FAW #29: Blake Ross of Firefox
The birth of Firefox
Blake Ross and his friend Dave Hyatt started Firefox in 2002 out of frustration from their work on the Netscape browser. Ross had interned at Netscape when he was just fourteen. By the next summer when he returned, he found development on the Netscape browser had become a depressing exercise and they were essentially directed to sacrifice the user experience in order to monetize the browser and become a promotional vehicle to support the Netscape.com portal site. Ross and Hyatt started a side project they called “Phoenix” at the time to “rebirth a new browser from the ashes of Netscape.” They forked the Mozilla open source project and worked on the code privately with a small team. What’s interesting is that most people view Firefox as a response to the IE browser. In reality it came as a response to the ailing Netscape browser and wound up stealing market share from IE.
It succeeded because it didn’t have to
They say it’s always easiest to raise money when you don’t need it. Firefox began as a hobby side project and was never intended to become a business- they were merely trying to fix the browser experience. For the same reasons that money is easier to raise when not under a deadline, Firefox met success because it operated in a vacuum free from financial pressures. Ross says, “Companies usually worry about competition for financial reasons, but when we did Firefox, money was just always sort of there. There were donations, seed money from AOL; we eventually got this Google deal, but it wasn’t a source of fear for us, because we knew if it didn’t make money… It wasn’t even supposed to make money - it was a hobby, right, so we didn’t really care. I was in school. It didn’t have to succeed.” They sought to escape the politics and poor decision making that plagued the Netscape browser by keeping it a hobby instead of a business. And that allowed them to keep the experience pure which in turn attracted more users and more loyalty.
Open Source for non-gearheads
One of the more challenging aspects of the Firefox project was satisfying their early adopter group. They were doing an Open Source browser designed to be usable for a non-technical audience. Much of the early feedback came from people that were downloading the nightly builds and suggesting “alphageek power user” features and not seeing the project from the perspective of trying to keep it straightforward for grandma Matilda. Ross says, “‘We’re making a product for mom and dad. You still have a voice here, but some of the features that you think we should add may not be the ones that they want tot use. So you have to take our word for it that, even though 500 of you want something right now, you may actually be in the minority of a much larger group that we’re pursuing that’s going to be silent during this phase of development.’”
We’re in somewhat of a similar position with JumpBox now in that most of the people that download our applications already understand the benefits of Open Source and virtualization. The burden of educating the non-technical user on the merits of OSS and virutalization at this stage would be prohibitive so we’re solely trying to satisfy the technical users that are frustrated by the usability of the typical Open Source server application. We have to be cognizant, however, of the technical slant of this early feedback and evaluate the feature suggestions against the ultimate goal of making Open Source accessible to the masses. For all the enhancements and optimizations we make to the JumpBox platform, we’re still losing half our users after download because it’s not yet to the “big red easy button” level of usability that we’d like and requires that you extract files and follow the readme. As we gradually shift focus to reaching those non-technical people we’ll bring the usability up to that level.
Their marketing tactics
The Firefox guys employed unorthodox marketing tactics for doing grassroots promotion of their browser. They launched a site called SpreadFirefox.com that allowed them to create “street teams” at the local level of people who connected and engaged in various guerrilla promos. They also raised $250k in donations to buy a double-truck ad in the New York Times to get some mainstream attention for the browser. In the first week of launching the product they contacted 100 different bloggers that had written about it and found that 85% of them were willing to display a “Get Firefox” button on their site. Whether the loyalty of their fan base can be attributed to a general anti-MS sentiment or people just liked sporting their logo, they saw strong support from many community volunteers. Ross says, “I thought marketing was something that required a degree and formal experience. It turns out that marketing is just making the product good enough that people spread it on their own, and giving them ways to do that. It’s a lot easier and more natural than I thought it would be. Now I can’t stand meeting with professional marketers who try to ‘craft’ the ‘message’ and all that junk.”
What’s after Firefox?
The Mozilla Foundation is the non-profit entity that maintains and distributes Firefox. The Mozilla Corporation is a for-profit commercial entity that is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation and handles development and distribution of the Thunderbird email client. The corporation handles the revenue generating activities related to the Mozilla line and reinvests the profits into the foundation. Confused yet? The two companies cooperate and yet are run independent of one another.
Ross is now working with his partner Joe Hewitt on his next project, a startup called “Parakey” that is currently running in stealth. They haven’t disclosed much about Parakey yet. “We don’t know of anyone doing specifically what we are doing, but you can just feel in the air that everyone’s moving toward this kind of model.” They’re keeping things small with just the two of them for now: “We’re nervous about finding someone else, so it’s hard… There’s a question of ‘Is it better for us to spend all of our time iterating very quickly, or potentially ruin that dynamic by bringing on someone that we don’t know well?’ In short, I’m nervous about everything. If you’re doing a startup and you’re relaxed, you should be very worried.” True dat Blake. We share your healthy nervousness here at JumpBox and look forward to seeing the next world-altering technology you guys produce with Parakey.