billcale - 12:55 am on Nov 6, 2005 (gmt 0)

It seems to me that Google is making a bold statement with its recent referral program... and I have lots of questions.

Google is risking somewhere between $150M to $1B, more or less, on the notion that more Firefox browsers on the Internet favors Google, isn't it? - Or is Google simply performing a public service as Mr Nice Guy and helping out the Firefox people?
- Is it significant that this referral program is being introduced through Google's Adsense program?
- Could Google be wary of a powerful Microsoft that completely destroyed Netscape's business several years ago?
- $1 per install of Firefox... with the size of the market, couldn't that make a lot of rich Adsense folks with the right composition of traffic and website topics?
- Isn't the Firefox referral money something that would make Microsoft verrry nervous?
- Is this the start of a more visible struggle between Microsoft and Google to establish net dominance or parity in the coming years?

And speaking to the $100 referral for Adsense publishers...
- Google owns the contextual ad market presently... why does it need to spend big bucks to recruit more publishers when possibly a $10 or $20 fee would do?
- Could Google's latest earnings show that there is indeed a much larger share of the total advertising dollar to be had and ever more publishers are needed?
- Will this bring about some stability insofar as publishers are concerned, since Google seems to be admitting that it needs publishers badly?
- Is Google mustering a small mercenary army of publishers to help it in what appears to be its coming battles with Microsoft?

Those of us in the Adsense program are equally pioneering, as is Google. Two or five or ten years from now, will we look back on these Google decisions as positive or negative factors in a program that has brought such thrills and enrichment to many of us? Google has done well by most of us so far... will it continue?