A reminder to fight dependency on your key customers

Do you use Firefox?   It’s been the third most popular web browser (down from second after Google’s Chrome passed it last year).   But now it may become an object lesson for any company that is dependent on a single major customer.

It turns out that the Mozilla Foundation which maintains Firefox is fairly substantial–it reports about $125 million in revenues for each of the last fiscal years.   Pretty impressive for an open source software creator.

But, rumor has it that Mozilla is about to become a $25 million enterprise, which will likely knock it out of browser competition very quickly.   Why?   Well, 84% of it’s revenues come from one advertiser and supporter.   Who?

Google–the creators of Chrome.   And there are reports in the last few days that Google is not renewing their contract with Mozilla for 2012.

Concentrated customer lists are a huge business risk, and they reduce the value of any enterprise.   Hopefully not as dramatically as this!  You won’t be able to use Firefox to do research on the answer to these questions, perhaps.