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Comment by astrobe_ | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that browsers are a counter-example: there was IE and Firefox and all of a sudden, Chrome wrecked both of them.

I believe they succeeded thanks to their huge resources, their popularity and their good insight, but which of these factors was the main one?

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50% a good product, 50% spending billions in ads, bundling deals and nagging people to install chrome when visiting Google properties.

I swear I had to make sure to download the Flash installer without the Chrome bundle for a number of years...

I just use chrome as my primary Flash program now, as it seems to bundle it's own version regardless of what I have installed.

I have a feeling that behavior played a (small?) role when the EU decided to fine Google for abusing their market position to pressure themselves into the shopping comparison market - they saw what happened the last time Google did that.

I think huge resources wins more often than not. Even more so in our corruption-enabled environment today.

Rule of law or better ideas? Meet billions of dollars. We all know who wins ... justice delayed long enough is justice denied.

Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller.

I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.

Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.

Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch:

https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.h...

https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html

It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.

> Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.

> Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.

I think this is a false dichotomy; the huge resources are what allowed them to hire all of those experts.

Actually, at $100k/yr per team member even Mozilla could afford such a team several times over. At least one if several of them of talent level nostrademons described were made ridiculous-good offers. :)

It appears it was management and/or politics that stopped other companies from doing what Google did.

$100k/yr is around what an entry level software engineer gets at Google. I'd guess that Google paid these experts much more than that.

And salary cost is usually about 30% above the gross salary. They probably cost google >$250k each.

Mozilla had around $7-8 million in profit last I looked. Currently over $9 million. They could still afford them at $250k each. Such a project would've even been worth most or all of a year's profit. Fortunately, they're doing Quantum to improve things. :)

Revenue is the important number to look at - Wikipedia has it at $329.5M as of 2014. Profit is after salaries - when all the early Firefox people left, they were replaced by other programmers, who probably cost a bit less but not a whole lot. I think tsunamifury's estimate of $500K-1M minimum isn't out of line, but even then, a team of 20 people making $1M fully-loaded costs $20M, which isn't exorbitant. Mozilla's revenue was estimated at $57M in 2006.

Gotcha. I wasnt using revenue since I didnt know enough about their expenses. Appreciate you filling in some blanks.

500k to 1 million per person mininmum.

Yeah, probably.

I don't think it is about the team itself, but the resources Google could swing round to push Chrome on consumers.

Chrome was already on a hockey-stick growth curve before the distribution deals started. I remember being in the TGIF where their Founder's Award was announced and one of the questions was "Isn't it a bit premature to give them this award?" (it was 8 months after launch, the Mac version wasn't out yet, and they had about 5% market share) and Larry pointed to the growth chart and said "They've already won, the rest of the world just doesn't know it yet."

I'd actually switched over to Chrome before joining Google, and told all my family to switch, and it was apparent at launch that it was just a better browser. Once you're at the point where your users tell their friends to switch to your product, there's basically nothing your competition can do to stop you other than massively improve their own product, because you're getting large and exponentially-growing amounts of free advertising.

Look, I'm sure the Chrome team has legendary coders that I truly respect.

How could Mozilla compete against Google (or even Apple) to pull this talent?

Again: Big money wins (exception being those organizations that are both big and inept).

You can start by letting them do their jobs. From TFA:

"The process involved coming up with an idea, presenting it and getting approval to run with it. You would then repeat this approval process at various stages during development. It was, however, very hard to get approval for enough resources (both time and people) to finesse an idea long enough to make it obviously a good or bad idea. That aside, I found it very demoralising to not have the opportunity to write code that people could use."

The early Chrome people indicated a similar frustration with upper management once Firefox got popular.

If you want a clear demonstration of the management clusterfuck that is Mozilla, see http://arewereorganizedyet.com/ The average time between reorgs in Mozilla is something like three to four weeks.

It's really not clear to me what definition of "reorg" is being used here, given those dates. The only one that might plausibly fit is "any change in the management structure, anywhere in the organization" to give you that frequency. As in, to get this frequency you have to count "a manager has too many reports, so another one was hired to take part of the load" as a "reorg".

That's fair, though it does seem like a fair number of people at Mozilla don't actually know what their reporting chain is nowadays yet alone who needs to approve any expense.

I'm not sure why people wouldn't know their reporting chain. It's in the company "phonebook": search for yourself, then follow the "Manager" links...

Expense approval is less clear, because it's not obvious which things your immediate manager can approve and which need to be kicked higher up the chain. But in my experience asking your manager works pretty well. It's possibly I've been lucky with managers.

All I can say is that this is not universal. My colleagues in Research and I have been able to pursue longer-term research directions at Mozilla that are now successful and which, frankly, most other companies would have shut down long ago for not having enough short-term value.

Yes, it's from the part of TFA article about developing IoT devices. Also in TFA is the author describing their time working on Firefox Mobile and later Firefox OS in glowing terms.

The Chrome team wasn't that big (though not that small either, in the grand scheme of things), but the marketing spend on Chrome was massive. Way more than Mozilla could ever have afforded for Firefox.

And for a number of years now, Chrome has had both a huge team _and_ huge marketing spend.

And that team size doesn't include the V8 team, the Skia team, and probably a few other areas I'm missing.

> Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch:

Note that excludes the V8 team, which I believe was a decent number itself.

Firefox succeeded because the only other option at the time was IE6 and Firefox was far superior to IE6, especially among developers. It was Firefox that first gave us developer tools. Do you remember web development in the days before developer tools?

And Firefox saved the Web, and the Web saved non-Windows platforms. Let's not forget that.

Actually the Web killed the GNU/Linux desktop.

Thanks to the Web applications, POSIX became irrelevant for desktops, ability to run a web browser is enough regardless of the kernel.

Google can switch the kernel in ChromeOS for whatever they feel like and no one will notice.

> Actually the Web killed the GNU/Linux desktop.

The web also nurtured the GNU/Linux server. Apache on Linux slaughtered IIS on Windows and itself got killed by Nginx on Linux in turn. The web giveth, the web taketh away...

The majority of web stacks, regardless of language, run on Linux.

ISP providers choose GNU/Linux because one cannot argue against free (gratis) that works good enough.

All the programming languages I care and use for web applications have zero dependencies on OS specific APIs, some of which I can even run bare metal or on an unikernel, with zero code changes.

The cloud concept, Web APIs and serverless executions, the OS of server running my web application is irrelevant, thanks to rich runtimes.

As for Apache and IIS, they are pretty much alive outside HN bubble.

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...

I don't think it's bad that Google, and you and I, have an easier time of switching to and from Linux kernels.

The web, specifically Electron, is why I can run a bunch of modern applications on my Linux desktop and I don't have to switch to another OS to use eg. Discord.

Being able to learn from FF's mistakes was huge. They took a lot of good people from Mozilla to boot.

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