush" Firefox. Firefox is irrelevant to them. What they're really after is killing Microsoft, Internet Explorer, and getting their services such as Google Docs, GMail and more into businesses. They don't care about the browser as much as they want to compete in an area where they know they will win. Such an area would be web apps and web infrastructure.
Don't think about this as a browser war as much as a platform war. Microsoft's platform is Windows, Google's is the Web. Google just realizes that if the web was better and more fluent, they'd have a larger market and a bigger piece of that cookie.
That's my 2 cents, at least.