- Mozilla isn't a company, it's a non-profit (this deal was done by Mozilla Corp, yes, but that's a wholly owned branch of the foundation). Reducing their reliance on Google for cash is never going to be Mozilla's aim as a whole.
- Three years is a hell of a long time. When the last deal was negotiated, there was no Bing, and no Chrome. The world was a very different place. No matter how good their strategy is, it's going to be a terrible one for the world in 3 years time.
- The interests of the Mozilla foundation and Google are broadly aligned - they both care about an open, free web. That's a rare thing to find in large industry players these days.
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.
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.
Thus, there's only such deals and donations. An investor would therefore need to donate, to support Mozilla.
2) Bid $300 million for Mozilla's search spot.
3) Raise $600 million, build search engine
4) Profit
(Yeah, in practice steps 2 and 3 would need to happen simultaneously)
99% of FF users would just switch to Google as soon as they install it. It's not like anybody has made a competent enough search engine yet...
I assume you can back that up somehow? Most evidence I've seen indicates that the majority of people don't change defaults.
It's not like anybody has made a competent enough search engine yet
There would be more if there was an easy way around the distribution problem. Becoming the default search engine in Firefox would sure help with that problem.
Then the evidence you've seen is wrong. If people "don't change defaults" how come they switched to FF in the first place, which is not the default browser on Windows, but is (or rather, was until it lost to Chrome) an extremely popular windows browser?
Maybe naive users don't change defaults, but those users are sticking with (duh) the default IE. Users that moved to FF are more likely to change defaults.
Also, they won't even have to change the default: they just navigate to google.com and search from there, instead of using the search in the toolbar with this unfamiliar "Bing" thing.
"""http://blekko.com/ http://duckduckgo.com/ (...) """
Note the use of the word: "competent". None has results that good that make people actually want to switch to it. (For example, DDG's main selling point is privacy).
The only example I agree with, Baidu was made from a similar algorithm to Google's and with a remarkably similar history (RankDex vs PageRank etc). And even that is mainly popular in China for national/cultural/political reasons, methinks.
(Btw, why do you quote like that? HN docs on formatting are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)
No, "my argument" was on the topic of the comment I specifically responded to.
You know, where you said that by getting the FF default search && making your own search engine, you'll "profit". To which I responded something akin to: "bollocks --even if you do that, FF users will just switch search engine back to Google".
It wasn't that hard to follow, check it again.
"""(Btw, why do you quote like that? HN docs on formatting are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)
Ever noticed how the "HN docs on formatting" say NOTHING about quoting?
"Italics", which you use, is not for quoting is for emphasis. Other people use your method, other people use ">", I use mine.
Pre Google people switched search engines all the time -as soon as a better one come along.
There is no share holder. No one has to be worried, except people who support Mozilla's point of view.
That's why it's a company worth supporting. If you support it, you win. If you don't, well, they might eventually die, and there aren't really many (read: any) replacement. It's pretty atypical.
Per the new business arrangement between Mozilla & Yandex
in Russia, we need to make some changes to the ru build's
search defaults.
...
This bug is marked confidential until the agreement
has been announced publicly.
PS I don't suggest that Yandex is not the best choice for Russian users (it may be), but we'll never know, because nobody asked them.
I find that very hard to believe. How can Yandex possibly outbid Google? Google's revenue is 60 times bigger. If Google wanted to win, it would have won.
Since Yandex was chosen, clearly there are other factors than money here. Perhaps Yandex is better for Russian users? I don't know, I don't speak Russian.
What would to suggest as an alternate revenue source?
Finding a sustainable way to reduce reliance on these companies should be the #1 job of the Mozilla business team in the next 3 years, before the deal comes up for renewal.