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Powered by Mozilla

John Slater has posted a very interesting article about a new logo "Powered by Mozilla". That is an excellent idea. Here is one comment I left on John's blog:

0. from a marketing point of view, what you want to avoid (the confusion between firefox and mozilla) is EXTREMELY important to embedders. They _want_ that confusion, they _need_ it. Saying that their tool uses Firefox’s rendering engine is a proof of modernity and quality. So I urge you to seriously consider a new version of your banner “Powered by Mozilla, just like Firefox” or something like that.

Let me explain a bit more item 0 : people around me with no wide computer knowledge know nothing at all about Mozilla. They know nothing about "Mozilla Firefox". They know Firefox. They all got it through www.firefox.com, not www.mozilla.com. Not only the people in the street don't know Mozilla, but even Mozilla is almost all about Firefox. Firefox is the root of the buzz, the root of the income, the root of the success, the root of the massive hiring process Mozilla started. Seamonkey is not a part of it any more, xulrunner is not a part of it any more, I hardly see how webrunner fits into that strategy, Mozilla just does not care about the editing companion to Firefox whatever its name Nvu or Composer, and Thunderbird is itself taken out from under the wings of Mozilla Corporation. The whole thing is about Firefox. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying it's bad or good. It's factual, period. So the modernity factor, the quality factor, the freedom factor and the coolness factor are NOT attached to the name "Mozilla" for the public, sorry to say. They are attached to "Firefox", the 400 million downloads product that kicks MSIE's ass in terms of security, modernity, extensibility, quality and more. In other terms, a "Powered by Mozilla" logo is USELESS to embedders because it's MEANINGLESS to their visitors/readers/users ; on the contrary a "Powered by Firefox" logo or a "Powered by Mozilla, the technology inside Firefox" logo or something like that is meaningful and carries enough coolness factor to be a valuable argument. I hope it's clearer like that. You have to accept that a "powered by..." logo is not helpful ONLY to Mozilla's marketing but also to the marketing of the people who are going to include this logo in a web site or product. And they will NOT do it if it does not bring any return value. So the only question is "What's the best return value they can have ?". Answer is easy : "a bit of Firefox's fame".