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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla competes with Google in the web browser market and is moving into mobile operating systems. Why would people expect Google to commit resources toward helping them do those things?

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They've been sponsoring them for years, they also still sponsor OpenStreetMaps which is a competitor used by bing and apple https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org2/google/gsoc2015/ope...

They also sponsor Github and many others.

Better mapping data from OpenStreetMaps can facilitate better data in Google Maps. Maps are still in the data collection phase.The long play is self-driving cars not an app in the app store.

It's hard to see a business case for Google that includes supporting Mozilla. That Google has done it in the past may be more symptomatic of big dumb inertia than anything else.

GSoC isn't something which is done because of an immediate "business case", aside from some long-term industry health stuff that benefits Google (and everyone else in the industry).

Don't assume this is something political. A lot of very good organizations were not accepted this year, Mozilla being one of them.

I'm not making political assumptions. I am assuming that businesses act to protect their business interests and that assisting a competitor compete in core markets is not in a company's interests.

I'd be happy to see a business case put forward for Google helping Mozzilla develop a mobile operating system to compete with Android.

I doubt they run any of the GSOC decisions through any sort of business case analysis. $150,000 is tiddlywinks to a corporation that generates billions on a monthly tempo. Hand wavy good feels are plenty enough justification for that level of spending.

(That's a ball park estimate of how much it would cost to fund and administrate several projects)

Your premise that Google contains enough business incompetence in enough of the right places to fund a direct competitor explains why they have funded Mozilla in the past. It doesn't really offer much explanation as to why Google did not fund them this year.

Conversely, even the minimum business process of some VP looking at the list and saying, "We are not going to fund a competitor," Occam Razors this year's events.

Google haven't supported a number of major projects this year (including some that they directly benefit from), it's not just Mozilla. One assumes, therefore, that the GSoC management decided that GSoC should support more smaller projects this year.

EDIT: If Google only wanted to fund things that directly benefit them, you'd've thought they'd do just that, none of this faffing about with an application process and only funding student work, no?

My premise is that it is not incompetent to ignore the business impact of GSOC.

If giving $150,000 to Mozilla materially erodes Google's business, giving $150,000 to Mozilla isn't the actual problem.

"Every thing was going fine for us, but then the CEO didn't pick up a penny he saw on the street and the whole thing fell apart."

Your premise, that the only possible reason to fund a competitor is incompetence, on the other hand, strikes me as absurd.

If they weigh business cases at all, they might have considered the value of goodwill they generate for funding competitors to outweigh any loss(es).

Aside: how does Google benefit from sponsoring Blender3D, in your immediate-profit-driven opinion?

I don't think anyone is claiming that they benefit from sponsoring non-competitors, only that they would suffer a disadvantage from funding a competitor, and that this MAY have weighed into their decision-making.

Don't assume it isn't. In previous years they saw Chrome and Firefox as combined bulwarks against IE's dominance of the browser market.

Now that Chrome dominates and Mozilla is working on a competitor to android, well...

Looking over who else was not accepted and who was I would guess this more about spreading the love around than blocking out the competition. TFA says Mozilla has been in several times in the past and is encouraged to do so again next year.

I'm pretty sure the bad press generated by Google singling Mozilla out would be far worse than any gain they would get.

> Why would people expect Google to commit resources toward helping them do those things?

Because Google doesn't care how people use the web and they want them to use it as much as possible, whether it's with FF, IE, or Safari.

Once they get to the web they will be using Google products, and that's what they care about.

> Because Google doesn't care how people use the web

What you say matches Google's marketing copy, but the aggressive marketing of Chrome (up to an including shady deals with other software to install Chrome in addition to itself) suggests to me that their marketing copy doesn't match their actual actions (though it may match what some of the engineering team on Chrome _thinks_ is going on).

At the moment they had been (in this context anyway) doing it for a number of years.

I am aware. I read the article.

So did Google suddenly realize they are competing with Firefox? Proof by contradiction says your theory is wrong (true for n=2015, false for n=2014 & earlier)

Reductio ad Absurdum [1] is available for deductive reasoning [2]. The inductive step is available to inductive proofs [3], but the difference between 2014 demonstrates it inapplicability here [via contradiction no less!].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deductive_reasoning

[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_induction [3]

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