We are technically and legally a non-profit organization. That means that all of the value that we create is owned by the public and cannot be distributed among or to private persons as you would with shareholders. And so that’s the legal mechanism that re-enforces the Internet as public infrastructure.
Tell us about your relationship with Google. You have a revenue-sharing relationship with Google. What about Google’s Chrome (Web browser) and what impact will it have on the relationship because there is a sense among certain people in the community that the folks that’ll switch to Chrome will come from the Firefox group.
That’s a set of related questions. The first one is what impact does the revenue relationship have on the product or what impact does Chrome have on the revenue relationship. You know, I’ve said for many years that we keep the revenue relationship with Google separate from our product. So as to Firefox, the revenue relationship is irrelevant to what the product is or becomes. We’ll develop Firefox as best we can; as we think best.
Firefox has a large share of the early adopters among its users and so I think we all expect that many of those early adopters will go look at Chrome. We expect most of them will come back. And there’s a bunch of reasons for those but clearly some will stay. We expect Chrome to have some market share; we don’t actually expect it to, like be a giant or take-off or any of those things but it will certainly have some market share.
And it is quite possible that the early—the first few shares, the first few points of market share—come from Firefox. I’m not sure that’s anybody’s particular goal and we intend to win back...those users.
You know, we expect that some of these people may stay with Chrome for—I don’t know; release, two releases, whatever—and come back. So, we’re not actually particularly worried about losing many of our users.
There is that perception again that Google is trying to do the same thing that Microsoft did 10 years ago when you talked about the monoculture. How is Google different?
First of all, Google’s different because Microsoft created a setting in which they had 99% market share on the OS (operating system) and 97% across the border—operating system, browser and desktop productivity apps. We have not seen Google remotely approach that setting now. And I know that the Google relationship with Yahoo! and Microsoft feels unbalanced. Like Google is clearly winning and that’s true! But imagine what it would be like if Google were 97% market share holder.
Second thing is that Google’s DNA is clearly about the Web..., about the movement of information around the Web which can’t all be controlled. So, I think their DNA is different than Microsoft’s... But, certainly there are concerns that Google’s becoming not just the powerhouse of our era but a monolith. You certainly can’t toss them off, I think. You know it’s always worth watching. You know Google, I think, will speak to this and I think they understand the concern. They understand that people are watching so to some extent it is a slightly different setting...