4 ms·

> A well-funded contender in the browser wars could almost certainly appear tomorrow and grab as much market share in the next 3 to 5 year period as Firefox cur

> A well-funded contender in the browser wars could almost certainly appear tomorrow and grab as much market share in the next 3 to 5 year period as Firefox currently has and do it on total operating costs that measure half of Mozilla's marketing spend (in actual dollars). This is true but it also has nothing to do with anything Mozilla is currently doing. It is actually a business maxim of Jim Barksdale [1] (and others probably) who used to be an executive at Netscape. Barksdale said that you could move into a market with a large concentration of users and steal a percentage of them away by just offering an alternative. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Barksdale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_L._Barksdale

cxr 5y ago
This is worded like a contradiction or a correction, but that is in fact exactly my point. On offer is the implicit suggestion that Mozilla needs half a billion a year to maintain its current position. But Mozilla's numbers are so low and Barksdale's maxim is well-founded enough that you don't have to take a huge leap in logic to see that that argument doesn't hold up. That it would be possible for a nobody to appear and get the same results means that Mozilla's costs aren't justified.
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  The two things are different though. Maintaining a position is not the same as building a position. If Barksdale is right then the existing players in a market need to work to ensure that they can't lose market share from new entrants.
  - cxr 5y ago
    You're not following the implication all the way through. If a player M controls some "share" in the game and an independent contender C can appear and match M's current share on <1/10 M's current costs, then M's costs to maintain its position relative to all others are not greater than C's costs. If M₀ is M's current offering, then M can carve out part of its budget to fund the entry of their own, controlled Cₘ, independent of M₀, and when Cₘ reaches maturity and matches M's share from M₀ alone, they can let M₀ die—or keep both M₀ and Cₘ around, having advanced their take with greater efficiency than all the costs it would have required to make the same gains with M₀ alone. This assumes that the share from Cₘ comes entirely from those competing with M. This won't be the case; M₀ itself will suffer. But even in the worst case scenario, the share from Cₘ can come entirely from eroding the share of M₀, i.e., a simple transfer. This also won't happen. However, even in the event that it does happen, it's still a net win for M, having used Cₘ to cut their costs by >90% under the regime with M₀.

cxr 5y ago

This is worded like a contradiction or a correction, but that is in fact exactly my point. On offer is the implicit suggestion that Mozilla needs half a billion a year to maintain its current position. But Mozilla's numbers are so low and Barksdale's maxim is well-founded enough that you don't have to take a huge leap in logic to see that that argument doesn't hold up. That it would be possible for a nobody to appear and get the same results means that Mozilla's costs aren't justified.

pixelgeek 5y ago
The two things are different though. Maintaining a position is not the same as building a position. If Barksdale is right then the existing players in a market need to work to ensure that they can't lose market share from new entrants.
- cxr 5y ago
  You're not following the implication all the way through. If a player M controls some "share" in the game and an independent contender C can appear and match M's current share on <1/10 M's current costs, then M's costs to maintain its position relative to all others are not greater than C's costs. If M₀ is M's current offering, then M can carve out part of its budget to fund the entry of their own, controlled Cₘ, independent of M₀, and when Cₘ reaches maturity and matches M's share from M₀ alone, they can let M₀ die—or keep both M₀ and Cₘ around, having advanced their take with greater efficiency than all the costs it would have required to make the same gains with M₀ alone. This assumes that the share from Cₘ comes entirely from those competing with M. This won't be the case; M₀ itself will suffer. But even in the worst case scenario, the share from Cₘ can come entirely from eroding the share of M₀, i.e., a simple transfer. This also won't happen. However, even in the event that it does happen, it's still a net win for M, having used Cₘ to cut their costs by >90% under the regime with M₀.