Phil Wainewright at ZDNet has a great post about how Mozilla is making a lot of money (the "bulk" of its $52.9 million in 2006) by including Google as the default search engine for the FireFox browser. It demonstrates another alternative revenue model for business application software vendors. I had previously discussed an ad-supported model and sponsored applications in this post. However, this is a different twist. Vendors would embed links to a variety of paid services into the applications, instead of advertising. Phil uses Skype as an example. If a vendor made a Skype extension the default for telephone number fields in an application, it could negotiate a micropayment deal with Skype for each call made through the link.
There are many opportunities here. Address fields in employee/manager self-service could trigger micropayments for Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps. How about a link on a total compensation statement that takes you to Payscale (a vendor gets a micropayment for each person it sends to Payscale that submits his/her compensation data -- which is automatically pre-populated of course)? This is more subtle than advertising, but could prove also be very lucrative.
Jim - Absolutely agreed. The one caveat is that the user should be allowed to determine what widgets are on their screen. Some users may want Payscale and Skype, others may not.
Posted by: Jason Corsello | January 12, 2007 at 09:01 AM