I'm so sick of this argument about Mozilla. It is like saying a Principal Engineer at Microsoft relies on Microsof because it provides 90% of his income. Last time Mozilla's contract was up for negotiation, they caused bidding war that increased their value over the previous contract...it wasn't Google's generosity. You are a fool if you think Mozilla is beholden to Google.
It is "TheNextWeb" here, so not exactly deep journalism. Its true that if Google declined to support Mozilla that Microsoft could get in there for less than the $300M that Google paid, and it would probably push Bing closer to parity with Google in terms of searches done.
So more accurate reasoning is "Search advertising is the best, Mozilla drives a lot of traffic, any search engine would love to have 'control' over Mozilla's choice of default search provider and how that works to insure they get the traffic from Mozilla customers."
So no, Mozilla doesn't need a 'backup' plan unless Bing goes away.
>I'm so sick of this argument about Mozilla. It is like saying a Principal Engineer at Microsoft relies on Microsof because it provides 90% of his income.
Well, even if he could shop around for another job, relying on MS like that means a sudden firing combined with an illness/mortage and/or worsening job market conditions can seriously hurt him.
The problem here is that Mozilla gets a large part of its income from a company that almost makes the exact same product.
That should make Mozilla feel uncomfortable whenever their agreement with Google is up for extension.
On the plus side, they know they can get money elsewhere if Google were to drop out; they could jump to the Bing camp. That's about their only alternative, though.
Also, their ability to get a good new contract depends heavily on their market share.
Imagine that that software engineer at Microsoft was becoming less productive and knew that Microsoft was hiring young engineers and that there was only one other company he could get a job, and that that company was also hiring young engineers. That should make him worried.
Yahoo and DuckDuckGo give money to Linux Mint for including them in its default Firefox configuration. I imagine they'd be interested in expanding that to all Firefoxen if Google and Microsoft weren't buying.
What if 90% of a politician's campaign funds came from one source?
It doesn't have to be overt, I doubt Mozilla makes many decisions by asking themselves, "will this make Google happy or unhappy?"
But consider that Mozilla knows what Microsoft and Yahoo's top bids were. Their ability to switch from one funder to another is dependent on how high those bids were.
That is not the same situation. With a politician, one source can contribute X, and another source can contribute Y, and both of their contributions influence the politician. In other words, if the politician loses a source of donations equal to 90% of his or her donations, there is probably nothing that would replace that donation. The only supply is percentage of the politician's time so to speak, which might effect how much someone is willing to donate in the absence of another donation, but probably not in the way the politician would like.
With Mozilla, the supply is one item, the default search engine for the search bar, something which has high demand. That means if Google were to become less interested in paying for the search bar, Bing would be waiting at the gates to do so. They could lose money if that were to happen, given that Google was the highest bidder, but that in no way makes them beholden to Google.
Not sure what you mean by high demand, it has certainly has had strategic value, but the grand total of companies that would be interested in the search box are Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
I wouldn't be looking forward to the next set of negotiations if I had Microsoft and Yahoo as my fallback positions.
Well, it must be different. The two companies compete directly on a number of products and Mozilla's decisions on whether to adopt things like NaCl, for instance, can't be too pleasing to Google.
Yet, I think you'd be right to question the independence of a politician who got 90% of their funding from Google. Maybe it is different because people interested in entering politics have less integrity and produce nothing of value so they are more in thrall to their biggest customer. ;-)
Maybe it is more like the academic projects I've worked on. 100% of the money is from the US Government but none of us are patriotic in the least. We just care about doing the research.
Or how about the US government, which gets most of its funding from US tax payers and China and never seems to do anything that pleases either group.
Or children that get all of their basic needs met by their parents and still grow up to rebel and hate them.
I think politicians are just a special case in being particularly worse than the average human being in terms of ethics, morality and intelligence. :-)
> a Principal Engineer at Microsoft relies on Microsof[t] because it provides 90% of his income
I would not exactly call this hypothetical person completely independent. Sure, they can go off and find somebody else to rely on anytime they want, but they are currently relying on one company in particular.
I don't get your argument at all. Clearly no-one would expect a senior employee of Microsoft not to further Microsoft's interests, so your analogy contradicts your thesis.
I think a better argument is that Mozilla needs to diversify its revenue sources. Chrome is taking away marketshare from Firefox thanks to advertising and paying a lot to be bundled with Java, Flash, Acrobat etc. updates or just being shipped as default by the PC OEMs. It makes sense for Google because then they needn't pay out so much to Mozilla. For many non tech folks where I had replaced IE with Firefox, I now see them using Chrome, and when I asked if they installed it, they usually have no idea how it got on their computer. This is a real danger that Firefox and Mozilla face.
Not sure what's the state now but a few years ago the CEO was being paid ~400K/yr to run Mozilla Corp. For that kind of money, one would expect that Mozilla would have more diverse revenue than being a one-trick pony.
On a purely market basis, 400k buys talent comparable to a senior manager / director of the Chrome or Safari team of ~100 people, not a VP or CEO of a company with $100m annual revenue.
$400k is what one-trick ponies like doctors and lawyers and traditional industry local small business owners earn.
> $400k is what one-trick ponies like doctors and lawyers and traditional industry local small business owners earn.
Or a little under twice that of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom ( pop. 60 million ), when summing his MP and Government jobs.
The combined ministerial and parliamentary salary of the Prime Minister is £142,500 at April 2013
I'm fairly confident in saying that David Cameron puts in considerably more effort than the CEO of Mozilla. I really don't see how anyone can justify $400k for such a job.
No one goes into a political office because they want the salary. Any one who can get there is usually already rich enough that the salary doesn't make much difference. If you consider the amount of money they spend campaigning, they effectively end up paying to have the job. They take the job because of the power that comes with the job, not because of the salary.
The President's benefits package is mind-bogglingly rich. Besides the incredible pension and almost all expenses paid while in office and on vacation and campaigning, the job is a golden ticket to $millions in "speaker fees" afterward.
Bwahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!! Perhaps you are accurate with the first half of the first sentence, but unless your definition of VP doesn't match what medium/large corporations actually consider to be VPs (in technical areas), you are completely wrong.
", I now see them using Chrome, and when I asked if they installed it, they usually have no idea how it got on their computer"
I tend to see that too. its pretty evil too. get flash update? chrome bundled at random. navigate google sites? site may not display correctly unless you download this "link to chrome"
and so and so forth. for many users its confusing and they don't know how it happened or how to go back.
> For many non tech folks where I had replaced IE with Firefox, I now see them using Chrome, and when I asked if they installed it, they usually have no idea how it got on their computer.
Chrome probably got there the same way Firefox got there - a well meaning individual (you, in the case of Firefox) installed it and told them to use it because it is "better".
Also b/c anytime you visit Google.com on any non-Chrome browser, it tells you to install Chrome for faster browsing. Google.com is so sparse that Chrome ad sticking out on the side is quite effective.
I wish I could find a "market share over time" chart but I can't. Anyways, IIRC I don't believe Chrome is still taking (much) aware from Firefox. They did for a long time but then flattened. Recently Chrome has dipped a little and Firefox is up: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/11/01/ie11-takes-1-49-mar...
When I installed Flash Player on a Windows laptop recently, I was surprised to see a download bundle featuring Chrome. I thought it was the other way around: install Chrome and you get Flash whether you want it or not.
