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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 am sure this is what he has in mind:
It's important for Chrome to actually gain tons of users because that potentially creates more search traffic for us, complementing our efforts with Android on the mobile front.
In fact, Chrome's current momentum, which has enabled it to grab more than the initial goal of 10% worldwide usage does not hurt at all.
Someone should tell this engineer that we know what he's thinking.
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.
I didn't know God was a monopolistic ad-broker.
He always was: "for you shall not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God" (Exodus 34:14)
How would I now know if decisions are made because of what users want or of what google wants?
Why should it be the way users want? If Red Hat pays people to work on the kernel, they work on what Red Hat want not what "users" in general want. If Google pays Firefox's bills, why wouldn't they be doing what Google wants? Apart from the extremely small minority that's contributed to Firefox, most of their users are simply product like TV viewers. The money made = number of people watching * number of ads, it never makes sense to made of those zero because then the total is obviously also zero. In other words, Only instead of being a means to serve ads, they're a means to serve search requests that serve ads. The only different is that being OSS, you can fork and go your own pay. Or pay them to go your way. But they don't become your pets to commandeer around just because you use the product, OSS or not.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And tried to charge money for them, when others were starting to offer them for free. Every time a thread about browsers is posted here, some member of the Opera team comes on here to tell us how Opera had everything first. Well, I'll give you that. Opera introduced me to tabbed browsing, and I loved it. Then they put ads in the fucking browser unless you paid for it, and I found a different browser.
Like Google, Mozilla is clearly committed to the betterment of the web
mozilla is a foundation to promote software.
google is a COMPANY whose goal i to PROMOTE ITSELF.
stop playing the fool, people. google is not out to help you. they are out to make a profit.
the biggest con is that google created a marketing jingle (sans tune) that goes 'do no evil'. its a lie and most of us knew this from the very start. a company (in america, especially) HAS to be profitable and has to be absent of ethics (well, its not a must-have but it surely helps).
google wants lock-in and they want to serve ads. they are NOT doing things 'to better the internet'. almost everywhere I go (on major websites) when I visit some i/o happens and goes to google. when I order electronic parts, some googleapis site gets triggered! I can't escape google even if I tried, and I have most of their domains blocked.
google is quite quite evil. every one of their plans should be carefully inspected and the real motivations exposed.
yeah yeah, the kids working there get free lunches and shirts. they are bribed to look the other way and they're in their own little bubble, insulated from much of the rest of the world.
google, like the devil, has a great accomplishment: convincing the world that they are not evil. ooooh, shiny websites! they CLEARLY have our interests at heart.
pathetic how we eat up this drivel.
google is the new microsoft. make no mistake who your friends are. google would sell you out as fast as facebook would. neither are your 'friends'.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
See Opera's financial reports:
...and...
Both go on to mention other, smaller, search affiliation deals.
the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That's it.
I believe this as much as that Google uses dodgy tax evasion tricks to make the world a better place, or perhaps help the economy...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
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.
Yes. It charged money in the era where free browsers weren't quite around (till 2000), and Opera had to make money from somewhere. After that, it became free and started supporting ads; again, because they had to get some revenue - the current revenue system of making money through search engine (i.e., Google) wasn't there yet. The ads got removed after that. Internet Explorer was free then, obviously because of the backing of Microsoft. Firefox came into play around 2004 - same time around where Opera also became free. Opera had had its share of mistakes. But your argument is too old to be relevant. This said, I totally admit that Firefox and Chrome are totally brilliant browsers- so are the companies behind them.
The sad thing is that most Google fanbois try to claim that Apple is a cult and yet their devotion is at times even more devout when it comes to the holy word of Google.
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?
Admitted Google fan boy. Google is still clearly the best search engine. If anyone is concerned with privacy they can find ways to use Google without divulging "personal" information. Facebook has many times more accurate personal information than Google could ever dream of gathering.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Well, since they don't care about users--or usefulness--but only about "technology," perhaps that explains the lack of basic features, like the inability to resume downloads. Perhaps it also explains some of the "over-engineering" going into such basic features. *sigh*
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
Oh, I completely agree with you. I'm not a hater... just a cranky critic. Facebook is infinitely worse, and I'd rather have a hundred Googles than one Facebook. Google admittedly does a lot of good for the web, but I can't think of a single thing that Facebook has ever done that benefits the web. I rewrote my original post, because it seemed to be too negative. Maybe I should have rewritten it again, to make it even less negative, but it does seem somewhat even-handed to me. Maybe it's because I'm so used to massive flamewars and melodramatic rants, anything that's not trollishly polemical seems even-handed and neutral. To be honest, I think that whenever I write anything on the internet, it comes out at least a bit too harshly worded. So, in conclusion, I don't hate Google... but I certainly don't love them, either. I'd say that I'm vaguely dissatisfied.
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.