So while it may seem like Mozilla has a lot of money, their revenue is miniscule compared to their main competitors in this race, which are Google, Apple, and Microsoft. They need to invest more in their browser to keep up. So while you might claim that their income is enough for “one” (person?), it is not enough to both maintain a product edge, and to invest large sums of money in things that do not contribute to their monetization scheme, at least in the long run.

Is there ever a point when one has enough money?

I tried to bring up the example from the interview with Google’s Andy Rubin. He was asked this exact question with regards to the Android operating system. His response was that this is actually not the relevant question, and that is the point I was trying to make. The question really is, how does my product contribute to the entire monetization scheme of my organization’s bundle? As long as the product contributes significantly to the goal of keeping people engaged with the monetized bundle, then it is not necessary to directly relate “Android” to “search revenue” – or in the Mozilla analogy, “SkinkFox” to “FireFox”.

“Why not reverse your proposal and keep user’s inside Tbird, searching from a Tbird-owned search box”

Because the powerful bundle to build on is not Thunderbird, but FireFox.

“public opinion in recent weeks has swung to the anti-bundling side of things”

While that may be true, it is also true that in the last few weeks a master bundler (Apple) has now surpassed Microsoft in total market value. What people whine about and what they really want and need are not always the same thing. Nobody wants to have money extracted from them, but it is necessary for any organization to extract money from someone if they are to survive.

Innovation is usually 90% copying with a small additional insight.

I’m not sure that innovation is the goal of Thunderbird either. Yes it is one of many possible goals, yet there are other pressures as well. I hope to discuss these issues in further posts.