Mozilla isn't a charity case - and Google's $300m will do nicely
Paying for Google search in Firefox is just business
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Open ... and Shut Some people seem to think Google gave Mozilla a sweetheart deal when it renewed its search agreement for Firefox. At roughly $300 million per year, it will fund quite a bit of open-source development at Mozilla, but this isn't a case of Google going soft during the Christmas season. It is, as Mozilla veteran Asa Dotzler argues, simply a case of Google paying the going market rate for traffic to its ads.
It's unclear why people don't grok this. Google, for all its "Don't do evil" sloganeering, is a business, not a charity. It simply isn't going to spend approximately $1 billion over the next three years subsidizing a rival to its browser, Chrome.
Not unless it expects a lot more than $1 billion to walk back in the door, in the form of advertising revenue.
MG Siegler speculates that the deal may be about heading off an antitrust inquiry. It's not, though that's a great side benefit. Kara Swisher posits that the size of the deal is reflective of price competition from Microsoft. Maybe.
But what's lost in such stretching to find a motive in the deal is the most obvious one of all: it makes financial sense for both parties.
Google engineer Peter Kasting insists that viewing Chrome and Firefox as bitter enemies is silly:
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. 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.
Chrome has certainly managed to force Mozilla to improve its Firefox game, not to mention Microsoft and Internet Explorer. But if Google were the only one building the browser on-ramp to its web services, and advertising revenues, it would be a Pyrrhic victory indeed.
Nor is Mozilla alone in making money by sending Google search-related advertising revenue. As Dotzler points out, Google is "no more donating to Mozilla than they are to Opera or Apple, both of which derive significant revenue by sending search traffic to Google".
Coming up with Sun T'zu The Art of War-type analysis of the deal may make for gripping reading, but it's not very accurate in this case. The Google/Mozilla deal is a boring case of two organizations partnering out of self-interest. ®
Matt Asay is senior vice president of business development at Nodeable, offering systems management for managing and analyzing cloud-based data. He was formerly SVP of biz dev at HTML5 start-up Strobe and chief operating officer of Ubuntu commercial operation Canonical. With more than a decade spent in open source, Asay served as Alfresco's general manager for the Americas and vice president of business development, and he helped put Novell on its open source track. Asay is an emeritus board member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). His column, Open...and Shut, appears three times a week on The Register.
COMMENTS
the problem
"IE plus Outlook has been so deeply imprinted on their brains that no other alternative would be imaginable in the next 1000 years or so."
Very true but this is the argument of defeat. Its like saying IE/Outlook is so popular why bother with Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera (etc).
The push of Firefox lead to IE improvements, the push of Chrome supposedly leads to IE/FF improvements and so on.
Despite this we still have an email / calendar / address book tool that is pretty much identical to one used 12 years ago.
If Mozilla spent a fraction of the effort they put into FF on improving Thunderbird things could change - not saying they will, but for a decade the argument over browsers was simply IE has won, dont bother doing anything else which is why we have IE6....
Where I work, we now use FF as the default install with alternatives being Opera and Safari. IE makes up less than 1% of the browsers used to access the corporate intranet.
Why cant this also happen to Outlook when something better comes along?
And for my own curiosity, why do you assume all enterprise installations are rich corporations?
You rightly point out that Google is a business, not a charity, but you appear to swallow the line that the purpose of Chrome is "to make the Internet better"?
"The Google/Mozilla deal is a boring case of two organizations partnering out of self-interest"
... and in the process Mozilla not giving a toss about the other projects they are running, or could support. It seems that the obsession with web browser glory has gone completely to the heads of its executives. Thunderbird and Lightning have been pretty much languishing for years - with important bugs still alive and well in the software. I wish they would finally get round to fixing the calendar properly, give it a good scalable back-end and a real multithreaded interface, and even start a calendar server one day - who knows. A calendar server is what is really missing from the open source eco-system to compete against Exchange. I've tried all current options for calendar servers, and they fall over when there are more then 1000 appointments in the back end.
But I forgot, Mozilla will stubbornly refuse to deal with anything that might turn out to be useful to the enterprise. Maybe it is part of the deal with Google - stay away from enterprise software? So much cash, so few results. Well, back to shaving another microsecond off the Javascript execution times then - that will surely save the world, won't it?
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