Forget Facebook. The Web's platform is Firefox | News Blog - CNET News

Correction: This post was updated to correct the time line of John Lilly's meeting with Jerry Yang.
John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla
(Credit: Matt Asay)
I spent an hour Thursday with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, andMike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of Engineering, and learned a few things. For one thing, Ionce argued that Mozilla should hire more "capitalist pigs." John's riposte Thursday was, "We have more capitalist pigs than you think."
John didn't mean that Mozilla is just another commercial open-sourcecompany. It's not. Clarifying that comment, John went on to point outthat four out of its five executives are entrepreneurs. In other words,though Mozilla is tiny compared to its proprietary competition (and bigby open-source project standards), Mozilla's team and community arewell-architected to compete. It's not going to fall over at Microsoft'sfeet anytime soon.
But while competing, Mozilla is heavily focused on its customers first and its competitors second. As John indicated to me:
Our question is always, how do we grow in a way that isleveraged? We always lead with the user experience and think about themoney secondarily.
That user experience is starting to evolve beyond today's browsingexperience. The most interesting topic discussed in our meeting wasjust how compelling Mozilla's Firefox will increasingly be as theplatform for much that happens on the Web. Forget Facebook, MySpace,the iPhone, and other so-called platforms. Firefox could well prove tobe the most disruptive Web platform on the market. Here's why.
To understand Mozilla's potential, it's useful to review a bit of its history. By the middle of 2005 theMozilla Foundationwas making around $4 million per month from Google...with only 10 to 12people on the payroll. Those are revenues that any small start-up--opensource or otherwise--would kill to achieve. Mozilla was largely doingit in its sleep through the Google relationship.
Even so, it was hard to operate as a nonprofit. There was plenty ofmoney but the Mozilla Foundation had no clear idea of how to build asustainable business. In fact, the Mozilla Foundation found itincreasingly hard to keep its hefty profits contained within theconfines laid out by California's nonprofit tax law. In 2005,Mozilla Corp. was born.
A visit from Jerry Yang
The $48 million run rate should have been a clear indicator thatMozilla had a huge opportunity on its hands. A visit from Yahooco-founder Jerry Yang in 2005, however, made it incontrovertible.
As it was related to me, Lilly had previously met Yang back in 2005.In John's first few days with Mozilla, he paid Yang a visit. This wasno courtesy call. Instead, Yang arrived 30 minutes late for theappointment and laid into John over Firefox's tie-up with Google. Inone fell swoop, scads of Yahoo customers saw their MyYahoo pages becomeGoogle landing pages. While troubling to Yang, this was the onlyreassurance that John needed that he'd made the right decision injoining the Mozilla Foundation.
Clearly Firefox mattered. And it mattered to many, many people.
Now we start to get into the platform. In 2005, 15 Mozilla employeesserviced 15 million Firefox users. In 2008, there are 150 Mozillaemployees servicing 165 million Firefox users. Those employees arescattered around the globe: Mozilla Europe (30 percent market share),Mozilla Japan (10 percent market share), Mozilla China (3 percent market share but growing fast), and Mozilla US. With two-thirds of its user base outside the United States, Mozilla must be global, too.
Mozilla's organization chart, which John drew up for me, looks muchlike a normal software company's organization chart. The office spacefeels like typical Silicon Valley office space. (People were playingping-pong when I walked in and a woman was walking her dog out thefront door.)
But Mozilla's potential is anything but standard. The stakes are huge.
A true community platform
John argues that the Firefox platform is actually more robust andeasier to use than "rival" platforms like Facebook, iPhone, etc. Unlikethese others, Firefox is a true community platform, reflecting thetastes, requirements, and whims of a broad array of users. It playshost to a wide array of third-party plug-ins.
Butthe community angle doesn't end with plug-ins. 40 percent of theFirefox code wasn't written by Mozilla. This has stayed constant asMozilla has grown. This is exceptionally impressive when you considerthat Firefox is 6 million lines of code.
This community input is demonstrated by the last launch of Firefox. It came out of the gatelocalized into 37 languages.Mozilla wrote one of those, the English language version. Bycomparison, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7 launched only in English,despite having far more internal resources.
Still another way to look at it is through its quality assuranceprogram. Mozilla employs a few people (8 to 10) internally to focus onQA, but 10,000-plus people download and install itsnightly builds.The feedback from this community is immediate and very pointed: "Youbroke Thai on X page," etc. Mike noted, "It's a little bit unnerving attimes," but it's also a significant indicator of the "outside" buy-inthat Mozilla garners.
Clearly, Firefox has the community. But does Mozilla have the ambition?
Weave: A Schematic
(Credit: Mozilla)
To gauge this, I asked John and Mike where Mozilla is putting its resources. What are its big, strategic bets?
The first order of business for Mozilla, John suggested, will be tocontinue to orchestrate a better browser. The steps beyond the "vanillabrowser" experience primarily involveWeave,mobile, Firefox as a platform, and Statistics. These are the four that John thinks about a lot.
What are they?
Weave. Think "cloud" services to the browser. It's similar to Adobe's AIR in blending the desktop experience with Internet-based services.
Statistics. Given Mozilla's spread of customers, it could do an opt-in ComScore/Nielsen-type service. Even a low hit rate with its users would result in much better information for Operations than these other services provide. Mozilla recognizes that it must shepherd customer information carefully, but believes that allowing customers to determine how much information to share is the right model, and will provide plenty of data.
Mobile. I actually first discussed mobile with John years ago when he started and I was considering building an open-source mobile start-up. Not much has happened with Firefox and mobile since that day but John and Mike argue that things have changed to make a mobile browser viable. While the carriers used to control virtually everything that was installed on their phones, Apple is forcing them to open up.
Importantly, Firefox's mobile efforts have caught the attention of Nokia and other industry heavies, which are stepping up as significant code contributors. As the web blurs between desktop and mobile,mobile Firefox will be ever more important.
Mozilla as a platform. The items already discussed above suggest ways in which Firefox can function as a platform for Web innovation, but the possibilities are much, much broader. My browser knows (or could know) how I spend my money, where I spend my time, who I like, etc. Would I allow--indeed, beg--Firefox to collect information on these things in order to provide me more tailored advertising, social networking, etc.? Absolutely. The key is user control of her data.
Or maybe it's as simple as building Facebook-like services as third-party plug-ins for Firefox? Perhaps Firefox wouldn't operate such platforms so much as enable them. The meta-platform, as it were. Mozilla could take a transaction fee on the commercial exchanges it enables.
John and Mike were less forthcoming on this last item, or quitepossibly are simply still thinking it through (more likely the latteras they were quite open and transparent). It is a massive opportunityfor Mozilla, one that requires real discretion and forethought.
The good news is that Mozilla's team of "social entrepreneurs" iswell-suited to take on the task. This isn't a group looking tostrip-mine open source for cheap profit. It's a group of seasonedentrepreneurs that take open source very seriously as a disruptiveinfluence, but also as an ethical influence.
Besides, even if they didn't, they'd have 165 million people yellingat them for getting it wrong. It's open source. Things like "voice" and"choice" still matter in open source. Perhaps no more so than atMozilla.
Originally posted atThe Open Road