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Google Businesses Chrome Firefox Mozilla The Internet

Google and Mozilla: Partners, Not Competitors 151

Posted by Soulskill from the one-big-happy-family dept.
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."
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Google and Mozilla: Partners, Not Competitors

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  • Google and Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)

    by InterestingFella ( 2537066 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @08:32AM (#38487800)

    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.

    • Re:Google and Mozilla (Score:5, Informative)

      by theweatherelectric ( 2007596 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @08:40AM (#38487830)

      Google is paying Mozilla around $100 million of commissions per year.

      It's now around $300 million a year [allthingsd.com].

      • Firefox has better brand recognition than chrome. It might cost google more than $300 million per year to take all of firefox's market share.

      • It's now around $300 million a year.

        Ah, that explains how they can release new versions so much more quickly now. :)

    • 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 G

      • Its the money, stupid! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Rockoon ( 1252108 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @09:24AM (#38487982)

        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? [slashdot.org]

        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.

        • That's not extraordinary, they realize that if they kill funding to Mozilla that they'll almost certainly be slapped with an antitrust lawsuit and could very easily wind up being broken up. It would take some incredible hutzpah for them to even try and risk that, there's just way too little to be gained for the risk.

          • That's not extraordinary, they realize that if they kill funding to Mozilla that they'll almost certainly be slapped with an antitrust lawsuit and could very easily wind up being broken up. It would take some incredible hutzpah for them to even try and risk that, there's just way too little to be gained for the risk.

            So its about the money, instead of the 'diversity' crap the grandparent god modded up for? Yeah. Thats right.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              No, it's not right, you make it sound like both can't be the case. Google makes money from advertising and ultimately the better the web is the more money they make, that doesn't inherently preclude the notion that they want the web to be better for everybody.

              Also, a lot of the folks with mod points around here are either incredibly cynical or lacking in any meaningful critical thinking ability.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by NotBorg ( 829820 )

                Also, a lot of the folks with mod points around here are either incredibly cynical or lacking in any meaningful critical thinking ability.

                You must be new here.

        • Or it could be that supporting opera isn't worth the effort because of it's small marketshare, and really just how bad of a product it is.

      • Don't get me wrong, they want to be the search engine everyone uses, but they don't want the government to declare them a monopoly and come after them. If they had the One True Browser(tm) then that would be far more likely.

        Besides, they make all their money on their search engine, or more properly on the ads it can serve up. Everything else is just a way of protecting and growing it. Hence it makes a lot of sense to play nice with FF, and others. They don't care what you use, so long as it talks to Google

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by bonch ( 38532 ) *

        And Google seems to be more than capable of actually competing with other companies rather than locking users into their products.

        You are the product; advertisers are the users. In the realm of web advertising, Google has a huge monopoly and is being investigated for antitrust abuse.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by devitto ( 230479 )

      Gaaaah! Yes, but your counter-critism is even more flawed.
      Do you think that $100/$300m is a goodwill gift? No!
      The key points are:
      a) Mozilla are not a search company.
      b) Google make the vast proportion of their profit from search.
      c) This contract brings in very significant additional revenue to Google.
      d) It keeps that very significant market share away from it's competitor(s).

      So no matter how much people think Google want a browser war, they'd over the moon if Firefox gained 100% market share - because thei

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Tooke ( 1961582 )

        I don't mean to be a grammar Nazi, but I thought I'd ask about something since you did it several times.

        Mozilla are not a search company.

        I believe it should be 'is', not 'are', because Mozilla is singular. If Mozilla was plural, you would say "Mozilla are not search companies". Also further down:

        Google really don't care

        I believe it should be "Google really doesn't care".

        The last bit was correct though:

        MS is basically held up by its marketing

    • Re:Google and Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Dr. Spork ( 142693 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @09:17AM (#38487944)

      ...if Google could avoid paying $100 million a year, they would do so. It's better to put that money into their own product...

      Not really. They're paying that money in order to be able to fight MSIE/Bing with two sharp weapons instead of one. If they cut off Firefox's oxygen and pumped the $100 million into Chrome, the pressure on MSIE would shrink and not grow. So this absolutely is a wise investment.

      • Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @01:56PM (#38489188)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • In just the same way, you could tell Google to just do search and advertising and forget all that peripheral "loss leader" stuff like fancy browsers, mobile OSs and cars that drive themselves. But I don't think that would be good advice. The problem with MS is not that they're playing in too many games, it's simply that they're not winning them anymore. There might soon come a day when they actually make some great products, but nobody will buy them. This would be so ironic because about ten years ago, they
        • Focused on the OS, enterprise services, and server platforms and then what? They've already got extremely high market penetration in all of those areas. They need to continue to grow or they'll be slaughtered by shareholders. Search/the web is an area they have massive room for growth. Of course they're going to continue to invest funds in a profitable area they don't have a lot of exposure in currently.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "Note that Peter is an engineer,...."

      Exactly. I'd like to hear the explanation from someone who holds the gate for such funds. In other words, the guy/ girl who has the fancy business MBA degree and see things in a quarterly-basis/ 5-year projection.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Google's market is advertisers. Google's conpetitors are other advertisers. Google's competitors are other eeb advertisers.
      Chrome and firefox are a means to an end. Google is thinking out a little bit more than most money people, wanting to (poor analogy alert) raise the tide, knowing full well it floats a lot of other boats besides its own, rather than justvtrying to hog up all of the harbor docking slips for itself.
      It still sees itself in a sea of plenty, rather than trying to be the only one left on the

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Chrome is NOT Google's market; the web, and Google services+ads, are Google's market.
      They don't mind whatever you use to get there, as long as it's a pleasurable experience on which to build and sell you products.

    • Re:Google and Mozilla (Score:4, Insightful)

      by c ( 8461 ) <beauregardcp@gmail.com> on Sunday December 25, 2011 @12:29PM (#38488740)

      > 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.

      $100 million (or $300m, or whatever it is these days) is money well spent to keep Microsoft fighting a two front war in the browser market. Because if they ever get another stranglehold on the browser, Google and pretty much anyone else who depends on a free and open web is seriously fucked.

    • Re:Google and Mozilla (Score:5, Insightful)

      by arkhan_jg ( 618674 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @01:01PM (#38488928)

      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

      Why? If you assume that most of that money goes into paying for engineers and developers and distribution costs, why is it axiomatic that they must also be employed by google? If the work is good, and gets additional users to use a quickly developing browser instead of say, IE6, then mission accomplished. Firefox takes different decisions and has different emphasis than google, so if your stated goal is a well developed advancing client base, it makes sense to fund a 'competitor' in that the two different projects with different histories will meet the needs of more people than a single browser team can. Firefox has built up a lot of trust by ordinary users the last few years, a number of whom don't trust google enough to install their browser. It wasn't safari or opera that broke the back of the IE dominance, it was mozilla by offering a markedly more functional browser - and that has forced microsoft to resume work on their browser and compete again.

      And after all, google tries to make advanced, compelling web apps in order to plonk adverts in as front as many eyes as possible. As any web developer who's had to build their site, and then break bits of it for IE6 in the last decade can appreciate, advanced browsers make it a hell of a lot easier to do that regardless of the name in the titlebar. And this is what microsoft feared and tried to stop for years - web-based, standards compliant advanced apps that run on any platform. When the browser is the platform, who cares what OS it runs on; and thus who needs to keep paying such extortionate prices for windows, and by extension, office? Obviously we're not there yet, and there will always be heavy duty stuff that can't be OS agnostic, but for most people, most of the time, it's becoming far less important what OS you have as long as it runs say, webmail, facebook and whatever sites you personally hang out on. We've cloud books, cloud music, cloud films, cloud email, cloud document apps, cloud productivity apps of whatever stripe, online banking, social networking, cloud photos, the list just keeps on growing. Just look at the roaring growth of smartphones, netbooks and tablets - most of what they're used for is a browser, apps that's basically some form-factor specific UI that gets or dumps everything onto some html5 website, or games.

      Competition is good, and it means that people who aren't google can come up with ideas that we can all then benefit from, including google themselves. It's good that google themselves realise that.

    • 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.

      Please just ponder:

      - What is exactly Google's product? i.e.: What exactly are they getting money from?
      - What is exactly Google's market? i.e.: Which users do they need to win to earn more money?

      Google *is* developping Chrome, yes. But Google *is not* selling Chrome. They do not get money from Chrome. It doesn't matter to them if more or less people are using Chrome, they won't earn money from it.
      (Unlike Microsoft which is also earning money from selling an OS+Browser (+a few other application) Bundle)

      Google

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sousoux ( 945907 )
      I don't agree. Google wants the web standards that allow their products (sites) to work well to become standards. The browser is the means to this end but for a web standard to become a standard requires more than one browser to support it. By funding Mozilla they can encourage this to happen. He's absolutely right in saying that Mozilla "winning" is not an issue however they would probably like it not to win too much so they can continue to exert pressure on new features through Chrome.

    • Their product is search. Mozilla is one way of getting to their product. Chrome is another. They benefit from there being a sufficient number of sufficiently fast and well engineered ways to get to their product. That's all.

  • Oh no! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Google + Mozilla = Gozilla

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rvw ( 755107 )

      Google + Mozilla = Gozilla

      Wrong! As you could know, it is Godzilla, which is final proof that Google is God.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by A12m0v ( 1315511 )

        I didn't know God was a monopolistic ad-broker.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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)

      • More like Goozilla.

  • Peter Kasting [conviniently] excluded one tidbit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bogaboga ( 793279 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @08:54AM (#38487866)

    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

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by iserlohn ( 49556 )

      The only problem with your theory is that those that are jumping ship to chrome is likely already using Google search.

      The real reason that Google pushes chrome is to ensure that they can drive the direction of web standards. In other words, chrome gives them a large say in how the web moves forward.

      What people tend to forget is that Google isn't a software company. They are a company that indexes and provides access to information, which currently is funded by ad-sales, but is not limited to this business m

      • Not limited to ad-sales as a business model? What percentage of revenues is Google currently making and projected to make on non-ad revenues?

    • The overwhelming thought that comes to my mind is that this poor engineer has actual bought the company line. All that kool-aid drinking thats so common at giant tech companies actually works on some people. He's a naive young engineer, who truly believes what he is saying. And that means that Management has done their job.

      Listen up, kiddo... You think you know [b]why[/b] Google is building Chrome? LOL. What you think the "corporate strategy" is, is actually just the part they tell you to motivate you. So

  • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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

  • The browser isn't the game. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sgt scrub ( 869860 ) <saintium AT yahoo DOT com> on Sunday December 25, 2011 @09:16AM (#38487942)

    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.

    • It's not very clear but what you mean, is that only Google and IE are left, there will still be many IE users using Bing.
      If Firefox is there too, and uses Google search, that's many users which could have been using IE instead of Chrome.

      That's true. Although it's not all there is to it, its certainly part of it.

      The *Google* engineer post about how is company is an angel and he doesn't get how *people* don't want to "understand" (the word he's looking for is *believe*) his point of view, he gets all mad. In

  • Firefox is really in a crisis because the Mozilla foundation is still living in the 90s, when everybody and his dog bought a new computer every 2 years.

    What we need is stability, we need less versions (preferrably one per year or even less than that).

    http://in-other-news.com/2011/The_problem_with_Firefox_and_how_it_could_be_fixed [in-other-news.com]

  • ORLY? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    A web without advertising is the best advancement I can imagine. Get working on that Google!

  • Someone ought to tell Mozilla this. Judging by their bizarre version numbering system and flawed gui tweaks, they appear to be trying (and completely failing) to compete with Chrome.

    Google has nothing to fear from Mozilla. They innovated themselves into global success, and are now irritating their way to total failure.

    They seem doomed forever to repeat the exact same failures as Netscape.

  • Google funds ad vector for $300 million / year (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 25, 2011 @09:57AM (#38488106)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Google engineer demonstrates why he's in engineering rather than marketing or sales. Details at 11.

      Probably true... but you have to realize that at Google, decisions are made primarily by engineers, for engineering reasons. Fully half of the employees are engineers, nearly all of the managers are engineers, and engineers' voices are the ones that carry the most weight and drive the decisions. The truly amazing thing is that the lack of marketing or sales focus in the company's direction hasn't driven it into the ground.

      People find it really hard to believe, but the truth is that Google employees really

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by allo ( 1728082 )

        > but you have to realize that at Google, decisions are made primarily by engineers, for engineering reasons. Fully half of the employees are engineers, nearly all of the managers are engineers, and engineers' voices are the ones that carry the most weight and drive the decisions.
        [citation needed]

  • I still would like to ask Google why they dont support Opera in their services if they are so concerned for the betterment of the web. Opera has been a prime contributor in the web and browser technologies. I dont doubt Google's motives, but there is this fact, too. I will hate it if a small market share is the only reason behind that.

    • Re:Then why not support Opera in their services? (Score:4, Informative)

      by gsnedders ( 928327 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @11:47AM (#38488508) Homepage

      See Opera's financial reports [opera.com]:

      Opera's monetization strategy for its desktop browser revolves predominantly around search. Google is Opera's global search partner and provides the vast majority of desktop monetization.

      ...and...

      Today, revenue generated from Opera's mobile consumers emanates primarily from mobile search, the Opera Mobile Store and content partnerships.

      Google is Opera's default search partner for Opera Mini and Opera Mobile world-wide.

      Both go on to mention other, smaller, search affiliation deals.

      • Yes. Google is the reason why Opera even exists. Thats totally known to me. They why not support it for its services too?
  • We'll see a Gogzilla? lol i know but surely i can be allowed one stinker joke for xmas.

  • they are nothing alike (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @11:16AM (#38488380)

    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'.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      > 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 t

  • Haha! (Score:3)

    by Lazy Jones ( 8403 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @11:50AM (#38488522) Homepage Journal

    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 [bloomberg.com] to make the world a better place, or perhaps help the economy...

  • Why is it so hard to believe? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dell623 ( 2021586 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @11:50AM (#38488524)

    An AC comment in the previous story said very much the same thing: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2583644&cid=38441032 [slashdot.org]

    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.

  • I thought that the reason for Chrome (and Android) was to make us all keep using Google products, in order to see Google ads.

  • Another very simple reason (Score:4, Insightful)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby AT comcast DOT net> on Sunday December 25, 2011 @12:16PM (#38488662)

    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?

    /conspiracy theorists need better hobbies.

  • Explains lack of basic features & over-enginee (Score:3)

    by gottabeme ( 590848 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @04:37PM (#38490050)

    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 [google.com]. Perhaps it also explains some of the "over-engineering [google.com]" going into such basic features. *sigh*

  • Firefox is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well.

    This is true as far as it goes, but it's moot as long as Firefox continues along its current mad quest to not be a different product with different design decisions.

  • I have accentuated so many times that competition is not good for anyone. Every competitor, customer and whole world suffers from competition.

    Alternatives and teamwork is the only real way to go.

    Example now with Google and Mozilla, both support standards together, both develops standards together, they help each other and they share best ideas and results to everyone so they get taken in use. But still all the time, both offers alternative for other product. Customer can choose what works best for them, sti

  • Web as a Platform (Score:3, Insightful)

    by DeeEff ( 2370332 ) on Sunday December 25, 2011 @07:47PM (#38490914)

    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.

  • Yes, Google are producing Chrome because, either directly or indirectly, it advances the web as a platform. The thing is, they're only doing it because the web IS their platform. It's hugely advantageous to their business model that the web is a viable platform for their products in the years to come. What I object to, is Google trying to suggest that the ultimate reason for producing Chrome is anything but commercial. Don't get me wrong, I love Chrome and the impact it's having on the whole browser market,

  • 90s (Score:2)

    by Max_W ( 812974 )
    I remember well what was in the 90s, before open source MySQL and PHP. I remember well that one has to pay thousands for some "architect version", "gold business version" just to get a simple database online.

    Even in Chrome becomes better than Firefox I would keep using Firefox. Because as soon as a commercial solution has a monopolistic chance it will use this chance. It is a part of human nature. So we never should be lured by a single perfect piece of a commercial soft.
  • Say corporations A, B & C have a certain market cornered, each owning 33% of it.

    B is really a non-profit, being sustained by donations from A.

    A's long-term goal is to drive C out of the market.

    I am no game theorist, but common sense tells me that A should dispose of B later rather than sooner, since B is in its pocket anyway. Together, their 66% has a much better chance of taking over the other 33%.

    Whereas if A first destroys B by withdrawing funding, then B's userbase is likely to bifurcate and go

  • The comment about the Google motive is simple. Google cannot afford to become a monopoly.

    BBB (BullSxxx baffles Brains) in that one has to justify why things are done for non profit (ha ha ha)

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