| I agree with the article that it’s difficult. What if Google was still allowed to distribute their apps via embedded Chromium, but were not allowed to ship the Chrome derivative as a full-fledged browser? That may still leave them some incentive to participate in its development since many of their web apps are optimized against Chromium, but they are not allowed the business advantage of the technology as it exists today. The would-be acquirer, I guess, would be forbidden from duplicating the business model. The logical question is, well how would that acquirer make any money? My hunch is that Chrome would just become a dead brand and the browser engine could live on as an embeddable technology. That still might provide value to a would-be owner, but they would make their money off of products making good use of the browser engine and not the engine itself for web browsing. Having a world class browser engine is valuable to application development still. It has core value, just not as a vehicle for making money in a standalone way. Maybe it’s hard to make sense of because monetizing a browser directly is, and arguably always has been, kind of… stupid. The answer might be found looking at something like Deno Deploy. They realistically can’t monetize the language/runtime because it doesn’t make any sense. They capture commercial value by offering to run your code in a seamless way. I don’t know. Maybe an AI company is a decent fit - they can run it as an agent/scraping service and make money that way. An automotive company could buy it and sell an optimized version for Infotainment systems for other car manufacturers as well. There’s money to be made off of selling it as a platform, but probably not as an Internet browser. I’m sure Google itself could have thought of a billion other ways to make money off it but they were just too lazy to dream it up because it wasn’t aligned to their core business. |