Firefox-Based Start-Up Gets Off The Ground 291
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.'"
Company? (Score:1, Insightful)
1/1, Rakh it up.
Want to bet? (Score:0, Insightful)
These people will find out the hard way that the types of people that thinks FireFox is just the most absolutely, unbelieveable, best thing EVER, are the same types of people that believe they should get everything for free. Good luck trying to get 1 penny out of any of them. So unless they are funded by their mothers and live in their basement, they won't survive for long. It's the harsh reality of going the open source way.
Let them come (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Want to bet? (Score:2, Insightful)
the bubble is back? (Score:5, Insightful)
what's the business plan?
not a new version (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they are following a .com tradition ... (Score:5, Insightful)
While I understand that you may base a business on for instance ZOPE [zope.org], 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.
Where's the content? (Score:4, Insightful)
Uh yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything they come up with for Firefox will be copied by the OSS community and offered as a free download.
Good luck
Re:the bubble is back? (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's see:
Nintendo DS
XBox
PSP
Ferraris
Televisions
Cable TV
Satellite TV
DVRs
Pez
Porn
Music
Movies
is that enough of a list? Do you need more?
Leather jackets
$3000 a month Loft apartments
XM radio
McDonalds
Pot
Cigarettes
Liquor
Gasoli
Cellular Telephones
Blackberry PDAs
"Teach yourself Anything in 21 days"
...And prompty crashes and burns (Score:1, Insightful)
I think it's Round Over for Round Two.
They are aiming at the OEM (Score:2, Insightful)
Smaller computer makers, who can't get a good deal with Microsoft, would love to be able to customize the browser well beyond what they can do with IE. They must also be considering selling their stuff to the likes of Linspire, who have no problem with including proprietary extensions with their products.
The end-user is way below their radar.
And, if I were them, I would stay away from that layer.
Re:the bubble is back? (Score:3, Insightful)
Three words: supported, secure browser.
Medium sized companies that have had to purge about 20 rounds of viruses that snuck past firewalls, mail scanners and anti-virus programs (usually via social engineering) are just about as fed up as they'll ever get. They're moving to web-based mailers to avoid Outlook, and they're eyeing Firefox, but FF is just a browser... they want a company they can sink their teeth into. AOL's Netscape browser isn't a core product, and is in the "might be gone tomorrow" camp....
I think these guys have a serious niche, just as Red Hat did, back in the day.
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
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. [newsfactor.com]
Maybe they are not selling to consumers... (Score:3, Insightful)
Like this one [faser.net]. Imagine if AmEx wanted a XUL app for their customers to check their statements etc. etc., but dont want to pay to skill up a dev team to write the XUL app...
Re:I don't like that phrase (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:not a new version (Score:2, Insightful)
Really, it's past the tipping point now, that critical mass needed to ensure web developers pay attention to it.
How to make money off of Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [mozilla.org] expresses these shortcomings of Firefox better than I did and provides more information on the above issues.
Re:Open Source Competition (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes. And that's good. It's called "competition". Something forgotten on desktop computing world
Yada Yada Yada (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that this is not a big issue, just an announcement that they are planning on doing something. Just a preemptive tactic, probably to generate financing.
As for all the 'End of Microsoft Monopoly', I am not sure this is really a "Good Thing". Yes, the Benevolent Microsoft Monopoly has not been that Benevolent at times, but I view this as the 'Protestant Reformation' for the Consumer IT Service Industry [CITSI] (New useless acronym), where you end up with thousands (actually hundreds) of versions of LINUX because there is always someone who thinks they know better.
Re:Chicken Shit (was Re:Want to bet?) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The unbeatable punch (Score:4, Insightful)
As for
Re:Want to bet? (Score:1, Insightful)
Oh well.
Re:Safe haven for non-geeks? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:the bubble is back? (Score:4, Insightful)
People are surprisingly stingy when it comes to a lot of things, finding out what they want and what they will pay for it is the heart of business. Throwing up a laundry list of items and saying "L@@K people buy stuff" to justify any new business is pretty silly. But it does get you mod points at slashdot.
There's more to "enterprise support" than CYA (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:All they have to do... (Score:2, Insightful)
Hired. These people are in it to get hired.
What is there to be acquired when the source code is open?
Re:Uh yeah (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Open Source Competition (Score:3, Insightful)
just wait and see (Score:2, Insightful)