The following is the first installment of a two-part interview with Blake Ross, who has been a key player on the Firefox development, team; and articulate voice on the Spread Firefox blog and is one of the most articulate and clear-thinking 19-year-olds, I have ever encountered. I am grateful that this book project has allowed me the honor of interacting with him.
How, when and why was Mozilla Foundation started?
BR (Blake Ross):The Mozilla project was originally coordinated by a small group of people within Netscape. In mid-2003, when Netscape decided it was done with the browser business (for the first time), the company split off the Mozilla group into an independent, non-profit entity called the Mozilla Foundation and granted it seed money of $2 million.
Mozilla used to be a technology vendor, not a maker of consumer products. The project sought to create the best possible Internet platform, on which other vendors would base their consumer products and market them directly to users. When the largest of these vendors—Netscape—withdrew, the Mozilla group had a choice to make: should it seek out other heavy hitting vendors, or try its own hand at the consumer market? Given the relative success of Phoenix (Firefox) at that point, it chose the latter. The new direction required a fundamental shift in mindset and culture; an organization that once catered to technology vendors now had to learn how to interact with mom and dad.
How is it financed?
The Mozilla Foundation thrives thanks to generous donations from users as well as sponsorship deals with other companies in the Valley. [Foundation officials can tell you more; I shouldn’t be commenting on the record on this matter.]
Do you, Joe (Hewitt) and others do this fulltime and are you compensated for your efforts?
Joe and I have never really been able to work on Firefox full time due to other commitments: I’ve had high school and college, and Joe worked full time at Netscape where he had other priorities. We were not compensated for most of the work we did on Firefox.
But it’s better that way. Firefox was born because it had to be born, because this product took residence in our minds and gnawed at us during work, at dinner and on the weekends. Our compensation is the feedback we receive from users, and it’s a much more powerful currency.
TRC: What marketing tactics did you use prior to launch?
I spoke earlier of Mozilla’s shift in direction. For a long while, we were concerned with the more mechanical aspects of the transition: we needed a new website that end users could understand; we needed a more positive brand identity; and most importantly, we needed a solid product. While we were working on readying the launch, a groundswell of support for Firefox was erupting organically. Case in point: one of the few marketing materials we did offer early on was a small set of Firefox buttons that people could add to their websites. Just a few months later, over 100,000 websites were linking to our Firefox page via these buttons—more than were linking to the websites for Internet Explorer, Netscape or Opera.
What role did your blog play?
My blog has grown up with the Firefox project. It began as an outlet for my frustrations with the Netscape experience—the very frustration that led David Hyatt and me to fork the codebase and begin Firefox in the first place. It soon turned into a development log that chronicled our work on the fledgling browser. Most recently, my blog served as a hub for a series of marketing activities that predated our SpreadFirefox effort. Each week, I announced and coordinated one new community marketing campaign—such as an effort to attract college students—entirely from my blog. Most of these efforts were wildly successful and inspired us to formalize our marketing approach through what would become SpreadFirefox.
What role did the blogosphere play?
The blogosphere has been buzzing about Firefox for as long as I can remember. I subscribed to “Phoenix” feeds from day one and loved poring over all the feedback. Tech bloggers were our first users and our most ardent supporters, and I’ve nearly become accustomed to the sight of a “Get Firefox” button at this point—they seem almost as ubiquitous as the RSS buttons.
Still, Firefox has always been about going after the mainstream. And as rewarding as it was to get the tech bloggers on board, the reality is that mom and dad don’t read tech blogs. But the harsher reality is that it costs money—lots of it—to get placement in the media mom and dad do consume. Blogs have indirectly helped us reach the mainstream without cost and in vastly more effective ways than traditional advertising. We reach mom and dad through word-of-mouth networks using a number of audiences as conduits:
• The developers. Mom and dad may not read tech blogs, but developers sure do. One figure indicates that over 20% of web developers now use Firefox, which means the number of sites that don’t work in Firefox drops and the number pushing Firefox to viewers skyrockets—both of which spur growth. But it’s not just web developers. Blogs also help us attract extensions developers who have created hundreds of add-ons for Firefox to ensure that we’ve got something for everyone. And though extensions aren’t geared toward the mainstream, we’ve been able to fold the best and most popular ones back into the core product and roll them out in the next version as our newest killer features.
• The press. The most fascinating part of riding the Firefox wave has been observing the interplay between blogs and traditional media. Firefox has demonstrated and perhaps even pioneered what I call the buzz pyramid:
1. Long before the mainstream or the mainstream media heard about Firefox, the blogosphere was buzzing about it daily. The blogosphere, of course, represents just a tiny fraction of Internet users, so this is the apex of the pyramid.
2. The “intermediate media” hears the buzz at the apex and reports that “everyone’s talking about Firefox.” These are outlets like c|net that sit between mainstream media and personal websites, and indeed from their tech perspective, “everyone” really is talking about Firefox-.
3. The mainstream media hears the buzz among the intermediate media and again carries the story that “everyone” is talking about Firefox. “Everyone” is still the blogosphere, but in the context of ABC, USA Today and other mainstream outlets, people interpret it to mean, well, everyone. And ironically, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy: once the mainstream media picks up the story and helps us reach mom and dad, everyone really does start talking about it. The base of the pyramid begins to fill out.
4. Word spreads throughout the mainstream and mainstream media continues to cover the story, propagating the word further. A growth cycle is created that Firefox has yet to break out of as the pyramid’s base grows ever larger.The voice of the blogosphere is a loud one. Bloggers create buzz, small media creates buzz about the buzz, large media reports on the “metabuzz” and, in doing so, inadvertently helps us achieve the buzz we wanted all along—the mainstream buzz—all for free. Perhaps the best part of the system is that the mainstream media never has to realize they’re actually picking up the thread from the bloggers; they think they’re getting the story from the smaller media. Without this kind of ego stroking, the system might fall apart.
• The Internet generation. Mom and dad don’t read blogs, but their Internet-addicted college students do. And when they get home, they’ll upgrade their parents to Firefox—along with their grandparents and their friends.
• The Firefox community. Perhaps most importantly, blogs have enabled us to reach out to our own community. One of the staples of SpreadFirefox is the free blog every member gets upon signing up. Our members use these blogs to invent, discuss, coordinate and execute enormous marketing campaigns—and when the campaign is over, the blog is the gathering place for the post-mortem.
These audiences are our megaphones. We’ve learned that when you let others tell your story for you, people are much more receptive than if you’re buying space to tell them yourselves.
