text stringlengths 0 2.08k |
|---|
Safari - same thing. Jobs was doing the hot new Macs in 2001-2002, he launched the iPod around then (2002, I think) - he needed a browser. And it was a secret at first; Safari became public I think in 2003, and it was important to have something that kept up with the Joneses and was shiny in that Steve Jobs sense. It w... |
\[15:10\] But unfortunately - and this is what lead to WebKit - it got kind of checklisted as "Done" and then Jobs didn't really invest in it. He put it in the same sort of organisation chart where you have ten people working on AppKit, ten people working on WebKit, ten people working on Cocoa - whatever. And it wasn't... |
The same story sort of repeats. As companies like Microsoft and Apple check off the browser box in their list of to-do's, they kind of neglect it, because it's not their main business. Opera did have for a long time the browser as their main business, and while they certainly (under Jon von Tetzchner, who's doing Vival... |
Safari was not going to take back a whole lot of market share just from the MacBooks - or whatever they were; the iBooks of the time, the iMacs. It really took Firefox, which got up to 27% share at its peak - it just kept growing, because IE still wasn't good, Microsoft still hadn't quite put their A-team on it. Eventu... |
I think Jobs knew, too. Jobs hated this. He was like, "You can't use WebKit. That's my open source." \[laughter\] He threw a chair against the wall because of Android, which he viewed as stealing his design. But with WebKit it was more like, "That's my source!" But WebKit itself was a fork of KHTML, this very sort of e... |
\[18:08\] And there were lots of other crazy things you could in HTML which Hixie [Ian Hickson] and others wrote up as HTML5 in the WHATWG and now we know that is a living standard. But KHTML didn't do that, and Dave Hyatt at Apple, having jumped from Netscape, had to do that. He's like, "I've gotta do it." So he was p... |
Hyatt, meanwhile - I've told this story in a few places - was being recruited around early 2005 by us, by Google, and another company I'm forgetting. He was kind of on the market because he was fed up because Steve at Apple had indeed checklisted the browser; it wasn't getting enough funding. It was just another ex-kit... |
So Hyatt gets fed up; Flock was being spun up by Bart Decrem alone, from Mozilla, because he wanted to do a dotcom for Firefox in late 2004. It was already non-profit; the answer from the board was no, so Bart said "Okay, I'm gonna do Flock", and what he called it when he first went to get VC funding was "Round Two." I... |
Eventually, Flock failed, but while he was getting funding and recruiting for it, he started recruiting his old buddy, Maciej Stachowiak, whom he knew from Nautilus, where Andry Hertzfeld also had been, which is sort of a more app-ly Linux desktop file manager thing. And Maciej was a force at WebKit, one of the founder... |
I don't think there's any way he would have come to Mozilla, but he did interview at Google, which he hated; they gave him puzzles. I think his name probably redacted in the discovery materials for the so-called Techtopus case. Do you guys know about that? It's a straight up Sherman Clayton antitrust violation. Google,... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[21:05\] Oh, right, right. |
**Brendan Eich:** ...which was suppressing salaries... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Brendan Eich:** The worst -- really nauseating to me was Eric Schmidt sort of cravenly apologizing to Steve Jobs for even daring to talk to some engineers in France who might have been from Next and may have had some Apple relationship; they weren't even necessarily being hired by Apple, but Steve was outraged that t... |
I was having dinner with Sergey and Larry, and Mitchell Baker in early 2005. Sergey comes in late and he says, "Sorry, I just got off the phone with Steve Jobs. He was just screaming, cussing at me. He said 'Don't touch Hyatt'!" So there was this definite restraint of employing a tech talent trade going on there. |
Hyatt didn't go anywhere, he stayed at Apple. One of the prices for Maciej and Hyatt to stay at Apple - I'm not sure how seriously they were ever gonna leave, because Apple's pretty good to its engineers; they're birds in gilded cages. They work very hard, they're very smart, they work on shiny devices and they get wel... |
I think that was a good thing, and it helped give that gift of WebKit to Google, which they secretly started using for Chrome in 2006. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[laughs\] That's great. So it sounds like for the most part all the costs are deferred to create these things by some massive company that has a bunch of other interests. |
**Brendan Eich:** That's right. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And eventually they get bored with it, because they don't have direct sustainability. Mozilla does have direct sustainability kind of baked in, right? it does generate revenue from the browser to fund the browser, correct? |
**Brendan Eich:** Well, you could say that about Google too, because it's all search revenue and for Google, Chrome is just a lower traffic acquisition cost device. Right now I think to get search fields in other browsers from Google is very hard. Bing is still competitive in the U.S., it has 20-something percent, depe... |
Google was sharing revenue with Firefox in the original deal we did at such a clip that we got alarmed and we thought, "Oh no, we're gonna have trouble taking this as a non-profit; we're gonna have too much money. We're gonna look like a giant billion-dollar hole in Eric Schmidt's balance sheet by January 2006." So we ... |
\[24:01\] Google got very worried in the mid-2000s about Microsoft coming back with IE. They'd done IE 7 in response to Firefox. It still wasn't that great, but they started distributing it again; it was still the default browser. They'd gotten in trouble in Europe with the European Commission, so they had to make a br... |
Google had started selling Google Desktop and Google Toolbar, and getting some Windows presence through that. Sundar Pichai did a lot of that work, which I think in the view of Schmidt and Sergey and Larry saved the day. If Microsoft in 2008 or so, with Bing being a new thing, has suddenly said "Hey, we're setting sear... |
This was just to show, like you said, that you need a big company with another business that can bear the cost, and actually find the cost preferable to paying for outside sources of search traffic for instance, or to - in Microsoft's case - have a browser and fend off Netscape or compete with Apple; or, in Apple's cas... |
This dynamic keeps things still somewhat balanced in the standards bodies, so everyone worries - if Google gets too powerful, will they start overreaching and waste time on stuff? And they already did, right? They did native client, they did Dart - that stuff wasted a lot of time. But they also invested in the web, and... |
The sunk cost problem is not just a one-time thing, it's an ongoing thing. Browsers cost. And you mentioned Mozilla... I can't really comment on their economics because Verizon bought Yahoo! and I have no insight, and even the Yahoo! deal was after I left. But just from the outside, looking at the balance sheets and th... |
\[27:07\] It's tricky doing a browser, especially if you don't have a lot of users, or if you have a declining user base, and Chrome is starting to become the -- I wouldn't say the monopoly, but the senior duopoly partner. It's tricky making a case for another browser being funded only by search revenue, for instance. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Given all that, I find it interesting that what you decided to do was build another browser. We've gotta take a quick break before we dive right into that, so we'll be back in just a few moments with Brendan Eich. |
**Break:** \[27:39\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** In our last segment we were talking a little bit about sustainability models for browsers. Could you talk about how Brave makes money? |
**Brendan Eich:** We're a startup, we're burning right now, so... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** How Brave plans to make money - let's put it that way. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Venture capital! \[laughter\] |
**Brendan Eich:** You know, you can still get, as I say, search revenue. We actually have search partners already. DuckDuckGo is a search partner, and we're making lunch money from them... Which is good. And we help build that up, because people who skew toward Brave do like DuckDuckGO. That's an up-and-coming search e... |
\[30:02\] If we didn't make Google the default, we suspect a lot of our users would reset from our default DuckDuckGo to Google, and then we would be stuck, because ethically and in the market we wouldn't wanna override their choice. We could never get them back on a default that might be a better search engine down th... |
This actually happened to Firefox - it's public information, people studied this identity-solving search engine log. If you look at what happened with the Yahoo! search deal, in December 2014 they made Yahoo! the default search for Firefox, and we'd had Google since Phoenix, since forever. We had a good commercial deal... |
We don't wanna do that in Brave, but we will make some search revenue from people who choose DuckDuckGo. And as the game theories would suggest, all the non-Google search engines generally are willing to pay for non-default traffic; that is for those users who choose to switch to DuckDuckGo or Bing. They'll pay better ... |
Another idea we have is the microdonations we're already supporting with the Brave payments beta. If you use Brave right now, since 0.12 one or two, you can actually get money into your user wallet and have it sort of deterministically anonymously and with low transaction costs distributed among your top sites. You can... |
\[32:47\] That means we get some small fee-based revenue off of that, but we have to cover our infrastructure costs. I'm not sure that will make us a lot of money either, but that's another way we'll make some money. I think if everybody who used Brave donated $5/month, they'd be essentially replacing their average cos... |
I think it would be nice for that to happen, but I don't think that will happen. I think the donor cohort will decline as a fraction of our user base. NPR gets like 30% listeners donating, but they do pledge drives, they're a nonprofit. We are getting early adopters skewing toward donating. We have like 11,000 wallets ... |
We think it's a good deal for publishers too, because they don't have to worry about the lost ad revenue if they're getting these donations trickled back to them through the Brave payments. |
I mentioned Brave payments as an auto micro-donation system, but there's general ecommerce we could do with Brave payments. If it's just on the Bitcoin blockchain, it could not involve us, there's no need for an intermediary (that's one of the beauties of Bitcoin) and we wouldn't make anything. But we'd like to enable ... |
Generally, there's too much friction buying things on the web, still. Obviously, if you have an iTunes or Amazon credit card relationship, it's one click and away you go. But you don't wanna do that with every ecommerce site you might wanna buy something from. It's kind of scary to give over your credit card to another... |
We'd like to make frictionless small payments a thing, a web standard, if you will. And there's nothing proprietary about it, we'd like to have Brave just be a pioneer, just like pop-up blocking or tab browsing was known before Firefox or Phoenix, but we popularized it. We'd like to make future payments that are fricti... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Sort of baked into the model there is that by default you're blocking a lot of ads, and tracking stuff like that. You have a view of the user and the privacy that I don't think a lot of other browsers go on quite as far. Could you detail a little bit the degree to which you bring that stuff out of th... |
**Brendan Eich:** \[35:47\] Yeah, so that's the really radical idea, and it's not fully implemented. Brave, with the right opt-in - we wouldn't wanna surprise users with this, but Brave should be your personal Google; it should be your personal data set and machine learning, which adds value to the data. |
You know how people say "Facebook sells your data"? They don't, because if they did, it would all get quickly arbitraged to a low price, and it's seasonal enough, there's enough repeated behavior among users that it wouldn't be necessary for them to keep selling it. It would be extracted and in bulk. Facebook doesn't s... |
That search ad business is still strong for Google, but search is kind of flattening out. The smartphone is less of a searchy device, it's more of a social and bespoke search, or custom app experience. Voice is rising, AI is changing things... Search is flattening. It's gonna be a challenge for Google to keep satisfyin... |
Google also did something clever - in 2008 they bought DoubleClick, because they saw if you didn't convert all those search ads on the search engine result page, those quality texty result up top that were clearly identified at ads, but sometimes could be better than the organic results -- if you didn't click on those,... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.