SCIENCES PO RENNES SECTION ÉCOFI SÉMINAIRE STRATÉGIE DES ENTREPRISES EUROPÉENNES, AMÉRICAINES, ET TIERS-MONDIALES Under the direction of Dr Bernhard Kitous Google Chrome: free software as a launching platform Charles-Axel Dein
[email protected] —
[email protected] Copyright ©Charles-Axel Dein 2009, Some Rights Reserved Rennes (France) — May, 2009 Preliminary remarks This dissertation has been written in May 2009 to fulfil the requirements of a seminar called “Strat- egy of European, American and Third-World Companies”, at Sciences Po Rennes, section Écofi. It has been written in accordance with the principles of the Sciences Po education, which includes interdisci- plinarity. Accordingly, this paper uses model from law, economy, sociology and history. French being my mother tongue, please apologise any grammatical or orthographical mistakes. Feel free to contact me (
[email protected]). This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Li- cense. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA. See Appendix D for more details. 1 Executive Summary Google has chosen to release Chrome as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in order to achieve two goals. Protect its businesses. FOSS is used to foster Chrome’s market penetration, which will in turn encourage the diffusion of innovation in the web value chain. It is in the firm’s interest to make the Internet grow: since it has been able to privatise the Internet, growth means increased audience, which will help Google sell advertisements (97% of its revenues) and gather information (via crowdsourcing and behavioural marketing).