Ross: Not a bad thing, but you have to deliver. It’s hard to under-promise and
over-deliver when everyone’s promising things for you. We’re trying not to hype
up what we’re doing until we’ve got something people can use. People expect
the world, so if you hype up what you are doing, you have to deliver, and it’s
not easy.
Livingston: Did any competitors ever do anything to anger you?
Ross: Not directly. The only thing that bothers me is that Microsoft seems completely
driven by competition. We tried to be driven entirely by users. There
was a need, so we tried to cater to it. We didn’t say, “We’re going to try to crush
Microsoft” just to crush Microsoft. That wasn’t the intent, even though that’s
kind of the stated goal of some misguided open source projects.
Whereas Microsoft, they win a browser war, so in 2001, they bow out.
Which is completely irresponsible, because this is the most used software application
in the world, and they just stopped developing it. Now they are back in
the game, because they have competition, so that pulls them back in. I will say
that Internet Explorer 7 is shaping up to be a good browser; I just wish it came
a few years earlier.
We also see them trying to emulate a lot of the more genuine community
spirit that we’ve built up. People like Mozilla because we’re open source; we try
to be transparent and honest with the community. We’re a free product. We
work with people. And we’re starting to see that kind of thing emanate from
Microsoft. They have a team blog now and they are trying to be very buddybuddy,
but it feels like a PR pitch, as if they looked at our situation and now
they are trying to bring that sense of goodwill over there. If it were genuine, it
would be great, but it feels like a sales pitch. It’s getting better though.
I respect companies like Opera, which also produces a browser. They aren’t
doing that well right now, but at least they’re in it for the right reasons. They’ve
been around for a decade now, and they are passionate about the Web.
Microsoft just kind of comes and goes with the money and the competition, and
that doesn’t seem like the right motivation to make a good product.
Livingston: Looking back, what did people misunderstand about Firefox?
Ross: Many die-hard open source fans misunderstood our goal. Usually, in an
open source project, if you’re not a developer, it’s kind of like, “What are you
doing here?”
A lot of people misunderstood the real audience we were going after. It’s
hard to explain exactly what that means, but you can imagine, here’s this