Founders at Work.pdf

Livingston: Did any competitors ever do anything to anger you?
Blake Ross 399
Ross: Not directly. The only thing that bothers me is that Microsoft seems completely
driven by competition. We tried to be driven entirely by users. There
was a need, so we tried to cater to it. We didn’t say, “We’re going to try to crush
Microsoft” just to crush Microsoft. That wasn’t the intent, even though that’s
kind of the stated goal of some misguided open source projects.
Whereas Microsoft, they win a browser war, so in 2001, they bow out.
Which is completely irresponsible, because this is the most used software application
in the world, and they just stopped developing it. Now they are back in
the game, because they have competition, so that pulls them back in. I will say
that Internet Explorer 7 is shaping up to be a good browser; I just wish it came
a few years earlier.
We also see them trying to emulate a lot of the more genuine community
spirit that we’ve built up. People like Mozilla because we’re open source; we try
to be transparent and honest with the community. We’re a free product. We
work with people. And we’re starting to see that kind of thing emanate from
Microsoft. They have a team blog now and they are trying to be very buddybuddy,
but it feels like a PR pitch, as if they looked at our situation and now
they are trying to bring that sense of goodwill over there. If it were genuine, it
would be great, but it feels like a sales pitch. It’s getting better though.
I respect companies like Opera, which also produces a browser. They aren’t
doing that well right now, but at least they’re in it for the right reasons. They’ve
been around for a decade now, and they are passionate about the Web.
Microsoft just kind of comes and goes with the money and the competition, and
that doesn’t seem like the right motivation to make a good product.
Livingston: Looking back, what did people misunderstand about Firefox?
Ross: Many die-hard open source fans misunderstood our goal. Usually, in an
open source project, if you’re not a developer, it’s kind of like, “What are you
doing here?”
A lot of people misunderstood the real audience we were going after. It’s
hard to explain exactly what that means, but you can imagine, here’s this
Mozilla project, it’s very open, everyone gets a say. If you are a developer, you
get to vote on whether or not a feature gets implemented. Then we come along
and say, “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 to 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.”
It’s hard to convince 500 flesh-and-blood developers that their pet feature
may not be desirable to 500 million imaginary users, especially when you have
no hard evidence to back it up. In some ways, I’m glad it’s just the two of us
again on Parakey. We can work very fast and there are no politics.