I did not realize currency trade was constrained to your sensibilities; my bad. Private property, free markets! Until two parties enter into an arrangement then you demand they open themselves to business with others?
Right, but the argument goes that the only reason Google pays Mozilla so much is to prop up the competition. Google may have calculated that it would be preferable to pay the hundreds of millions, rather than have Firefox die just leaving Chrome/Safari.
Thus, it's not really a sustainable business, but rather being the lucky benefactor of some scheme. Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers. I wouldn't call that a sustainable business.
Mozilla's value to Google might be only being "the other guy", but Mozilla is valuable to me (a consumer) because they are producing a Firefox, which is a product I consider valuable.
Obviously I would prefer that Mozilla can find a self-sustainable business model to support Firefox development. But if I had to choose between "Mozilla doesn't exist" and "Mozilla exists only because it gets money from Google", then I choose the latter.
Firefox is developed by the Mozilla Corporation. The closest thing to paying for Firefox is probably donating to the Mozilla Foundation, but that money is used for education and advocacy.
That's a choice made by the Mozilla Corporation, not a technical impossibility.
Google Chrome is not a "sustainable business" either; it just gets funded by Google's other business activities (mainly Google ads). Arguably, Safari is the only one that people (indirectly) pay for when they purchase an Apple device.
> Their value is only in being 'the other guy', not in actually creating a valuable product for consumers.
I use Firefox purely because I feel it works better than Chrome.
Google isn’t a sustainable business without paying enormous sums to remain in business, without a whole lot of political concessions that have been made to hype USian markets.
What is and isn’t a sustainable business is relative to how frequently you have been told what is and isn’t sustainable business.
This is not true. There are so many examples of 2nd mover who became the dominant force, such as Zoom, Photoshop, MS Office, IntelliJ.
To attribute a success product purely to luck is also intellectually lazy. There are often so many factors, in many cases conflicting, that change of course of a product. It is impossible to say luck is the main factor, although it is usually a factor.
Thats what free market allows.
I’m highlighting social hypocrisy.
Google isn’t sustainable without policy concessions; the market value gibberish is added onto something that is propped up by government looking the other way to sell the idea to people who don’t understand finance is an ephemeral con game. IMO “big software products and services” are only big business because it’s also profitable to politicians insider trading schemes. Open source and for hire software workers and ridding ourselves of big corp protectionism provisions in law and policy would be great. Very little of this distributed ledger and accounting nonsense has value to the average worker; their day to day is being a worker. Make the minority of “successes” compete on an open labor market instead of giving Bezos a pass. Having 25 people willing to chuck $50k each at my dreams.
Make him a gig worker too.