In the past we could hope that Mozilla and Google had the best interest of their users in mind but now having such super-obvious product placement? This raises a lot of questions for me and will do even more so for the average user.

For example, by funding Mozilla, Google helped to remove Microsoft's browser monopoly. Since Google's business relies on the Web, that made perfect sense. Now they have their own browser too, which makes things complicated :)

Likewise, Microsoft currently has a dominant influence in video chat, thanks to Skype. It makes sense for Telefonica to erode that dominance, since they have more business opportunities in an open, many <-> many ecosystem compared to a Skype-only one.

Too many companies base their business model on becoming a monopoly in their field ("the next Microsoft", "the next Google", "the next Facebook", "the next Twitter", etc.), rather than allowing interoperability and having to succeed on merit. When this inevitably fails, they leave behind nothing except useless, incompatible APIs. Hopefully this is different :)