The Largest Cash-Printing UI Ingredient Ever Made
I watched a chat from Evan Czaplicki, creator of the Elm programming language, known as “The Economics of Programming Languages”.
It’s a captivating take a look at how a small OSS undertaking like Elm has to compete in a world the place most of the expectations round developer expertise for a programming language are set by firms who soak up billions in income.
One in all Evan’s assertions is that the biggest supply of cash flowing into the world of programming languages comes from Google paying to be the default search engine (a captivating thought, remember to watch the entire talk to know why).
In response to Evan, Google took in $283bn in income in a single yr. Of that, $49bn went in direction of “visitors acquisition prices” which incorporates Google paying different browsers for the choice of being the default search engine.
How a lot precisely? Google paid Firefox roughly $400 million whereas Safari acquired someplace within the vary of $15-20bn.[1]
Microsoft, nevertheless, reserves the precise to make Bing the default search engine of their browser.
Evan factors out that, in line with SEC filings, “Search and information promoting” income for Microsoft is roughly $12bn. This implies if Microsoft put 100% of their income from Bing in direction of paying to be the default search engine on Safari, they’d nonetheless need to provide you with a minimum of one other $3bn out of pocket.
As you possibly can see, a browser’s URL/search bar is an costly piece of actual property. Those that personal it get a slice of that $49bn “visitors acquisition value” cheese from Google.
Which form of will get me considering that maybe a reasonably affordable enterprise thought is: make a kick-ass browser that folks love, attempt for even 0.5-1% of browser market share, after which promote your default search choice.
In different phrases, getting Google to fund your superb thought for another browser doesn’t appear that wild?
All of this actually drove house that the browser URL bar doubling as a search enter needs to be the only largest money-printing UI component ever made.
