I just don't understand
By glazou on Saturday 25 June 2011, 17:35 - Mozilla - Permalink
Asa (recently named Product Manager for Desktop Firefox) commented a lot in Mike Kaply's recent blog entries following my own. I must comment myself on Asa's answers because some are just shocking.
Mike, you do realize that we get about 2 million Firefox downloads per day from regular user types, right? Your “big numbers” here are really just a drop in the bucket, fractions of fractions of a percent of our user base.
Uh !?!? We spend 8 to 10 hours per day (out of 16 hours awake) at work where the browser is one of the most important productivity tools ever, but corporate users are a drop in the bucket and therefore should not be addressed? Wow. Speaking of "drops in the bucket", I really wonder why accessibility is so important then... Oh, wait, there is a legal arsenal supporting accessibility. Even if localization is done by the community, Mozilla also spends resources to build and distribute Firefox in minor (in terms of speakers) languages like Basque or Breton. Who said drops in the bucket?
Speaking of drop in the bucket, I have an important question and I would like a firm, official and non politically correct answer: what is the future of Xulrunner?
Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours
We'll see. The day you understand that fighting Chrome with Chrome's strategy does not bring any differenciating factor and can only lead to the superiority of Chrome, you may change your view and finally discover there are important markets shares that are strictly not addressable by Chrome for various reasons. BTW, an old friend of mine, IT top manager for a 40,000+ employees, company called me yesterday. Verbatim: "once IE10 is out, we'll switch back to IE, the only browser that does care about corporate users despite of the issues it also raises ". Devastating... Already well heard in Redmond apparently.
A minute spent making a corporate user happy can better be spent making many regular users happy.
I dispute that. The finances and resources spent to implement and ship Panorama, an unfinished, unextensible, unlocalizable feature that drastically changes the center of gravity of the browser and was finally hidden would have been better spent on the production of a MSI package for corporate IT teams.
Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6.
Here in France, Firefox is used by governmental agencies, Ministers and even the Gendarmerie Nationale. I think you just lost them, in the middle to long run. By the way, will Thunderbird follow the same path for versions EOL?
IE9 is a fine browser and probably better suited to those who want long-term support. It’ll always be behind the consumer browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera)
WOW, to say the least. I would not bet a single cookie on that. And to be frank, I think IE10 will easily compete with the "consumer browsers". I even think IE10 and IE11 will start a frontal attack against the extensibility of Firefox and therefore a big part of its market share.
The Web platform is going to move forward at an increasingly swift pace, whether enterprises like it or not. There’s no stopping that. The Web is much bigger than the enterprise. It is a large and important piece of how we all live and it won’t be held hostage to the slow-moving dinosaurs of the past
Last time I checked, the companies you quite shockingly call "dinosaurs of the past" were still feeding us, providing your computer with electricity, allowing us to drive cars, to fly from a continent to another one, to buy flats or houses, manufacturing physical goods. And none of them releases a new version every six weeks. Browser vendors are extra-terrestrial aliens in this world. They think, because it's a browser war, users and web authors need 10 new browser versions per year. They don't. The only thing they really need is an interoperable Web and that's a totally different thing.
Basically, enterprises need to get more agile. They need to devote all that test/certify/train every three to ten years energy to continuous testing and roll-out system. It’s not more work or more money, it’s just a different schedule of work.
Winning a fight (hear a browser war) implies reaching new users. It also implies not letting existing users go. Asa thinks only individual users, I think all users. A blind user does not deserve less attention than a not visually impaired user ; similarly, a corporate user does not deserve less attention than others. And Corporations will not change the speed of their validation process because they just can't, they have too much to test with too small teams to achieve that validation in six weeks' time. Thinking they can shows only a total misunderstanding of what is an industry outside of the Computer Science domain and outside of the Bay Area's habits.
Comments
Aza has always been a "bomb thrower" in making comments, often to the detriment of Mozilla. I don't know Aza and so I'll assume he is actually a smart guy because he is in a position of some authority at Mozilla, but he is making a dumb mistake if he thinks the goal is maximizing the number of browser downloads.
@Jim B
It's Asa, not Aza. Otherwise people might confuse Asa Dotzler (Mozilla's resident troll and Firefox Product Manager) with Aza Raskin (Mozilla's former creative lead and creator of Panorama and Ubiquity among others).
I'm working on a product (electromechanical stuff)that will last at least 25 years. Many testing, many meetings to ensure the lifespan, does a computer software can last that long? if yes how many revision will it have during this period of time? our products will have none.
Once user starts using IE at office...why he will ever use anything else at home? when IE is so close to FF now..
Very well said. I am a little optimistic that there's some strategic thought emerging rather than just Chrome-chasing and fun personal projects... I think the Vision Statement [1] is pretty good.
[1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Vi...
I posted the following on Mike Kaply's post:
With all due respect, Asa, it is evident that you do not understand businesses.
The purpose of any business is to make money.
Let me say that, again.
The purpose of any business is to make money.
In the vast majority of businesses, IT departments support the rest of the business. IT departments are classified as indirect meaning they do not directly make money for the business. The support that IT departments provide is to enable others in the business to their jobs more efficiently and more repeatably. IT departments enable others to gather and analyze data/information about the business that is then used to run the business better not to mention meeting pertinent legal requirements.
Businesses also want stability and certainty not only in their sales, but they want it internally, too. Stability and certainty means no unpleasant surprises and no unexpected costs. Introducing new software every 6 weeks does not engender “stability and certainly”.
Does that mean that businesses cannot handle “change and uncertainty”? No. In fact, those businesses that can adapt to changes in the marketplace are often the most successful. However, that does not mean they are fine with a supplier who purposefully introduces changes such as Mozilla is now doing with Firefox especially when those changes mean limited resources must engage in testing while taking time away from other responsibilities the lack of “major” changes to Firefox not withstanding.
With that being said, it is pretty arrogant to sit as the keyboard and basically diss businesses as being “behind the times”. Few businesses will not adopt the “latest and greatest” software just because. Why? Because few of them can ill afford, first, the added cost to do so—think training and updating of systems for the new software in addition to any purchase costs—and, second, the downtime and/or loss of productivity during the transition from old to new IF any gains from that change are small.
Businesses will only introduce new software—or make any change for that matter—when the cost/benefit ratio justifies making the change. Think of the cost of the change being much lower than the increased productivity and/or additional money that can be made by implementing the change.
It is also not a matter of the IT departments being more efficient. The do not exist just to test new software. They must maintain the networks, servers and individual systems throughout their businesses.
Let’s be honest here. Most individuals will be more likely to use the browser that they use the most. If their employers use IE, they will be more likely to use IE at home simply because they are familiar with IE.
In conclusion, dismissing corporate customers and their concerns with new software is a serious oversight with the potential for significant long-term negative ramifications for Mozilla and Firefox. If you, Asa, cannot grasp the importance of corporate customers, perhaps you should resign from your position as Product Manager for Desktop Firefox.
Daniel,
When Mozilla addresses the corporate problems a lot of people will be happily using Firefox at work. Firefox is the better browser, so why not also use it in the office ? Otherwise you will still have a place where people need to use IE.
When you convert a company you also convert a whole lot of users (depending on the size of the company). I agree with Jigar's comment, because lots of home users use Microsoft Office because that is what they also use in the office. The features that OpenOffice.org / LibreOffice offer should be more than enough for the home user, but it is just not what they are used to work with.
Firefox and Chrome are very good browsers, but lack greatly on enterprise features. That's one of the things that can be greatly improved. When you look at Windows Installer (MSI), Active Directory integration, Group Policy there is very little to be found for Firefox and Chrome. At our Dutch Mozilla user community from time to time a company has a question about enterprise deployment of Firefox. However, I have not very much to offer. At least I can provide some pointers, but cannot tell whether these work fine because these are not supported by Mozilla.
But as long as Asa thinks that enterprise users are not important I fear it will just stay this way. Until Google looks at the enterprise users as a nice user group and also takes that market share.
Great post. In reality, I don't think there's anyone that feels Firefox 5 deserved a major version number and in fact the underwhelming release in fact makes it harder to market the product as a whole. But I assume smarter minds than mine have a plan. Having wow factor every three releases only serves to make Mozilla look stupid.
Also I'm in full agreement that the MSIs, GPOs and 64bit builds would've been a bigger step forward for Mozilla than Panorama and would've served as a great foothold in increasingly competitive times. But there are always going to be questionable decisions. You even look at the decision for Mobile to trickle down resources from tablet to phone based on the idea that tablet installations are more valuable than that of a mobile installations. Especially given that phone installations dwarf those of tablet installations and will for a long time yet. Thus proving there's a certain wow factor that people in high places will always aspire to.
I think the best solution for Mozilla would be to have a rapid release cycle of a release every three months, but based on the fact that all features are in branches, surely it's not hard to decide when features are merged to a release branch? Thus work on the assumption that x.N will be out every 3 months without fail unless x.0 is released due to features being complete. At least then EOL isn't as big a factor.
"You even look at the decision for Mobile to trickle down resources from tablet to phone based on the idea that tablet installations are more valuable than that of a mobile installations."
What? I work on the mobile team, and don't believe this information is true. Also, as far as I know there hasn't been any decision about the enterprise stuff either.
We're Mozilla. We discuss things in public and take in public opinions before making decisions. We don't have secret boardroom meetings about this stuff. It confuses people/businesses/the press because, as far as I know, no other business out there works like this. They hide everything and announce it at the last minute. In fact, the whole thread that started this was put up back in May, so I'm sorta shocked that this is surprising people/companies now.
There's really nothing written here that hasn't already been written though. We need to just decide, do we want to spend the extra money for the QA and RelEng resources necessary to provide an LTS build (I don't think it will be that much extra work from engineering, where we are already pushing patches to multiple branches).
> A blind user does not deserve less attention than a not visually impaired user ; similarly, a corporate user does not deserve less attention than others
Apples and oranges, I'm sorry to say. Big corps can improve the state of their situation by changing their strategy, while blind users hardly can.
@DigDug2k:
You name it. The problem is Communication. It all comes down to Communication or rather the non-existence of it.
People don't feel informed or involved. The rapid release cycle? Copy Google, period. Listen to Add-On developer? Write a blog post! Talk with big partners liek IBM? Nah, it's a company.
Many people feel just that.
Being open is great, but all the information that's there really is confusing. Most appears to be lost somewhere on the way.
I completely agree that this whole chasing Google thing is a dumb idea. Firefox 4.0 meant something. It made me proud to see it finally hit. Firefox 5.0 was just Firefox 4.1. Just a blip. I use Nightly, so the version number thing doesn't really affect me, but now I have no idea when any features will actually come out. Other than tracking the rarely-updated wiki. I honestly feel embarrassed for Firefox right now. It's like it is admitting Chrome is better by blindly following it, even if it is detrimental or pointless to do so.
Great post! I read Asa's comments too, and was shocked but not surprised. What surprises me is that he now got this new position as Firefox Product Manager, which means that his rude comments are appearing more and more often in bugzilla too (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_b...).
Sorry it’s gotten so long:
I’ve been following the forum feedback towards Fx releases on IT news sites in Germany for a year or so, because I feel a member of the community and I care. Mozilla in general has traditionally been strong here. For years the sentiment has been balanced to positive. These sites are frequented by people from software development and IT departments, the latter seeming to be predominant among posters. These are the early adopters around here, they try out new stuff at home and they are happy if they can bring it to the work place. The usual flame wars notwithstanding, they are generally benevolent towards OSS projects, and wary of tech giants like Google, Apple and (to a degree) MS.
In recent months the sentiment on Fx has become almost exclusively negative on those sites (heise, golem, ...). The new versioning scheme (Fx did not make corp setups easy even before, but was "worth it") is by far the most prominent pain point.
While I strongly agree with rapid release as our software development model, for Firefox it might be a bad marketing model. A lot of users would actually not mind several new versions a year if the versioning scheme gave them some confidence in a low probability of breaking change (4.1, 4.2, ...). Even non-IT users are annoyed with this and perceive it as a transparent marketing ploy ("major revision should bring major change"). In general, the connotation of "Mozilla" has been shifting from "open source community fighting MS/Apple" to "browser company making money".
We should not confound our intention (versions should not matter) with the message we send (*you* don’t matter, we want your downloads=money).
Also, even if we are genuinely convinced that the new release model is the best for home users *and* corporate, we don’t get any credibility on that with those "drop in the bucket" statements. And, our mission is to bring the web forward -- theirs (IT) is not. Their job is to keep the crazy machinery running that piled up over the years, so that everyone can keep working. Lastly, "they should change their process" reminds me of the famous Job Quote "don’t hold it that way". It exhibits ignorance about where a user stands (even if they love Fx, these guys can’t make a company change their way when it can simply use IE instead).
For what can be done, an LTS release model would probably resound with the guys who already appreciate it in Ubuntu, *and* send the potentially strong positive marketing message that we actually do care enough about our users to reconsider our strategy.
As someone who has been reading mozilla blogs (just out of general interest) for quite a while, Asa consistently comes across as not a very nice person, and never particularly insightful. Typically when he says something stupid it isn't actually representative of Mozilla's policy as a whole, though -- hope that's the case here!
"Firefox 6 will be the EOL of Firefox 5. And Firefox 7 will be the EOL for Firefox 6." (Asa Dotzler quoted by Daniel Glazman)
The source is http://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/un... .
See also
* "we'll no longer be maintaining old branches." in http://mozilla.github.com/process-r...
* the previous support of old branches in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Templa...
* the Linux kernel support of old branches
"Firefox 5.0 was just Firefox 4.1." (Brad)
+1
I haven't installed Firefox 4 at my managed site (120 school workstations) because they messed with the user interface in some kind of half-arsed attempt to be Chrome and, as the school's sole part-time technician, I don't have time to retrain all my on-site users. I originally installed FF (and spent a lot of time learning how to roll extensions and options out in an automated way, and convincing my users that The Internet was not Internet Explorer and vice versa) because at the time the alternative was IE6 and who needs that kind of pain?
We don't need any of the fancy schmancy stuff built into the newer browsers, but when we do, I'll probably just cut straight over to Chrome unless the Firefox team decides to make security-updated, UI-stable LTS releases available alongside the rapid-release treadmill.
flabdablet: This doesn't make a lot of sense. Even a LTS release won't be supported *forever*, and when support ends, you'd face exactly the same problem that you're having with Firefox 3.6 vs. Firefox 4, i.e. significant UI changes from one LTS release to the other. On the other hand, if you follow the rapid releases, you'll have only a small set of UI updates with each release, which users will likely be able to handle without retraining.
Daniel, please allow me to answer a side-question of your blog post: "What is the future of Xulrunner?"
I think there is none. XULRunner is already effectively dead. There are still a few companies trying to build a product on top of XULRunner but eventually they will also have to switch to a platform that they can rely on. Mozilla has no incentives to improve XULRunner and third parties won't do it either simply because it is so hard to get changes accepted.
@Wladimir: I hope you're pessimistic. If that happens, I'll have no choice but leave the Mozilla community and switch to webkit.
@Dao
Companies aren't looking for forever releases. They want something greater than six weeks and less than forever.
In the past, we've said a year for an LTS is reasonable and even six months is doable.
But six weeks is just too short.
And people keep saying "small UI changes with each release", but that depends on the change. I'm betting chrome search goes away in one of these releases eventually, and that's a huge UI change.
I just hope all this "slow down for the business!" rhetoric doesn't retard Firefox too much.
You know big corps have money and resources. Why not put their money where the mouth is and contribute instead of demanding a non-profit do it for them?
About :
"Basically, enterprises need to get more agile. They need to devote all that test/certify/train every three to ten years energy to continuous testing and roll-out system. It’s not more work or more money, it’s just a different schedule of work. "
Being myself in some form of corporate IT (BSS/OSS systems for telecoms) I don't know if he realizes that the main issues for corporate IT applications are their own functionalities complexity and multiple interfaces, and that if the browser can stay put, do its job properly, and not add more regression/issues, that's always a plus.