Google and Mozilla – A new “Complicated” relationship
When you are rich and friendly residential neighbour goes into having competition with you, what do you do? That’s what Mozilla has to figure out now that Google has brought out its new Chrome browser to compete with Firefox.
Mozilla and Google were always considered as best of friends, right down to living next door to each other in Silicon Valley. For most of that period, Google was a mentor and a patron to Mozilla as it relighted the browser wars and fought the good fight against the likes of Microsoft and Apple. Now, Google is evolving and will obviously be backing its own Chrome product and things are surely bound to change here.
Mozilla has even moved across town, physically separating itself from its old mentor, and is working to hold onto it’s share of the browser marketplace against three giant competitors instead of the earlier two, according to a New York Times story. Google, until now, has not yet made the kind of inroads that say Mozilla and Apple have done against Internet Explorer, but you can never count out a company like Google with its vast knowledgeable team. Mozilla needs to understand and look into the new situation, and to learn to compete with their old friend and new competitor, Google.
There is more at stake here than just the numbers mentioned. Everyone else is in this game for the money. Mozilla is the lone standard-bearer of the Open Source Philosophy, in which everyone can pitch in and anyone can get a copy of and customize the code. Mozilla operates in a completely different world that its competitors.
Sandeep Krishnamurthy, the director of the business administration program at the University of Washington at Bothell, recently wrote a paper on Firefox’s success, says “Mozilla is about a community coming together and saying it can compete with the largest software company in the world. There really is nothing like it.”
Google says that they are not out to harm Mozilla and its status in the market and so far they have not. Google Chrome only controls about 2 percent of the market while Mozilla is still growing and now stands at around 22.5 percent. Although there is little fear at either company that Google will stop supporting Mozilla, everyone also has to admit that Google will continue to feel business and financial pressure to use and promote Chrome.
As far as Mozilla are concerned, they have vowed to keep working harder to keep Firefox viable by continuing to improve their product, and that their areas of clear leadership in the browser war may become fewer. Still, Mozilla and Firefox now have a very strong track record and they, too, will be hard to ignore as the struggle for browser supremacy continues.
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Tags: apple, chrome, complicated, firefox, google, internet explorer, microsoft, mozilla, news, open source, relationship
