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Comment by bobthebee | Hacker News Reader

The 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 business team in the next 3 years, before the deal comes up for renewal.

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I'm sure Mozilla feels very precarious getting such a huge chunk of money from a single source. But:

- 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.

Your right that for Google whether a user is using Chrome or using Firefox with Google Search it shouldn't matter much on the bottom line and they don't have to worry too much about feature support from Firefox as they are quick to propose/ adopt standards.

Even though I prefer Google's search results to Bing's, I feel the "open web" might be a better place if Mozilla unseated Google's search monopoly by signing with Bing. Mozilla does have a search deal with Microsoft, but it's for second place on the list. If Bing was Firefox's default search engine, Google would have some healthy search competition.

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.

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.

Investors don't invest if there are no shares to get. And, there are no shares to get. And that's the whole point of Mozilla's existence.

Thus, there's only such deals and donations. An investor would therefore need to donate, to support Mozilla.

I think nl was suggesting that investors could raise money to buy Firefox's search spot and then create a search engine. Imagine if some VC firm raised $301M to outbid Google and then signed a deal with DuckDuckGo.

If DuckDuckGo could really make $301+ M on search in Firefox, they would bid that. Reality, they can't. There is no value created in the imagined middle man investor.

1) Create a company

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)

Profit how? From your search engine?

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...

99% of FF users would just switch to Google as soon as they install it.

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

http://blekko.com/

http://duckduckgo.com/

http://www.gigablast.com/

http://www.yandex.com/

http://www.baidu.com/

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.

"""99% of FF users would just switch to Google as soon as they install it. I assume you can back that up somehow? Most evidence I've seen indicates that the majority of people don't change defaults.""""

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.

So is your argument that Google should have paid nothing to be the default search engine, because people will switch, or is it that $300 million is an appropriate about for the 1% that won't change the default?

(Btw, why do you quote like that? HN docs on formatting are here: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

"""So is your argument that Google should have paid nothing to be the default search engine, because people will switch, or is it that $300 million is an appropriate about for the 1% that won't change the default?"""

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.

Oh, and another thing: people already switched MULTIPLE times from Yahoo to Lycos to Altavista to Google.

Pre Google people switched search engines all the time -as soon as a better one come along.

Mozilla is not your traditional corporation. Money always comes second. Openess and such values always come first. Always.

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.

I like Mozilla, but I think you're stretching "openness" here. I don't see a lot of openness in this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=471561

  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.

Openness would mean asking Russian users to vote for the default search engine before striking a deal.

No, openness means you can take the Firefox source and release your own (rebranded) browser with a different search engine. This is exactly what Iceweasel is; in fact, I think they even use DuckDuckGo for searching, but I could be wrong because I don't have it installed.

We are talking about different opennesses here. I'm not arguing that their browser is not open source. This thread is about bidding for the default search engine in Firefox and Mozilla's business decisions. Obviously, Yandex outbid Google in the Russian market. The switch from Google was based on money. The decision was not made in the open. I interpret this as "we value openness, but to keep this organization afloat to continue making open source browser we need to make _closed_ deals with search engines", which looks like an acceptable compromise to me. But it's nowhere near the complete openness as I understand it. If your goal is pure philanthropic -- to make the best free browser -- you base your decisions ONLY on what's best for users, not on an acceptable compromise somewhere inbetween [who gets you the most money] and [what's best for users].

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.

> Obviously, Yandex outbid Google in the Russian market. The switch from Google was based on money.

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.

Actually I think it is looking more sustainable now that bing has high interest in the position as well. As long as Firefox holds a market share similar to its current one and bing holds its market share to keep ms interested in pushing it the decent sized deals should continue and probably grow.

What would to suggest as an alternate revenue source?

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