Google recently announced a program where they will pay you “up to” $1 for each person you convert to Firefox. And the helpful folks at Explorer Destroyer have written website scripts that help you encourage your users to switch to Firefox.
Google becomes stronger when all the elements that sit beneath them in the stack are commoditized. And this $1 bounty they are now offering encourages the commoditization of the browser that sits directly beneath Google. You may recall that Microsoft did quite well by building a proprietary layer (Windows and Office) on a commoditized stack (PCs).
Google is also trying to commoditize the network between them and their users: see my Googsun article where Jonathan Schwartz discusses Google’s commitment to an “open, neutral, interoperable network”.
Isn’t it a remote possibility that Google fears that Microsoft is going to use the next / future revs of IE to go after them by disabling Google Ads and ads in general.
It will only take a FireFox Adblock extension-like feature on behalf of Microsoft to turn off all ads by default to cut off Google money supply. Remember at one point of time popup ads were all over the place and Google via its toolbar made them opt-in. Well Microsoft can certainly return a favor and make any kinds of Ads on page opt-in.
I think the $1 bounty for pushing Firefox is just a defensive tactic on Google’s behalf.
This is not leaving Mircosoft many options to secure a monopoly…The only one I can think of is altering your windows OS with automatic updates so it disallows any non IE browser….but wait a second…They got into lots of trouble last time they did something like this…
Here is a great post concerning Microsoft’s current state of affairs:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051110.html
Wow…sorry about all the posts, but I just saw another great post by Cringely. Theories on how they will dethrone Microsoft. Pretty interesting:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html
Interesting post… I think it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens with Google over the next 2 or 3 years. It seems like only yesterday that I was trying to persuade friends and family to give the little-known search engine a go because ‘it just works really well’!
I agree – by positioning to compete based on process rather than product, Google really is creating an internet-based commodity business as outlined in Schwartz’s article. Almost anything created on the internet today is really fodder for Google, until we see a disruptive innovation some day in the future…
I think some of the recent criticisms of Google’s product efforts miss the point that Google is like the Dell of the internet – relentlessly improving their processes to maintain its position as the search engine king. Google is getting harder and harder to topple every day by virtue of their business model, probably, and its forays into things like webmail and RSS are really just side businesses.