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Mozilla is a legacy browser business that's mostly surviving off of Marissa Mayer's quixotic obsession with building a search business for Yahoo!. Their mobile
by cwyers 11y ago
Mozilla is a legacy browser business that's mostly surviving off of Marissa Mayer's quixotic obsession with building a search business for Yahoo!. Their mobile ambitions have thus far been a rounding error in terms of overall market share, and Firefox on iOS is a massive capitulation to Apple in that it uses Apple's HTML and JavaScript engines, not Mozilla's, so even if it succeeds (SPOILER ALERT: it won't) it mostly just helps them keep their legacy browser viable for longer because it lets iOS users share bookmarks between phone and desktop, it doesn't help them grow marketshare or fight the Webkit/Blink duoculture. And they're developing Rust, despite their constant insistence that Servo isn't a product. (Although I think that's largely a product of them remembering how Netscape killed itself through rewriting a browser from scratch, and not wanting to repeat the experience.) I don't think they have the resources to open up another front in this war, much less one as ambitious as an open social network (or one that bites the hand that feeds them as much as an open search engine -- they're not being funded by Google anymore, but they're funded by Google's rivals in search).
- Sven7 11y agoAnd you think Facebook doesn't have powerful rivals? You think the content industry or the advertising industry that keeps it running likes the fact they are beholden to one network. This is a matter of using some imagination and presenting the case to the right people.
- cwyers 11y agoI am unsure as to why those powerful rivals of Facebook would want to pay Mozilla, a company with no special expertise in building a social network, to build a social network. Especially since the most well-funded company that is a direct rival of Facebook is probably Google, which is the company that Mozilla just got away from being dependent on, and has their own social network already that they probably would prefer to this hypothetical Mozilla social network.
- Sven7 11y agoLook at the content world, whether its Disney, the movie studios, Comcast, the news networks, ESPN, HBO etc. why aren't they putting their top quality content on Youtube? Why are they building their own infra? Why are Amazon and Netflix making their own content? The most simplified reason - after whats happened with the music and news industry, the content producers don't trust Silicon Valley. And most importantly marketing of content cannot happen without Facebook today. And that's just media. There is the telecom sector (Verizon, Vodafone, AT&T) which believes all kinds of interesting things about the traffic silicon valley generates. There is the advertising industry which has seen more and more of the data and tools they used, being built into FB and offered directly to their customers. There is Apple which has suddenly realized their user base might pay for security, privacy and non ad supported networks. There are all kinds of other players in tech from Twitter to Linkdin to Quora to Snapchat to Uber who are constantly worrying about how their data might overnight start flowing into FB\Whatsapp\Instagram etc. And this is just the US. There are all kinds of extremely resourceful entities outside who would love leverage against FB and Google. Mozilla is the ideal non threatening entity they might get behind. Nobody is expecting FB to be dethroned anytime soon, but that doesn't mean any of them are enjoying the control they hand over to them. Tapping into that frustration, can result in a more even playing field in both search and social.
- cwyers 11y agoSo you're saying that Twitter might give Mozilla money to develop a social network? Twitter already has a social network and no money.