Late last year, 10,000 people donated about $250,000 to the Mozilla Foundation. Their goal was to help Mozilla buy a full-page ad in the New York Times promoting its Firefox browser. When the ad ran on December 15, the two-page, $100,000 spread helped turn Firefox into the first open-source product to earn mainstream, mass-market recognition.

From Mozilla's point of view, the donation drive and the ad itself were big successes. After the ad appeared, Firefox quickly snowballed into an international phenomenon; I wouldn't be surprised if even my mother (Hi Mom!) knew a thing or two about the upstart browser and its slow-but-steady market share offensive against the world's mightiest software company.

All of this, from a non-profit group that might as well have organized a bake sale to advertise its software to the world.

Just think what some real money could do for Firefox. Never mind the overpriced ads in some commie New York news rag--we're talking about flexiing some real marketing muscle here, folks.

Want to buy a couple of Sting tunes for Firefox's prime-time, major network TV ads? No problem. Want to get Patick Stewart to do the TV ad voice-overs, driving millions to Mozilla's servers before his every silver-tongued syllable? You got it. Ready to hire a mad scientist to carve the Firefox symbol on the moon with his Death Ray? Go for it.

Yes, I exaggerate. (Please, no email about that New York Times crack, OK? It's a fine paper; I read it all the time.)But I do so to prove a point: If a company with a lot of money were to take an intense interest in a born winner like Firefox--a company with a lot of money--then a 90 percent market share could quickly become a fond, distant memory for Team Internet Explorer.

By a lot of money, I'm thinking of a company worth, say, the same amount as Ford and General Motors--combined.

A company like Google. What are they up to at Google these days, anyway? Read on to find out, and have a great week.

Matthew McKenzie
Editor, Linux Pipeline
mattcmp@sonic.net
www.LinuxPipeline.com

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