Ross: No, but the users we were getting weren’t really the target audience;
these were people that downloaded beta builds from Mozilla. So it was still a
geek audience. We had to transform the culture at Mozilla because it was all
based around open source ethos, which says programmers are kings, marketers
are sleaze, and everyone else can read the manual. All the branding for Mozilla
looked very Communist—the logo was a dinosaur and the banners ads were . . .
I can’t even describe it, but very odd, technical kind of imagery that didn’t
appeal to most people. We had to move a lot of that into a more mainstream
world.
Livingston: How did you do that?
Ross: The first thing that happened was that Netscape split off Mozilla into an
independent entity. Mozilla was once just the open source technology arm of
Netscape—they made technology and Netscape distributed it. When Netscape
said goodbye, Mozilla didn’t really have any kind of major distributor anymore.
As Firefox matured, Mozilla decided that they could try to distribute it
directly to the user without having to go through a middleman like Netscape. At
that point, the culture started to shift out of necessity; the organization had to
cater to more users or potentially collapse.
Livingston: As you were working on this, did you worry about competitive
threats?
Ross: No, Firefox was very different from traditional startups. Companies usually
worry about competition for financial reasons, but when we did Firefox,
money was just always sort of there. There were donations, seed money from
AOL; we eventually got this Google deal, but it wasn’t a source of fear for us,
because we knew if it didn’t make money . . . It wasn’t even supposed to make
money—it was a hobby, right, so we didn’t really care. I was in school. It didn’t
have to succeed.
It sounds bad, but the project was kind of just for us at the beginning—to
make something that we knew we could make, but not inside Netscape. It was
an outlet for those frustrations. We wanted people to use it, but we weren’t
going to kill ourselves if it failed. We defined success in terms of users, not
competitors.
In any case, the IE team had been disbanded, and Netscape had bowed out,
so the market was wide open. We didn’t crunch numbers or conduct market
analysis; we relaxed and followed our gut. There’s a lot more pressure now with
Parakey. People expect another Firefox or something like that.
Livingston: People must have high expectations for you, which is not a bad
thing, I suppose.