Remember a few days ago when I wrote about the ecosystem that surrounds Google? I said that Google isn’t just Google; it’s every other company, website, blog and mashup that has built a business model on the back of the search giant. And lo and behold, into my inbox appears a gift from ZDNet, tailor-made to reiterate my point:

Mozilla’s revenue, which includes Mozilla’s foundation and corporation, came in at $66.8 million in 2006…

Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler at Mozilla, wrote in a blog:

“As in 2005 the vast majority of this revenue is associated with the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox, and the majority of that is from Google…”

It doesn’t take a big leap to conclude Google is bankrolling Mozilla… Mozilla gets 85 percent of its revenue from Google. The latest Mozilla-Google contract expires in November 2008.

Mozilla’s financial statement really puts the browser battle into perspective. It’s not Firefox vs. IE as much as it is Google vs. Microsoft. [emphasis mine]

Google vs. Microsoft is quite different to Firefox vs. IE. So how does this affect your perception of the open-source browser, if at all?

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 2:13 am and is filed under Microsoft, Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.