Posts Tagged with “choice”

One way that building a consumer product colors much of the Mozilla project is that building a competitive browser is brutally hard. It’s critical, it’s wildly exciting now, it generates astonishing commitment and bears great results — that’s why we do it. But it’s hard.

Building great products is hard enough on its own. Living within a competitive market space, as the browser does, adds another layer to the challenge. No one interested in maximizing the chances of success would choose our market space. Today the browser market looks competitive because the dominant player has “only” 75% market share. Where else does that look competitive?

Not only does the major player have “only” 75% of the market, it has unparalleled access to the established distribution channel — the hardware that people buy. Every person using Firefox has to make the decision to install Firefox every time he or she gets a new machine. That is a very hard place to be. It’s better today than when we started, but that’s only because the dominant player then had more than 90% market share and people thought it would be impossible to make any significant difference.

Other browser vendors also have some advantages we don’t. Apple for example, has exclusive control over what software is included on its hardware and has never offered Firefox. Apple has enormous resources and the ability to integrate its browser into other products. And of course Apple is renowned for producing excellent consumer products. For the future, when people speculate on who else might build a browser, some very giant companies are named. This is fierce competition.

We create browsers because it is too important to have only one or two big commercial players controlling access to the Internet. We create browsers as a public asset rather than for the private benefit of shareholders. We try to represent the quality of an individual’s online experience rather than a business plan. That’s a good cause, and extremely motivating. But it’s not enough to get 130,000,000 people to use Firefox. For that to happen we have to build a product that is better than those produced by the commercial industry leaders.

We won’t succeed because we are “OK.” We won’t succeed because there’s no other choice or the other choices are expensive. We won’t succeed simply because of our public benefit goals. Public benefit is important, it provides both direction and motivation. But that needs to be combined with a product experience that people love. We will succeed only if we create exceptional products that people choose to use over and over again.

We’ve long described the mission of the Mozilla Foundation as “promoting choice and innovation on the Internet.” I’ve been thinking about how to make this more concrete. How to answer questions like:

• Is all choice equally useful? How do we figure out which choices we actively try to accomplish?
• Is all innovation good? Or are some types of innovation more likely to promote the goals of an open Internet?

I’ve found these questions harder to answer than it might seem.

More and more I come back to the concept of participation. One of the things that makes the Internet so exciting is the ability for many people to participate in the development, use and direction of the Internet. People can participate in many ways, in many languages, on many machines, in many different activities. Also, people can participate in a highly decentralized way, making their own choices about if, when and how to participate. Some participate by creating content, some by creating software, some by building communities, some by creating websites. Those who participate help determine the direction in which the Internet develops.

So, what kinds of choice matters to the Mozilla project? What kinds of innovations should the Mozilla project focus on? My current thinking is that we should focus on:

• Innovations which promote widespread, decentralized participation in online activities; and
• Choices — in technologies, products, community projects — that make it easier for people to participate in building the online experience that works for them.

Does this resonate with you? Is this a helpful way to think about our goals? Please let me know.

I’ve been thinking about how to describe the goals of the Mozilla project, and how the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation fit into that. By “Mozilla project” I mean all the people who are involved, unrelated to any employment relationship. The Mozilla Foundation, including its subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation, together make up only a small portion of the people involved. It’s important that the Mozilla Foundation remain in sync with the larger project it seeks to lead, and that we have healthy discussions about that goal.

We’ve been using the goal of “choice and innovation on the Internet” for some time now. Recently someone asked me for a history of this phrase. I did a bit of research, here’s what I found.

I. Pre-Foundation website.

As far as I can tell, I think we started using the specific phrase “choice and innovation” when we created the new web pages for the Mozilla Foundation. Before the Foundation existed, our web site and communication was mostly internal, aimed at developers and participants in the project. It was less aimed at end-users or at the general public. So the mozilla.org site did not have a focus on explaining the importance of the project in general terms.

II. Pre-Foundation Public Statements

In the pre-Foundation era I did explain the importance of the Mozilla project to the press, particularly around the release of Mozilla 1.0 in June, 2002. I’ve found and copied a few of these interviews that were done by email below. The comments show their age a bit (2002 was a long time ago in Internet time) but overall still seem relevant today.

Question: “What is your view on the market share currently held by the Mozilla browser? Is it important to take on Internet Explorer? (if it is, how to do that?)”

Answer: “The Internet is becoming an increasingly important part of our lives. ‘Browser’ software is the means through which consumers and citizens access and manipulate data via the Internet. It is an unhealthy situation to have only one means of accessing Internet information. It is unhealthy to have our means of accessing the Internet determined by the business plan of a software vendor. The goal of the Mozilla project is to provide alternative, open source software through which people can access the Internet. This is a critical piece in allowing the needs of citizens and consumers to determine the development of Internet technologies.”

“The Mozilla project provides a viable, vibrant technical alternative to Internet Explorer. This alone is not the entire story, distribution is also important. But distribution is impossible until a viable technical alternative exists, and Mozilla provides such an alternative.”

Question: “Going further than the published roadmap, where do you see the Mozilla browser five or ten years from now? Which kind of features may be incorporated in the future?

Answer: “The Internet is a diverse environment. Human beings can access their data and conduct transactions on the Net based on their goals. Different people choose different means of doing so, some focus on convenience, some on protecting their privacy. Innovation has returned to “browser” software, providing new convenience to users. Many of us use devices other than desktop computers to access the Internet, and Mozilla based software helps power the change.”

Answer: Our goal is a World-Wide-Web where consumers have choice, and where no single entity dictates what the consumer can do or see. In other words, to maintain effective consumer choice in how our personal information is transmitted and used. We’re dangerously close to losing that choice now, as more and more websites provide their data and services in formats only IE can understand.

III. The appearance of “Choice and Innovation”

I believe the “choice and innovation” phrase first appeared in Nov. of 2003, when we set about finding a good way of describing our purpose that could be easily absorbed and understood. “Bonsai” (our web-based tool for showing what has changed in our source repository) suggests it appeared in version 1.2 of the “about” page. The phrase also appeared on the front page of the mozilla.org website when it was revised in mid to late Nov. 2003. In this case the reference was:

What is Mozilla?
The Mozilla project maintains choice and innovation on the Internet by developing the acclaimed, open source, Mozilla 1.5 web and email suite and related products and technology.

IV. What I take from this

“Choice and innovation on the web” has been an excellent way to describe our goals or mission so far. The phrase has developed staying power because it expresses a basic nature of what we’re doing. My believe is that “choice and innovation” is a great starting point, has served us well and is part of our heritage that we should look to. I also suspect it is not enough to guide our daily activities. Is any innovation equally desirable for us to pursue? And do we care if choice lead to a better overall better experience? If so, for whom? “Choice and innovation on the web” is a great foundation, and I’m proud of it. We have the opportunity and the responsibility to build upon this foundation and define what we think the Mozilla project can and should do to make the net a better place.