p2pnet - rss feed: The secret of Firefox’s success
p2p news / p2pnet: Beverly Hamilton in Florida sent a bunch of Christmas cartoons like the one on the left. Some of them are hysterical. A jumbo jet with Santa plastered across the nose? And Rudolph sitting in an armchair with a line of mounted deer heads above him —– They used to laugh and call him names.
heh. Cheers, Beverly ; )
We’d heard from her a couple of days earlier, as well, raving about the new Firefox. And at the bottom of her Xmas email was a small Get Firefox! label.
On the one hand, you have the Microsoft Internet Explorer with hundreds of millions of PR dollars and a mega-monopoly behind it, and on the other, a relatively small, open source application run by a handful of individuals.
People-power has arrived, a reality the entertainment and software cartels in particular are having painfully and forcefully thrust upon them.
Mitchell Baker runs Mozilla and she believes in “the once-radical notion that software should be written cooperatively and freely shared,” says a story in the Mercury News.
“The Mozilla Project and its Firefox trademark are the property of the Mozilla Foundation, of which Baker is a director.
“The foundation, hobbled by the rules governing non-profit organizations, formed the for-profit Mozilla Corp. in August with Baker as its chief executive officer. She also continues to hold the whimsical title of ‘chief lizard wrangler’ for the Mozilla Project.
“The corporation now employs 36 of the 40 employees who work full-time in the foundation’s Mountain View office, in an office park clinging to the bay side of Highway 101. Most of the foundation’s revenue comes from big Web operators, including Google and Yahoo, who pay millions of dollars for preferential positioning in the Firefox search window.”
The Mercury News story also declares, “Firefox has largely drawn new users so far by word-of-mouth marketing and news coverage, rather than conventional software marketing tactics.”
There’s no doubt Mozilla has been, and still is, coolly and calculatingly exploiting the Net as a sales and promotion tool. Or it thinks it is. The advertising industry calls it viral marketing. But the ad folks didn’t create it. They’re just cashing in on an existing Net phenomenon which they’ve had to label. Otherwise they couldn’t sell it.
But Firefox is doing well only because Jane and John Doe like it: it’s neat and it has cool hooks. And vitally important, it isn’t Microsoft. And that’s what they’re telling each other. And they’d still have been talking about it without any help from the marketeers. P2p direct. Email, IM, chats, posts on sites, mobiles of various kinds. You name it.
The 21st digital century is here. The Net and blogs and personal posts and sites and news pages are today’s news and information sources and resources. Not the cartel-owned print and electronic lamescream media adnews outlets.
P2p (people-to-people), not PR and puff, are driving Firefox’s success and coming up fast are crowds of new indie web p2p browsers and other p2p communication systems such as FreeWan (the Net without constraints) and new browsers such as Flock, developed on Firefox but with social networking built in.
“Baker, who lives in Belmont with her 7-year-old son and husband, an open-source software developer at Stanford University, said Mozilla is considering bundling and hasn’t yet reached any deals,” says the Mercury News. “Then she adds, somewhat cryptically, ‘I think something will happen’.'”
She’s right. But not “will happen”. Rather, is happening.
December 4th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
“They’re just cashing in on an existing Net phenomenon which they’ve had to label. Otherwise they couldn’t sell it.”
so true. i love it
December 4th, 2005 at 8:45 pm
Early in Windows history were the browser wars. Other software makers were making browsers and no one was paying attention to paid for browsers when Microsucks was offering for free. At the time there was all sorts of clamour about how Microsucks was corraling the market on the browser and limiting computer users choices. After all, who was going to pay for something that was given for free? Worse the competion was shut out because Microsucks didn’t give competing software an even break.
Now down the road, a page has been ripped right from Microsucks operating manual and they don’t know how to respond. Once IE became the browser for everyone, the malware writers and spyware writers had a field day. They didn’t have to guess what was on a computer users computer to figure out what file to attach to, everyone had the same files. A victim of its own success, Windows became and to some extent still is, that OS that everyone loves to hate. Right along with that feeling was the browser of choice offered by Microsucks. For the regular computer user, cleaning up after a day’s surfing on the net means checking with scans of antivirus and spyware hunters as the cost of using Windows.
Now people are rapidly getting fed up after being shown other unscruplous businesses such as the music cartels are quite willing to take advantage of those same security holes that are part and parcel of running Windows. This means for better than 90% of computer users, they are both vunerable to these sort of sneaky methods and as long as Windows remains the OS (and complimentary IE) of choice or lack of choice for computer users, these sort of things will continue to plague Microsucks. Only recently has the slumbering giant awaken to the idea that security matters to the user and if they want to continue to dominate the market they will have to address these issues or continue a long slow leakage rate of losing customers and users of their products.
The adoption of Firefox by computer users shows the trend. By blog, word of mouth, or any other way of communicating on the net, people are telling other people to get away from the headaches of running one of the most insecure browsers of the computing world. By changing to Firefox returns a small measure of the surfing pleasure that has been taken away while trying to control the intrusion into their computers from those wanting to make money with drive by headace installs of all sorts of mischief.
It is high time that Microsucks learns that if it is going to continue to be a dominate force in the computing world, it listens to hear its most frequent users and what they are saying loud and clear. Eliminate the headache or we will find other means.
December 5th, 2005 at 6:38 am
i am a lover of open source, i have a windows xp, and i love, i hate drm and windows vista, i use firefox, openoffice, emule, gimp.
December 7th, 2005 at 1:39 am
I was using Netscape 1.0 before MS ever had a browser. And before that Mosaic. Check out http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/browsers6.htm for a browser timeline. What put IE on the map was that it shipped with Windows 95 in Sept , 1995. You no longer had to go out and d/l a browser (18MB) over a 28.8 modem. That is where MS got the share of the market. That and AOL bought Netscape, and screwed it up. Versions 4 .x sucked big time.
That was when I first tried Opera. Now I’m firefox all the way.