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It seems to me that browsers are a counter-example: there was IE and Firefox and all of a sudden, Chrome wrecked both of them. I believe they succeeded thanks

It seems to me that browsers are a counter-example: there was IE and Firefox and all of a sudden, Chrome wrecked both of them. I believe they succeeded thanks to their huge resources, their popularity and their good insight, but which of these factors was the main one?

fabrice_d 9y ago
50% a good product, 50% spending billions in ads, bundling deals and nagging people to install chrome when visiting Google properties.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I swear I had to make sure to download the Flash installer without the Chrome bundle for a number of years...
  - H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
    I just use chrome as my primary Flash program now, as it seems to bundle it's own version regardless of what I have installed.
- sgift 9y ago
  I have a feeling that behavior played a (small?) role when the EU decided to fine Google for abusing their market position to pressure themselves into the shopping comparison market - they saw what happened the last time Google did that.
r00fus 9y ago
I think huge resources wins more often than not. Even more so in our corruption-enabled environment today. Rule of law or better ideas? Meet billions of dollars. We all know who wins ... justice delayed long enough is justice denied.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller. I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser. Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do. Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch: https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.html https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.h... https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    I don't think it is about the team itself, but the resources Google could swing round to push Chrome on consumers.
    - nostrademons 9y ago
      Chrome was already on a hockey-stick growth curve before the distribution deals started. I remember being in the TGIF where their Founder's Award was announced and one of the questions was "Isn't it a bit premature to give them this award?" (it was 8 months after launch, the Mac version wasn't out yet, and they had about 5% market share) and Larry pointed to the growth chart and said "They've already won, the rest of the world just doesn't know it yet." I'd actually switched over to Chrome before joining Google, and told all my family to switch, and it was apparent at launch that it was just a better browser. Once you're at the point where your users tell their friends to switch to your product, there's basically nothing your competition can do to stop you other than massively improve their own product, because you're getting large and exponentially-growing amounts of free advertising.
irrational 9y ago
Firefox succeeded because the only other option at the time was IE6 and Firefox was far superior to IE6, especially among developers. It was Firefox that first gave us developer tools. Do you remember web development in the days before developer tools?
- ploxiln 9y ago
  And Firefox saved the Web, and the Web saved non-Windows platforms. Let's not forget that.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Actually the Web killed the GNU/Linux desktop. Thanks to the Web applications, POSIX became irrelevant for desktops, ability to run a web browser is enough regardless of the kernel. Google can switch the kernel in ChromeOS for whatever they feel like and no one will notice.
    - sangnoir 9y ago
      > Actually the Web killed the GNU/Linux desktop. The web also nurtured the GNU/Linux server. Apache on Linux slaughtered IIS on Windows and itself got killed by Nginx on Linux in turn. The web giveth, the web taketh away... The majority of web stacks, regardless of language, run on Linux.
      - pjmlp 9y ago
        ISP providers choose GNU/Linux because one cannot argue against free (gratis) that works good enough. All the programming languages I care and use for web applications have zero dependencies on OS specific APIs, some of which I can even run bare metal or on an unikernel, with zero code changes. The cloud concept, Web APIs and serverless executions, the OS of server running my web application is irrelevant, thanks to rich runtimes. As for Apache and IIS, they are pretty much alive outside HN bubble. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/ https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...
hkmurakami 9y ago
Being able to learn from FF's mistakes was huge. They took a lot of good people from Mozilla to boot.

fabrice_d 9y ago

50% a good product, 50% spending billions in ads, bundling deals and nagging people to install chrome when visiting Google properties.

digi_owl 9y ago
I swear I had to make sure to download the Flash installer without the Chrome bundle for a number of years...
- H4CK3RM4N 9y ago
  I just use chrome as my primary Flash program now, as it seems to bundle it's own version regardless of what I have installed.
sgift 9y ago
I have a feeling that behavior played a (small?) role when the EU decided to fine Google for abusing their market position to pressure themselves into the shopping comparison market - they saw what happened the last time Google did that.

r00fus 9y ago

I think huge resources wins more often than not. Even more so in our corruption-enabled environment today. Rule of law or better ideas? Meet billions of dollars. We all know who wins ... justice delayed long enough is justice denied.

nostrademons 9y ago
Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller. I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser. Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do. Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch: https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.html https://s.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome-team.h... https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html https://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/09/google-chrome.html It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I don't think it is about the team itself, but the resources Google could swing round to push Chrome on consumers.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    Chrome was already on a hockey-stick growth curve before the distribution deals started. I remember being in the TGIF where their Founder's Award was announced and one of the questions was "Isn't it a bit premature to give them this award?" (it was 8 months after launch, the Mac version wasn't out yet, and they had about 5% market share) and Larry pointed to the growth chart and said "They've already won, the rest of the world just doesn't know it yet." I'd actually switched over to Chrome before joining Google, and told all my family to switch, and it was apparent at launch that it was just a better browser. Once you're at the point where your users tell their friends to switch to your product, there's basically nothing your competition can do to stop you other than massively improve their own product, because you're getting large and exponentially-growing amounts of free advertising.

irrational 9y ago

Firefox succeeded because the only other option at the time was IE6 and Firefox was far superior to IE6, especially among developers. It was Firefox that first gave us developer tools. Do you remember web development in the days before developer tools?

ploxiln 9y ago
And Firefox saved the Web, and the Web saved non-Windows platforms. Let's not forget that.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Actually the Web killed the GNU/Linux desktop. Thanks to the Web applications, POSIX became irrelevant for desktops, ability to run a web browser is enough regardless of the kernel. Google can switch the kernel in ChromeOS for whatever they feel like and no one will notice.
  - sangnoir 9y ago
    > Actually the Web killed the GNU/Linux desktop. The web also nurtured the GNU/Linux server. Apache on Linux slaughtered IIS on Windows and itself got killed by Nginx on Linux in turn. The web giveth, the web taketh away... The majority of web stacks, regardless of language, run on Linux.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      ISP providers choose GNU/Linux because one cannot argue against free (gratis) that works good enough. All the programming languages I care and use for web applications have zero dependencies on OS specific APIs, some of which I can even run bare metal or on an unikernel, with zero code changes. The cloud concept, Web APIs and serverless executions, the OS of server running my web application is irrelevant, thanks to rich runtimes. As for Apache and IIS, they are pretty much alive outside HN bubble. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/ https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve...

hkmurakami 9y ago

Being able to learn from FF's mistakes was huge. They took a lot of good people from Mozilla to boot.