Comments on: Why is Chrome Eric Schmidt’s favorite Google Product?

By: Dave Jeyes

Dave Jeyes — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 18:50:19 +0000

@Peter

It’s not offensive to say that CEOs like great ideas that also have income potential. And your back of the napkin math doesn’t include the income *potential* from search queries as Chrome grows.

Your motivation might be to serve the end user, but there’s no doubt that Eric would want to monetize that effort.

By: Peter Kasting

Peter Kasting — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:11:57 +0000

Note for clarity: I don’t have hard numbers on either the income Google makes from search queries or the costs of developing the browser, but I can do back-of-the-envelope calculations based on Firefox’ marketshare and Mozilla’s publicly-stated revenue from Google. Also, my opinions are purely my own, not Google’s (though I would hope that’d be obvious).

By: Peter Kasting

Peter Kasting — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:07:52 +0000

As a Chromium developer I find your article to be both silly and slightly insulting.

Do the math on what kind of profit Google makes on queries from the browser and you’ll see that the benefits from Google Chrome (over, for example, the deal with Firefox) are insignificant, likely not even enough to pay for the development costs.

Google has stated repeatedly that its goal with Google Chrome is to advance the web platform and that the financial benefits it receives are due to the broad phenomenon of more people using the web for more things. I’m not sure why it’s so hard to take that at face value. Recently announced products like Google Wave are doubtless difficult to make work with IE.

My motivation as a developer is to serve the end user best, and apparently Eric feels that the decisions made to do that have been good ones. To suggest that our motivation is raw profit from address-bar-based search queries cheapens the enormous effort we’ve put into being “as simple as possible, but no simpler”.