Comment by JumpCrisscross
6 days ago
> Chrome can’t exist as a standalone business without being even more consumer hostile
Why not? Chrome's team isn't as prone to distracting itself as Mozilla. But there is still a lot of ancillary nonsense they get up to that wouldn't be necessary if it weren't in Google. Starting, for example, with not giving a fuck about how their product impacts ad sales.
Because you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages.
This quickly adds up to billions of dollars. You have the option to massively downsize, likely sacrificing product quality; or to sell something very valuable to a business-mined buyer. And there's really nothing a browser vendor can sell that isn't bad news for the users.
About the best option would be for Chrome to be spun off and then for Google to keep paying them for being the default search engine.
Presumably Google, Bing etc. would still be bidding to be the default search engine?
Google is paying Apple $20 billion per year just for that so financing 1000 engineers (which is probably excessive, a few hundred + contributions from other companies using Chromium might be enough) shouldn't be too hard.
Google paying to be the default search engine was ruled anti competitive.
3 replies →
That seems to work for Mozilla. It would be nice to see other revenue models, but that exists and having the most used browser as a search client should pay at least as good as whatever deal Mozilla and Apple get.
Sort of? Mozilla is not doing well. Further, the only reason Google is paying Mozilla is to keep a notional third-party competitor alive; search traffic from a sub-3% browser is not worth that much. If the Chrome deal goes through, there's really no business reason for Google to keep paying them.
> you need to pay something like 1,000 engineers - and not just any engineers, but engineers used to Alphabet's SF Bay Area salaries and equity packages
Why? I'm arguing you can downsize the portfolio without sacrificing product quality for most users. That should let one get by with fewer engineers and/or ones in lower-cost areas.
Mozilla has ~700 employees just to keep an ailing browser on life support. Brave has ~250 employees, but they're building largely on Google's core engine, so they're getting a ton of engineering for free.
Browsers are massive. I'm pretty sure the complexity is exceeding the complexity of the Linux kernel. You can pull off heroics with fewer people, but if you want to build a company that brings in revenue, has a security team and a privacy team... all of sudden, it's a pretty big enterprise.