After visiting Mobile World Congress (MWC) earlier this year I provided some highlights of the event covering, among others, the new front Mozilla has engaged in: the mobile OS. I dedicated a separate post to WebRTC at MWC, where the highlight of that part was the joint demo of Mozilla, Ericsson and AT&T. At that point in time, I viewed the interest of Mozilla in this demo purely as a WebRTC-enabled browser vendor calling for others to build services on top.
The ecosystem that came into focus from that demo was rather simple--you have the browser vendors (Mozilla), infrastructure vendors (Ericsson) and service providers (AT&T) each taking its traditional role:
* Browser vendors--They give you native WebRTC support in the browser
* Infrastructure vendors--They give you the server side of things for WebRTC
* Service providers--They build/enable/launch the services using the 2 other parties in the ecosystem
This is reinforced in the WebRTC overview video of Google's Justin Uberti talking about the decision not to include signaling in WebRTC, and all the different options of servers and service APIs available out there to support your service and application needs.
But.... A job offering Mozilla released recently, looking for a WebRTC Service Product Manager, got me thinking.
Is Mozilla looking to offer actual services?
Are these services going to be social/consumer type of services, enterprise services or maybe a service creation platform?
What is going to be their business model for this if at all?
Source: Mozilla career section on Website
Change in the Value Chain?
From one single job posting of Mozilla I wouldn't conclude that the browser vendors are becoming service providers, but if we look closely at what Google is doing, they have been there for some time already, with all their great tools included in Google Apps and Hangout. Therefore it looks like a natural step for Mozilla to make a move to this direction. Only the future will tell us what their exact plans are, but I would keep a close eye on that if I was a service provider or a UC vendor.
* Opinions presented in this blog post represent the author's personal views and not necessarily those of his employer.
