| It's also a way of effectively funding a non-committal proxy war on big tech. I think almost everyone can see that the status quo creates a bad business environment, the big G can dictate terms far too unilaterally and is dire need of competition. Funding this sort of development can be a long term strategy to upset the status quo without risking the entire business by going on some kamikaze pivot that puts you in direct competition with Google or Apple. That would be investor relations suicide. It's a very safe bet. It doesn't work out, and they lose $100k and can write it off as marketing and get some goodwill out of it. If it works out, and they sabotage Google for $100k. One may say this is unlikely to succeed, that they are too entrenched, if it wasn't for the fact that this exact move succeeded already with Microsoft and Linux in the '90s. Linus had nothing to his name but a janky Minix knockoff, and the entire userspace was filled with Richard Stallman's bizarre menagerie of hippie software. Does that seem like plausible competition for Microsoft, who at the time was by far the wealthiest software company in the world? Well, as it turns out, yeah, Linux became one hell of a fly in the ointment for them. |