Proposed 2010 Goals

September 11th, 2008

What can Mozilla do with our products and our product development processes to move the Internet toward our vision of an open, decentralized, participatory place in the next two years? In my last post I suggested we develop a set of goals to answer this question. Here’s my proposal. Comments, suggestions, additions, deletions, concerns, even wholesale restructuring welcome!

1. Deepen Mozilla’s role as a centerpiece of the Internet

communities continue to expand and provide means for individual development
thought leadership expands to include things such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
innovations emerge from the Mozilla world
technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues
projects and products remain vital

2. Data: provide leadership in

helping people exercise better ownership and control over their data
making anonymous, aggregate “usage data” more of a public resource

3. Mobile

have an effective product in the mobile market
demonstrate that “mobile” is part of one, unified, open web

4. Continue Firefox mindshare and marketshare momentum

Categories: Mozilla | Tags: 2010 goals

51 comments for “Proposed 2010 Goals”

1
Sean said on September 11th, 2008 at 11:27 am:

I think your sub-sub-bullet point that mentions “open web” is way understressed. Too many people in the world don’t know what this is and what it means to them. And Mozilla, being uniquely not a commercial company but still having a large impact on what the web is, can make the point clearly. This is especially important when many other major players tend to rely on secrecy for too many things.
2
Tomer Cohen (he l10n team) said on September 11th, 2008 at 12:27 pm:

How do you plan to make sure no other browser will over take Firefox and become #2 browser (if not #1)? I’m not worried about Firefox disappears, but I’m starting to see more and more people prefer “other browsers” instead of Firefox, and we all know the Webkit has some advantages over Gecko.
3
Percy said on September 11th, 2008 at 12:30 pm:

So far, Mozilla has done a great job providing the tools users need to *consume* an open internet with Firefox and Thunderbird, ChatZilla, Camino and SeaMonkey, Sunbird/Lightning, Bugzilla, etc. It has managed to grab a significant market share mostly based on its faithful growing community. It has achieved financial sustainability. And staying true to its principles all the way.

But most importantly, it has made “standards compliant” a selling point; performance and standards tests fights headlines in mainstream media outlets; usability and innovation a daily topic at least within the industry segment.

I think Mozilla needs to start pushing from the other side and help *produce* the open internet.

While openness and standards are good on itself as they drive innovation in areas where it makes the most impact for users, there’s still something better to achieve: *easy* openness and standards.

Whether an author decides to start up his IDE or log on to his favorite CMS, he shouldn’t care whether his code is standards compliant or not.

To do so Mozilla needs to:
– reach (at least) open source CMS projects to help make them as web standards and open as possible
– deliver an integrated content creation tool that enables web developers and authors to produce open content, whether it is static or dynamic text content, video, audio, 2D/3D animation, forms, applications, etc. in a way that matches or exceeds competitive proprietary tools like Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, Real, Windows Media Player, etc.
– In some cases, where there’s already appropriate support for certain open standard back it as much as possible, making it the brain-dead option for content providers. A recent example of this is native support for Ogg Vorbis and Theora. PNG, SVG, MathML, are other examples. ODF is an example of a gap that could be closed.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that Mozilla should build all of these tools, but should ensure the options are there and help them become more viable whether they need infrastructure, usability/design expertise, community growing expertise, etc.

I believe the time is now. Having five main browsers (IE, Opera, Safari, Firefox, Chrome) racing in so many areas for users preference is a good signal. But if most people understand it is not, then some kind of metric must be set to determine when will it be the appropriate time for Mozilla to get involved.

I would include: “5. Facilitate open web content creation.”

We also need metrics for all set goals, but I guess that could be subject of a future post and discussion.
4
imobiliarias santa maria said on September 12th, 2008 at 5:18 am:

imobiliarias santa maria

imobiliarias santa maria
5
Gary Kwong said on September 12th, 2008 at 7:37 am:

Education in schools, colleges, etc. should be a part of these goals too. They introduce students to open source communities, and these expand beyond just Mozilla.

Seneca is an excellent example.
6
Darek said on September 12th, 2008 at 8:32 am:

I like especially the following points:
– thought leadership expands to include things such as the open web, hybrid social enterprises, organizational sustainability, shared decision-making, individual control, and portability in Internet life
– innovations emerge from the Mozilla world

I also agree with the comment from Sean than “open web” may be understressed – although I think it may be implicitly included in point 2 (Data).
7
Your hair will be rejuvenated soon said on September 14th, 2008 at 11:03 pm:

Pleae come and link to this site.
8
Tom said on September 15th, 2008 at 4:45 am:

Top goal:

– Forcing EULAs down users throats!
9
Gerv said on September 15th, 2008 at 7:13 am:

Imagine for a moment that it’s 2010. How do you decide whether these goals have been achieved or not?

This list seems more like a list of courses of action than a list of goals.

Goals are things you can measure against, like:

– Gecko owns at least 10% of the mobile browser market
– Make it so that less than 10% of the top 100 websites have a mobile-specific version
– Provide public access to anonymized, aggregate Firefox usage data under a model licence
– …
10
Giuseppe Maxia said on September 16th, 2008 at 3:37 pm:

Hi,
Interesting goal #2.
Can you elaborate more on what you want to achieve? Is a backend database involved?
Is there any way that MySQL, the most popular open database, can help Firefox, the most popular open browser, to achieve these goals?
We would like to help.

Giuseppe Maxia

MySQL Community Team Lead
Sun Microsystems, Database Group
11
Mark Surman said on September 16th, 2008 at 10:19 pm:

Great to see these getting refined and looking forward to digging into what they mean in action.

I agree with the two comments about underlining the open web as a goal more strongly. Maybe this could be achieved with a tweak to the first headline? Something like:

“1. Deepen Mozilla’s role as a driver of the open web”

…?

Also, I wonder if it is useful to add something to the ‘data’ section on education and awareness raising. It seems that public consciousness about data in the cloud — and how to make good personal choices — will be important. Adding education and awareness to the first bullet might also work.

More later. MS
12
chris said on September 17th, 2008 at 5:09 am:

I know this is a rather marginal point from the mozilla point of view, but I would like to see improved KDE support of mozilla products in the future. I think porting firefox to QT is a great start – it would be nice to see a port of the other applications (thunderbird, sunbird), as well.

The KDE4 project has great potential of defining the future open-source desktop, so I would love to see mozilla contributing to it by providing a high-quality integration of their products.
Mozilla has the man-power and the resources to push the open-source desktop, so let’s hope they’ll do their share.
13
tobias said on September 17th, 2008 at 8:35 am:

Mozilla behaves more and more like an commercial product than an open source project. Don’t go to the dark side, 😉
The thinks that should help Mozilla to come back are:

– Find a solution for the EULA in Ubuntu. Nobody is interested in seeing the EULA at first start and no other open source program does this.
– Find a solution in the relationship with Debian. It’s a shame that they have to call Firefox Iceweasel.
– Better integration into the Linux desktops. (KDE, Gnome, Mobile-Plattforms)
– Full Linux support for all AddOns you release. Not like Ubiquity.

Linux is important, because Linux has a much more developers per user than any other operating system.
14
Max Kanat-Alexander said on September 17th, 2008 at 4:17 pm:

I actually agree with Gerv. I’ve actually done quite a bit of helping people and organizations determine their goals, and one of the interesting things to look at is the definition of “goal.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary is one of the most authoritative dictionaries in the English language, and it has several definitions for the word “goal.” The applicable definition in this case would be:

the end toward which effort or ambition is directed : AIM, PURPOSE : a condition or state to be brought about through a course of action

In terms of defining the goals of an organization or an individual, I find that it really helps to pay attention specifically to the last part of that definition–what is the state or condition that you will bring about, and how will you know if you made it or not?

Without a specific end or aim, it’s hard for an organization to estimate how much effort it should be putting in to reach the end or aim.

-Max
15
Myk Melez said on September 18th, 2008 at 3:17 pm:

There are a few goals in this proposal that suggest maintaining a positive status quo, like “technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues.” I think it’s great that we’re doing many things well already, and we should acknowledge and celebrate those accomplishments, but somehow it feels strange to do that via goals.

I guess I see goals as more aspirational targets that motivate folks to examine their participation and potentially change what they do or how they do it rather than work they’re going to accomplish anyway on their current trajectory.

I suppose it could be useful to have status quo goals when there is nothing more to gain in a particular area of accomplishment but some potential to lose what we already have unless we stay vigilant.

Nevertheless, I suspect that’s not the case for any of these goals, and they could all be written aspirationally. Specifically:

Instead of “technology excellence and industry wide leadership continues”, we could say something like “expand its industry-wide leadership role and increase the technical excellence of its products”.

Instead of “projects and products remain vital”, we could say “projects and products become even more vital”.

And finally, instead of “continue Firefox mindshare and marketshare momentum”, we could say “increase Firefox mindshare and marketshare”.
16
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17
swimmer21 said on September 19th, 2008 at 12:03 pm:

Develop a “context” engine within Firefox to make the web easy and efficient.
Got some ideas on that and I’m ready to share.
18
Martin said on September 19th, 2008 at 1:44 pm:

How about something new and powerful for email. Something mozillish, innovative.
19
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21
Daniel said on September 21st, 2008 at 3:59 am:

Well, here’s an explicit goal which may not really fit in this place.

Anyway, I think for the future of the Web a 100% CSS 2.1 support would be helpful. There are only four bugs missing to be feature comlete: Bugs 2056, 115199, 132035, 137367
22
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26
Stan said on September 21st, 2008 at 5:48 pm:

“What can Mozilla do with our products and our product development processes”

How about starting to listen to the users?
The AMO, and Awesome Bar debacles come to mind.
27
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James said on September 22nd, 2008 at 5:05 am:

“making anonymous, aggregate “usage data” more of a public resource”

What are we talking about here? Browsing history?

Mozilla has no business knowing what pages are browsed. That would be like someone who makes a phone saying that if you use it they have the right to listen to all your calls.
29
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31
Kelly said on September 22nd, 2008 at 1:29 pm:

James, “aggregate data” means specifically *not* personal browsing history. That’s what Chrome does. This means larger, anonymous data like how many users visited a Mozilla page or how many clicks it takes the average user to find what they’re looking for. The government tracks traffic flow on streets so they can figure out the best timing patterns for traffic lights, but not where each individual car goes. This is the same kind of thing.
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health said on September 27th, 2008 at 12:38 am:

How do you plan to make sure no other browser will over take Firefox and become #2 browser (if not #1)? I’m not worried about Firefox disappears, but I’m starting to see more and more people prefer “other browsers” instead of Firefox, and we all know the Webkit has some advantages over Gecko.http://www.csxianhua.com
34
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