I hope mozilla can now afford H.264 licenses. They are the last holdout to make web video easy.
Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#12I hope mozilla can now afford H.264 licenses. They are the last holdout to make web video easy.
Isn't this an issue of keeping the web open, rather than the cost of licenses?
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#13I hope mozilla can now afford H.264 licenses. They are the last holdout to make web video easy.
Not true.
Chrome: http://blog.chromium.org/2011/01/html-video-codec-support-in...
Opera: See an opinion piece at http://my.opera.com/haavard/blog/2011/01/13/openness
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#14The dynamics behind the deal are interesting. Google probably paid just enough to outbid Bing, the second highest bidder. Or Firefox played a great hand of poker with Google. In either case it should trouble Mozilla that they are dependent on not only Google, but Bing (by extension) for the majority of their revenue. Finding a sustainable way to reduce reliance on these companies should be the #1 job of the Mozilla b…
Not really.
If Google or Bing hadn't paid enough then it would be pretty easy[1] to raise the money from random investors.
There are precedents for that - Lycos (I think? or Infoseek?) raised capital after buying a default slot on the original Netscape browser with money they didn't actually have.
[1] Not saying that building a web scale search engine is easy, exactly, but I am saying that the default search engine for ~25% of the world web browsers is a business a lot of investors would want to invest in.
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#15What's actually being paid for, here? It could be the case that having Google as the default in Firefox will pay for itself through advertising. Anyone have any feel for how likely that is? If it isn't, is it an attempt to buy good will? Trying to gain some leverage over Mozilla when it comes to taking sides in the standards war? Or just the idea that any time Firefox gains a user is a time that Safari or IE isn't ga…
Google's product is not Chrome. Google's product is not search. Google's product is advertising. Search is how they deliver it, and browsers are how they deliver THAT.
Google doesn't care, financially speaking, if Chrome or Firefox does better in the marketplace. They care about the eyeballs that Firefox, Chrome, and any other browser can deliver to Google ads.
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#16What's actually being paid for, here? It could be the case that having Google as the default in Firefox will pay for itself through advertising. Anyone have any feel for how likely that is? If it isn't, is it an attempt to buy good will? Trying to gain some leverage over Mozilla when it comes to taking sides in the standards war? Or just the idea that any time Firefox gains a user is a time that Safari or IE isn't ga…
It could be the case that having Google as the default in Firefox will pay for itself through advertising.
Of course it will, easily
(Seriously - people should understand that Google's business is search (and advertising), and they want to commoditize its complements - browsers and phones with browsers on them).
Google does roughly 1 billion searches a day[1], and makes conservatively $0.08 per search[2]. Firefox has roughly 25% market share.
$0.08 * 1,000,000,000 * 0.25 = $20,000,000 per day.
Yearly revenue = $7,300,000,000 = $7.3 billion
Reasonableness check: Google's yearly revenue = $29.3 billion. $29/4 (ie, Firefox at 25%) = $7.25 billion, which seems roughly right.
[1] http://www.jeffbullas.com/2011/05/16/50-amazing-facts-and-fi...
[2] http://www.quora.com/How-much-revenue-does-Google-make-per-q...
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#17What's actually being paid for, here? It could be the case that having Google as the default in Firefox will pay for itself through advertising. Anyone have any feel for how likely that is? If it isn't, is it an attempt to buy good will? Trying to gain some leverage over Mozilla when it comes to taking sides in the standards war? Or just the idea that any time Firefox gains a user is a time that Safari or IE isn't ga…
Google's product is not Chrome. Google's product is not search. Google's product is advertising. Search is how they deliver it, and browsers are how they deliver THAT. Google doesn't care, financially speaking, if Chrome or Firefox does better in the marketplace. They care about the eyeballs that Firefox, Chrome, and any other browser can deliver to Google ads.
This is very wrong. Google cares deeply if Chrome wins. You are being way too narrow in your focus.
Advertising is not their product, it's their revenue stream. Their product is _everything_ that sits between a user and monetizing an ad. Just look at what they have done from an engineering, offensive and defensive position here. It's all about that ethereal space between users and monetization. That's the battlefield, and they want all of it.
They need FF because when Chrome dominates, FF needs to be a viable competitor. With Bing, it would be worse off.
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#18Kind of curious: what is mozilla spending (or plan to) all of this cash on? Wikipedia says the MozCo has ~600 employees. Even if they are paying average $200k per person and spending another 80 million on rent, hosting, equipment, etc. that still leaves ~$100mil. Executive compensation? Rainy day fund?
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#19The dynamics behind the deal are interesting. Google probably paid just enough to outbid Bing, the second highest bidder. Or Firefox played a great hand of poker with Google. In either case it should trouble Mozilla that they are dependent on not only Google, but Bing (by extension) for the majority of their revenue. Finding a sustainable way to reduce reliance on these companies should be the #1 job of the Mozilla b…
Not really. If Google or Bing hadn't paid enough then it would be pretty easy[1] to raise the money from random investors. There are precedents for that - Lycos (I think? or Infoseek?) raised capital after buying a default slot on the original Netscape browser with money they didn't actually have. [1] Not saying that building a web scale search engine is easy, exactly, but I am saying that the default search engine f…
It's a great option to consider, but:
* What matters is not just default placement, but actual share. How many would not switch to Google? Say hypothetically half which I think is generous.
* That leaves them with the kind of share that Bing had prior to the yahoo deal. And bing was losing over a billion a year.
* That still doesn't actually create a business model, because now they have create a search ad network to compete with AdWords. That's another tough problem - especially without scale.
So all in all I don't doubt they could raise some money, but chances of success would be extremely slim.
I don't think that Mozilla has a BATNA to Bing/Google which is why the economics are so different in each round. It's entirely based on Google and Bing bidding against each other.
Re: Google Will Pay Mozilla Almost $300M Per Year in Search Deal
#20What's actually being paid for, here? It could be the case that having Google as the default in Firefox will pay for itself through advertising. Anyone have any feel for how likely that is? If it isn't, is it an attempt to buy good will? Trying to gain some leverage over Mozilla when it comes to taking sides in the standards war? Or just the idea that any time Firefox gains a user is a time that Safari or IE isn't ga…
> What's actually being paid for, here? For this - http://img585.imageshack.us/img585/7109/googlevy.png
$300M / (16*16 pixels) = ~$1M/pixel!