Comment by ootachi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ootachi | Hacker News Reader

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That's completely false. You, as a programmer who wants to fork Chrome, do not have the advertising power and reach that Google has. You do not have the Google.com home page. You do not have the ability to air ads during the Super Bowl. You do not have the Google brand. Instead, you have a pile of source code and a compiler.

Despite what people would like to think, technologies do not generally win because of their technical superiority (although Chrome is a damn good browser). They win for innumerable other reasons unrelated to things that engineers do.

The fact is, open source or not, Google has total control over Chrome. The fact that somebody with vastly inferior resources could fork it is not a credible threat to that control.

What about a competitor with comparable resources? Not really challenging your claim, I'm actually just curious. Why don't Google's competitors just use Google's own OSS against them?

Say Facebook acquires Rockmelt, which is based on Chromium. Rockmelt as an independent browser isn't much of a threat, but with Facebook's resources (money, engineering, publicity), they could easily bake in their own social stuff on top of an already amazing browser.

Same thing with Amazon/Kindle and Android.

Well, yeah, those competitors could (leverage Google's OSS against it).

But an open source community, outside of some company control, not as easily if at all.

Take for example Mozilla/Firefox.

Well, didn't it do very well, and in many places, won over IE? It did. But it did it:

(1) Starting with the branding/product/code made by a huge (at the time) company (Netscape).

(2) Having mostly people from said company working on the Mozilla version.

(3) When Netscape died, it almost took Mozilla with it.

(4) Firefox revived the interest in the browser big time, but Firefox lives on a $100M a year Google subsidy.

Would Firefox still be worked at a competitive pace without Google's money?

I seriously doubt it.

Because browser wars are expensive (look at how much money Google had to throw at Chrome to make it the #2 browser), and browsers are hard -- finding people who are qualified to work on browsers is not easy.

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