"Shut up about Firefox memory issues" ;)
Glad to know they are working on it.
- How do you know what the everyday end user (not a geek) would want?
- How do you reach them? Against masses of competition from a browser that ships with 95% of computers. (IE)
The early adopters were the geeks. The techies. But the Firefox goal was to reach the mom & pop crowd. So you had an interesting adoption cycle. The network effect needed to move outside the geek circle – to get the geeks to tell non-geeks in a non-geeky way. Traditional marketing was not an option: was frowned upon and too expensive.
So, along comes "Spread Firefox" which is a campaign that uses the active users (those non-developers who are passionate on the boards) to spread the project. It gave users the feeling that they too were a part of the open source project.
I personally think the open source aspect of Firefox gave it a validity as a movement. Non-biased. Open. Inclusive.
Also, the extension ability gives a plain simple product a customizable perfect product (those value-add things we typically buy from one vendor or another, but now can ‘make’ ourselves).
Extensions were the way Mozilla balanced a simple app with the need to keep developers interested and excited. They get to code, but the app does not get feature bloat.
"Take back the web" was one campaign that resonated well with the audience eager to drop the evil IE ;)
What’s next for Firefox with IE 7 (trying to match Firefox features)? It took them 4 years before they began innovating – with market leadership, they didn’t care one whit for IE customers. Now, with Firefox on their tails, they are starting to react. Why would you now change to Firefox?
Well… viruses. spyware. adware. Need we say more?
Well, for a "mass market", yes. IE users are often unaware of the above. So, how do you convince users to switch to Firefox?
Dave Winer is getting smacked down by Blake Ross for jumping to conclusions too often (I cannot even begin to contextualize this, but it has to do with Dave asking for the Firefox future, and Blake saying this was not a Firefox talk, and blah blah blah)
Blake – you’re being nothing but honest and transparent. I am sorry you had to be hit so hard at this conference for what appears to be no reason. Youth? Success? Something obviously made people annoyed with you.
Chris has to step in at the end to diffuse a very tense air.
Tags: blake ross, ie, firefox, gnomedex, gnomedex6, gnomedexcommentary
Arieanna,
Many thanks for the write-up and the feedback. I’m not quite sure what happened there either. I came hoping to brainstorm grassroots marketing with folks and left scratching my head that we were discussing mundane Firefox trivia which can all be found online.
But I suppose one good thing came of it, which is that I’ve now discovered blogaholics :)
–Blake
It wouldn’t be Gnomedex without Dave Winer getting into it with someone. Unfortunately it was your turn, Blake. It happened earlier during the Scoblecast too when Dave was onstage, with someone in the audience, though in that case the audience member seemed to start it.
Thanks for stopping by Blake, and sorry we didn’t get to talk in person. I think it was an unfortunate spiral of events that led to the onstage argument, but you held yourself well.