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Well, how should I...?

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I don't actually think I've ever given a talk on the history of Mozilla

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to a large set of people, which is pretty shocking...

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Ok! So...

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I'm gonna give it a try.

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I'm not sure if I've actually given a talk

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on the history of Mozilla to this many people.

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So that's probably an indication that I need to do more of it.

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Mozilla's been around for a long time, since 1998.

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And I thought when we got started...

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I'd like to ask:

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Of the people here,

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how many have been in Mozilla for three months or less?

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Can you raise your hand?

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Ok, excellent.

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How many have been here a year or so?

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That's a pretty good group too.

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Ok, how about the five year?

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Pretty good and I'm gonna say the ten year.

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How many people? Who's around, though?

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One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...

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So there's nine people in this room that have been working on Mozilla

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for ten years and more.

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And there's probably another nine or ten people in this gathering today

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who have been here that long as well.

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And so I'm gonna explain the different roles that we had in the early days.

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I'll try to name some names as we go along, I won't get all of those names,

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but if you see this people and have questions about Mozilla or Mozilla's history,

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find a good time and ask them, because we all have many memories.

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So, Mozilla started in 1998. It came out of Netscape.

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Netscape at one time had been the almost monopoly browser vendor.

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It was the first commercial browser,

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so we had, I don't know, 99% of the market share at one time.

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And it was a pretty exciting time.

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That was when the Internet and the Web actually really exploded.

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Microsoft appeared. They started building its own browser.

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Microsoft did a couple of things that ended up eventually building a good browser.

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And it also engaged in a whole range of illegal activities.

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And so the combination of that changed the landscape drammatically.

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And Netscape management had the foresight to recognise they could not continue

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and be successful in the way they had been operating.

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And they realised with the help of the engineering folk set at Netscape

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that the best opportunity was to convert their typical proprietary closed commercial product

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into an open source product.

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This was radical in its day.

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Open source is mainstream now, but it was not then.

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Open source was deep in the technical community,

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it never surfaced in a product,

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it was all sort of odd

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and it was a very radical move.

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The second thing that happened is that the management team,

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I was there at the time,

53
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a lot of us were,

54
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but I was part of these discussions,

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realised that an open source project had to be real.

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So, inside Netscape there was created a small group of people

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who were charged with the job of building a successful open source project.

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And there was a larger group of people, engineering,

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that was charged with building a successful Netscape product.

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That Netscape product was designed to make money for Netscape

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and ultimately money for AOL, after AOL bought Netscape.

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So, in the very early days of Mozilla, through '98, '99, 2000,

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we had these two different groups.

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We had the engineering group, which was a 100-150 people

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working on building the Netscape navigator product

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managed by a set of people wanting to use that product to make money for AOL.

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Then we had the small group of people who were charged with building Mozilla

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as an open source project,

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building contributors from all sorts of different places

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and building a technology base that was useful for many different companies.

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The open source side.

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That was small in name.

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There were six or eight of us.

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Of those, Mick was one of them,

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Gerv was one of them,

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Dan was one of them,

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Brendan was one of them,

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I was one of them,

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Shaver was one of them and there was a few of other folks

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who aren't here any longer.

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That was one group, then we had this very large engineering group

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building the Netscape navigator product.

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And in there Chofmann was there,

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Johnny was there,

85
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Jonas was there,

86
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Dbaron was there...

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Dbaron came actually a little later.

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But there is a bunch of people here in that engineering group.

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That went on for a little while

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and it turned out to be not stable.

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It turned out that the efforts of the Netscape management group

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to build the product to make money for them

93
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came into conflict with how we wanted to manage the code base

94
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as a Mozilla open source project.

95
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That conflict simmered for a while

96
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and eventually it exploded.

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Yes, please feel free to ask questions at any point.

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[Question]

99
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No, it turned out there are lots of ways to build a browser that makes money

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that people don't like.

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So in those days, Netscape had been acquired by AOL

102
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and AOL was a website property.

103
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So to that management team,

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the browser was a tool to drive people to the AOL website.

105
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You can do that, but it doesn't mean you like the product.

106
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You can add user interface features to it,

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you can focus on new buttons and menu items

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that in those cases were AOL specific,

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you can put your resources there

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rather than on security and new features,

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you might not be interested in features

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that help people find things across the web,

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because AOL wanted them going to AOL.

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So we found that there were immense conflicts

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and also, in an open source project,

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you have contributors who have an "ownership stake",

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meaning that they put effort in, they are building a product,

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if they are using the product they have a set of needs

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that might be different.

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As part of the open source project

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we were balancing the needs of our employers, Netscape,

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with various other people.

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And eventually,

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that broke down.

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So for example, we'll take user interface

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which is always a contentious issue in a product.

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The single most contentious issue,

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way back in 1999 and 2000,

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was user interface,

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because Netscape would want a user interface

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that drove people to AOL

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and Mozilla wanted an interface that was good for people using the Web.

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I was the General Manager of the small group of people

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building Mozilla as an open source project.

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In those days we called ourselves staff@mozilla.org

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or mozilla.org staff.

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When the tension exploded over the interface,

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over really who controlled the code,

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we had long fights about what would the basic process is

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by which we build the product.

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So things we take for granted today,

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like you have to earn the right to be a committer,

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we fought with Netscape over that.

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Things like code needs code review,

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it has to be good enough;

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that being hired as an employee

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doesn't automatically make your code good enough;

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that even after you are hired as an employee

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your peers need to decide your code is good enough.

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So basic things like code review were immense fights.

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I was the representative of Mozilla

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and when those tensions came to a head,

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I was fired.

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Yes.

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Was Mozilla the open source browser in those days?

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Mozilla was in those days a technol..

157
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Sorry, the question was "Was Mozilla the open source browser in those days?"

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Mozilla in those days was seen as a technology development organisation.

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And Netscape liked to think that it was building the browser.

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[Question]

161
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Did everyone hear Dan?

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The initial theory was like the Linux kernel,

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where Mozilla would be the technology development asset

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that builds the kernel

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and other organisation would build the commercial products from it.

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So we had this ongoing tensions

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and one of them was Mozilla was becoming a product

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in its own right.

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It turned out that as the Netscape and AOL management

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began building their product to drive traffic to AOL,

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more people started using the Mozilla version

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than the Netscape version.

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That was going on in the background

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and let to some of these tensions.

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So I was fired

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and the belief at Netscape at the time

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was that by getting rid of me,

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Netscape management would then have the ability

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to control the Mozilla open source project

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and could convert it into a set of people that helped Netscape

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build the product that they wanted.

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Essentially, to view the community as a free work force

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that would help build the Netscape product.

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Of course, the competing view is that we're all building an open source project

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that has to meet the needs of the community

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and that people who contribute and build the product

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have some say in what happens to it.

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What happened at that point was that the two groups of people,

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the small group of people that had been mozilla.org staff

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and the larger group of people which were all the engineers

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contributing to Mozilla

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reunited to form one shared outlook.

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What happened was that essentially the engineers working at Netscape

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were very clear that the leadership that they were following was Mozilla.

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And it was me.

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And it was not their management.

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So, everyone involved voted to continue to try to build

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an open source project.

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So I remained the General Manager of Mozilla.

200
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I remained the leader of the Mozilla project

201
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and the spokesperson for the development of the Mozilla project,

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much to the surprise of the Netscape and AOL management.

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We learned a lot of lessons out of that.

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We learned from that that leadership depends on who will follow you.

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You need to lead people.

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My own view is that you have to be leading in the right direction

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enough of the time,

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that enough people follow or enough people also lead in that direction.

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[Question]

210
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This would be... I was fired in 2001 and yes...

211
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Yes.

212
00:12:03,637 --> 00:12:05,778
Yeah. So that was 2001 when I was fired.

213
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[Question]

214
00:12:13,785 --> 00:12:14,431
Yes.

215
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The question was:

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"The open web is here today it's easy to see why it's important

217
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back then in those days before the open web, how did you know?

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What makes you willing to risk your job?"

219
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We'd been working on a browser for a while,

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so we could tell that the browser was important.

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It was clear at that time, when Microsoft had maybe 90-95% market share

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in the browser, in the operating system and in the productivity suites,

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Office and Excel,

224
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which were the only things that people used in those days.

225
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And so it was clear

226
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that in those days,

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Microsoft controlled access to the Internet.

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We didn't call it the open web then but it was the Internet

229
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and we knew it was great.

230
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It was very clear that by controlling the browser,

231
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Microsoft controlled how individual people experienced the Internet.

232
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That the server side of the Internet in those days

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was developing, growing and becoming richer and more capable.

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But the client side was deteriorating

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and through that client,

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Microsoft was able to ignore formats

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to make vast quantities of content unavailable to people.

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And to determine the business model

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through which you could access content

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and to have an immense influence over the entire structure of the Internet.

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So that much was clear.

242
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It sounds melodramatic but the future of the Internet

243
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was already an issue at that point.

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It was very clear the browser was the leverage point.

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We were very clear about our jobs.

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One second, I'm gonna tell a couple of stories

247
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and then I'll get you Chris.

248
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But we were very clear that our jobs were on the line.

249
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It wasn't just me.

250
00:14:07,071 --> 00:14:08,479
It was everyone I named and Marcia.

251
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Is Marcia here?

252
00:14:10,025 --> 00:14:11,294
I didn't see her hand go up.

253
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But we would have meanings as the small group that was mozilla.org

254
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when the tensions got really high

255
00:14:17,196 --> 00:14:18,542
and we would get together

256
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and we would say things like

257
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"What happens if AOL pulls the plug?

258
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What happens if we're all fired tomorrow?

259
00:14:26,204 --> 00:14:28,581
How do we keep Mozilla operating?"

260
00:14:29,029 --> 00:14:31,306
Those would be things like...

261
00:14:32,986 --> 00:14:36,416
Our release engineer at the time

262
00:14:36,531 --> 00:14:40,392
had the keys to the server room where the Mozilla machines operated.

263
00:14:41,889 --> 00:14:44,734
These are small details but they were really important at the time

264
00:14:44,734 --> 00:14:48,517
and we knew that if he could do it

265
00:14:48,517 --> 00:14:51,655
he would help us keep Mozilla operating

266
00:14:51,655 --> 00:14:55,323
and we knew that Chofmann was running the engineering organisation

267
00:14:55,323 --> 00:14:57,755
and we knew that he would be helpful as it turned out,

268
00:14:57,755 --> 00:14:59,063
we needed him.

269
00:14:59,395 --> 00:15:05,949
And Marcia had the keys to the closet that was our single supply of Mozilla t-shirts.

270
00:15:07,913 --> 00:15:10,569
Which I bought with my own money.

271
00:15:10,569 --> 00:15:12,822
Oh, no. That was later, nevermind. The ones I bought later.

272
00:15:14,553 --> 00:15:16,253
But she had that key

273
00:15:16,253 --> 00:15:19,487
and she had access to some other things.

274
00:15:19,487 --> 00:15:21,996
So we would sit and think how many machines do we need,

275
00:15:21,996 --> 00:15:23,819
how many employees do we need.

276
00:15:23,819 --> 00:15:25,503
If we have one employee,

277
00:15:25,503 --> 00:15:28,079
is it Leef who runs the build machines?

278
00:15:28,079 --> 00:15:29,487
If we have one employee,

279
00:15:29,487 --> 00:15:30,564
is it Brendan?

280
00:15:30,656 --> 00:15:32,118
Who is he?

281
00:15:32,279 --> 00:15:35,085
And what's the best way to keep Mozilla operating?

282
00:15:35,900 --> 00:15:39,255
But when it came to it I was the only one who was fired

283
00:15:39,255 --> 00:15:42,103
and so the rest of the Mozilla folks were left

284
00:15:42,103 --> 00:15:44,868
and Chofmann provided a haven

285
00:15:45,143 --> 00:15:48,171
for us to try and continue to be effective as well.

286
00:15:48,171 --> 00:15:51,137
So this was this first era.

287
00:15:53,408 --> 00:15:56,824
So after I was fired there were a bunch of people still at Netscape,

288
00:15:56,824 --> 00:15:58,831
working on Netscape navigator.

289
00:15:58,831 --> 00:16:03,790
As part of that we finally managed to ship our first product as Mozilla.

290
00:16:03,790 --> 00:16:05,590
Mozilla 1.0 we called it.

291
00:16:06,099 --> 00:16:09,371
And this had been a long time in coming.

292
00:16:09,663 --> 00:16:12,019
That was in 2002.

293
00:16:12,586 --> 00:16:17,104
We started Mozilla in 1998 and expected to have a product

294
00:16:17,104 --> 00:16:19,264
very shortly afterwards.

295
00:16:19,272 --> 00:16:22,291
But it turned out, when we got into it

296
00:16:22,291 --> 00:16:25,280
that the technology was pretty old.

297
00:16:25,280 --> 00:16:30,780
Brendan made the decision to really build the new technology base.

298
00:16:30,932 --> 00:16:33,009
That technology base is Gecko.

299
00:16:33,671 --> 00:16:37,768
It cost us years to get the rendering engine to a point

300
00:16:37,768 --> 00:16:40,958
where we could really build a good application on it and ship it.

301
00:16:40,958 --> 00:16:43,380
We finally did that in 2002.

302
00:16:43,705 --> 00:16:47,800
It was Mozilla 1.0 and it was technically a good product.

303
00:16:47,800 --> 00:16:50,772
It was technically a shockingly good product.

304
00:16:50,772 --> 00:16:54,177
Across the open source space, where people knew it

305
00:16:54,177 --> 00:16:56,531
they were retelling us they were really shocked

306
00:16:56,531 --> 00:16:58,208
to how good a product it was.

307
00:16:58,532 --> 00:17:01,136
But it was not a consumer product.

308
00:17:01,724 --> 00:17:05,292
It was really built by developers, for developers.

309
00:17:05,292 --> 00:17:08,094
It didn't have a clear designed aesthetic,

310
00:17:08,094 --> 00:17:11,763
it didn't have an approach to consumers.

311
00:17:11,763 --> 00:17:13,694
So it was a very powerful product

312
00:17:13,694 --> 00:17:17,476
and if you couldn't figure out what was really the best user experience

313
00:17:17,476 --> 00:17:19,666
you'd build both and have a pref for it.

314
00:17:19,828 --> 00:17:24,504
It was known as loaded and overweight

315
00:17:24,504 --> 00:17:27,629
and technically good, but a poor product.

316
00:17:27,629 --> 00:17:29,368
That was 2002.

317
00:17:29,754 --> 00:17:31,569
About a year later,

318
00:17:31,923 --> 00:17:35,402
AOL decided they were tired of investing in the browser.

319
00:17:35,402 --> 00:17:37,087
They still had, I don't know,

320
00:17:37,087 --> 00:17:40,990
75 or a 150 people they were paying to work on the browser

321
00:17:40,990 --> 00:17:42,952
and they weren't really getting anywhere with it.

322
00:17:42,952 --> 00:17:49,488
At long last, they became interested in taking mozilla.org assets

323
00:17:49,488 --> 00:17:54,294
and giving them to those of us who'd been running the project.

324
00:17:55,293 --> 00:17:59,812
Again, to give you a sense of what life was like in those days,

325
00:17:59,812 --> 00:18:02,491
mozilla.org assets were

326
00:18:02,491 --> 00:18:06,214
the trademark, the name, mozilla.org,

327
00:18:07,834 --> 00:18:14,077
four big servers we fought for that ran all mozilla.org

328
00:18:17,573 --> 00:18:20,223
and some seed startup money.

329
00:18:20,261 --> 00:18:21,661
That was really it.

330
00:18:22,405 --> 00:18:23,451
Yeah, Mick.

331
00:18:23,919 --> 00:18:25,212
[Question]

332
00:18:36,769 --> 00:18:38,938
That's definitely the timing.

333
00:18:39,338 --> 00:18:42,081
Yes, so that was why it may well have been.

334
00:18:42,434 --> 00:18:44,767
What Mick said was

335
00:18:44,767 --> 00:18:50,387
"wasn't it the case that the reason AOL stopped investing in browsers

336
00:18:50,387 --> 00:18:55,293
and in Gecko is that they just completed a deal with Microsoft

337
00:18:55,293 --> 00:18:57,866
where they had agreed to use IE

338
00:18:57,866 --> 00:19:02,914
or the Microsoft rendering engine in their browser."

339
00:19:02,914 --> 00:19:04,360
Is that right?

340
00:19:05,247 --> 00:19:09,001
Yes, that's right. The AOL client, that I forgotten about.

341
00:19:09,001 --> 00:19:17,307
So Microsoft managed to buy AOL out of their own browser effort.

342
00:19:19,173 --> 00:19:20,658
But it was good for us.

343
00:19:20,658 --> 00:19:23,075
Because that didn't seem like a lot of assets,

344
00:19:23,075 --> 00:19:25,329
but it was really critical to us.

345
00:19:25,437 --> 00:19:30,986
We had thought before about starting our own effort at mozilla.org

346
00:19:30,986 --> 00:19:32,517
but without the name,

347
00:19:32,517 --> 00:19:34,647
it would have been really hard.

348
00:19:34,647 --> 00:19:37,910
And four giant servers doesn't seem like much today,

349
00:19:37,910 --> 00:19:39,795
but in that era it was a big deal.

350
00:19:39,795 --> 00:19:42,336
We also got some seed money from them,

351
00:19:42,336 --> 00:19:44,403
we got 2 million dollars.

352
00:19:44,618 --> 00:19:47,073
That was a funny story too because

353
00:19:47,073 --> 00:19:49,481
I had ended up working with Mitch Kapor,

354
00:19:49,664 --> 00:19:52,506
I don't know if you know, from Lotus,

355
00:19:52,506 --> 00:19:54,544
those who remember Lotus 1-2-3,

356
00:19:54,544 --> 00:19:57,693
and Mitch had come to see that open source was really important,

357
00:19:57,693 --> 00:20:00,806
after he left Lotus and he had his own open source organisation,

358
00:20:00,806 --> 00:20:02,675
and I was working with him.

359
00:20:02,675 --> 00:20:05,479
And he really stepped in to help us.

360
00:20:05,479 --> 00:20:10,641
So Mozilla has a history of things appearing when we need them.

361
00:20:10,949 --> 00:20:14,225
There is that saying that is it luck,

362
00:20:14,225 --> 00:20:16,256
or is it effort, or is it skill.

363
00:20:16,279 --> 00:20:19,906
And Mozilla has been blessed with all three:

364
00:20:19,906 --> 00:20:24,814
immense effort, tremendous skill and this luck that things appear.

365
00:20:24,814 --> 00:20:29,953
So, Mitch appeared and he essentially arm wrestled AOL

366
00:20:29,953 --> 00:20:31,968
for that seed money.

367
00:20:32,203 --> 00:20:34,860
We look at the 2 million dollars

368
00:20:34,860 --> 00:20:37,107
and we thought that we could support maybe 10 people

369
00:20:37,107 --> 00:20:38,261
for two years.

370
00:20:38,391 --> 00:20:40,912
Because we had set down as mozilla.org

371
00:20:40,912 --> 00:20:43,297
and thought that to be effective as a project,

372
00:20:43,297 --> 00:20:45,990
the minimum number of people we needed was 10.

373
00:20:45,990 --> 00:20:48,265
Running the machines was one person.

374
00:20:48,265 --> 00:20:51,346
You know, we keep the project alive but we couldn't be successful.

375
00:20:51,346 --> 00:20:54,165
And Mitch had pitched a little bit of other money

376
00:20:54,165 --> 00:20:57,369
and IBM and Sun were our first commercial partners

377
00:20:57,369 --> 00:21:01,254
and they pitched in some money and started maybe with 12 or 13 employees.

378
00:21:01,254 --> 00:21:02,946
What that meant was:

379
00:21:04,339 --> 00:21:06,710
Johnny Stenback and D Baron,

380
00:21:06,710 --> 00:21:08,756
that was the platform team.

381
00:21:09,090 --> 00:21:12,166
One person on Firefox for the front-end team,

382
00:21:12,166 --> 00:21:13,774
one person on Thunderbird,

383
00:21:13,774 --> 00:21:15,459
one release engineer,

384
00:21:15,459 --> 00:21:17,343
Chofmann as an engineering manager,

385
00:21:17,343 --> 00:21:21,347
Mick did the ultimate sacrifice and ran our systems for us,

386
00:21:21,347 --> 00:21:25,590
for a year or two before we were able to get him back

387
00:21:25,590 --> 00:21:28,018
into a role that really fit him better,

388
00:21:28,018 --> 00:21:33,018
we had one person helping us on sustainability,

389
00:21:33,018 --> 00:21:35,138
Brendan as Brendan,

390
00:21:35,138 --> 00:21:37,383
and me trying to be successful.

391
00:21:37,383 --> 00:21:38,914
And that was it.

392
00:21:38,914 --> 00:21:41,060
And that seemed like a lot to us.

393
00:21:41,106 --> 00:21:41,667
[Question]

394
00:21:41,714 --> 00:21:43,839
That's right, I forgot Asa

395
00:21:43,839 --> 00:21:45,685
How can I forget Asa?

396
00:21:46,211 --> 00:21:47,303
[Question]

397
00:21:49,761 --> 00:21:51,589
And project management.

398
00:21:52,265 --> 00:21:53,388
And still.

399
00:21:53,857 --> 00:21:56,192
From that day till now, phenomenal.

400
00:21:56,192 --> 00:21:59,954
Whenever I have a problem with my browser, Asa is always able

401
00:21:59,954 --> 00:22:01,731
to figure out what it is.

402
00:22:01,731 --> 00:22:02,662
So that's it.

403
00:22:02,662 --> 00:22:04,485
No one else can ever do that.

404
00:22:04,485 --> 00:22:05,270
[Question]

405
00:22:13,170 --> 00:22:16,687
All of a sudden, we had our own independence.

406
00:22:17,365 --> 00:22:19,411
It was pretty scary,

407
00:22:19,943 --> 00:22:21,936
10 people is not really enough,

408
00:22:21,936 --> 00:22:27,091
there was no ongoing financial sustainability that we knew of,

409
00:22:27,091 --> 00:22:28,691
it was a gamble,

410
00:22:28,845 --> 00:22:32,547
but we had our own independence and we could make a product.

411
00:22:33,607 --> 00:22:37,462
We made phenomenal changes in that period.

412
00:22:37,462 --> 00:22:40,729
It was our second set of phenomenal changes.

413
00:22:40,729 --> 00:22:45,295
When we were founded we made up an organisation that was revolutionary,

414
00:22:45,295 --> 00:22:46,933
as Chofmann described.

415
00:22:46,933 --> 00:22:48,418
How do you work with a company?

416
00:22:48,418 --> 00:22:49,979
How did we do code review?

417
00:22:49,979 --> 00:22:51,418
How did you earn your authority?

418
00:22:51,418 --> 00:22:53,518
There was nothing quite like it before.

419
00:22:53,518 --> 00:22:55,728
When we started the foundation

420
00:22:55,728 --> 00:22:59,164
we remade ourselves over again.

421
00:22:59,164 --> 00:23:02,192
We were, as I said, a small number of people,

422
00:23:02,323 --> 00:23:06,882
we made a bet on a new product that was Firefox.

423
00:23:07,018 --> 00:23:10,025
We didn't have a product to ship at that time.

424
00:23:10,140 --> 00:23:13,158
And Asa with our community involvement

425
00:23:13,158 --> 00:23:15,467
continued to ship the Mozilla suite

426
00:23:15,467 --> 00:23:16,813
for fifteen months,

427
00:23:16,813 --> 00:23:18,609
as the only product we had in the marketplace

428
00:23:18,609 --> 00:23:20,417
until Firefox was ready.

429
00:23:20,417 --> 00:23:23,406
We made that bet, which is a scary bet.

430
00:23:23,406 --> 00:23:25,542
Imagine not to have a browser,

431
00:23:25,542 --> 00:23:29,420
I mean we didn't have a person working on the product we were shipping.

432
00:23:30,533 --> 00:23:34,830
But we did that because we knew that Firefox was our opportunity

433
00:23:34,830 --> 00:23:36,738
to make a commercial product.

434
00:23:37,895 --> 00:23:42,632
Our first five or six years of life taught us that technology alone

435
00:23:42,632 --> 00:23:46,835
will not change the industry the way we want to.

436
00:23:47,064 --> 00:23:52,120
Technology alone does not change people's lives the way we want to do that.

437
00:23:52,120 --> 00:23:55,824
Our opportunity with the browser is to have a product that touches people.

438
00:23:55,824 --> 00:23:56,600
Yeah.

439
00:23:56,692 --> 00:23:57,584
[Question]

440
00:24:00,980 --> 00:24:03,762
Yeah. So that's where I'm trying to get to.

441
00:24:03,762 --> 00:24:06,950
That technology alone is not enough,

442
00:24:06,950 --> 00:24:09,675
that raw power of technology is not enough,

443
00:24:09,675 --> 00:24:12,137
that if you really want to touch people,

444
00:24:12,137 --> 00:24:15,402
not us, not power users, not developers

445
00:24:15,402 --> 00:24:18,098
but if you want to touch consumers

446
00:24:18,098 --> 00:24:19,905
and change their lives,

447
00:24:19,905 --> 00:24:23,414
you have to be utterly committed to that.

448
00:24:23,721 --> 00:24:26,905
You can't build the features that you want

449
00:24:26,905 --> 00:24:28,989
just because you want them.

450
00:24:28,989 --> 00:24:30,997
You can't tell people:

451
00:24:30,997 --> 00:24:33,345
"Oh, you should behave this way,

452
00:24:33,345 --> 00:24:35,352
you should want to be this way."

453
00:24:35,352 --> 00:24:38,112
You have to build the product that is elegant

454
00:24:38,112 --> 00:24:41,456
and beautiful and powerful under the covers

455
00:24:41,456 --> 00:24:43,049
but that people love.

456
00:24:43,049 --> 00:24:44,518
That was the first thing.

457
00:24:44,518 --> 00:24:46,172
That is a big change.

458
00:24:46,172 --> 00:24:49,056
Many open source projects never make that change.

459
00:24:49,056 --> 00:24:52,508
I started calling it the tyranny of the product.

460
00:24:52,508 --> 00:24:57,013
If you are serious about wanting to touch hundreds of millions of people

461
00:24:57,013 --> 00:25:00,434
you have to be committed to those hundreds of millions of people.

462
00:25:00,434 --> 00:25:02,457
You can't just think they're stupid,

463
00:25:02,457 --> 00:25:04,065
or they don't understand.

464
00:25:04,065 --> 00:25:08,855
You have to really be committed to making their lives better.

465
00:25:08,855 --> 00:25:10,991
So that's what Firefox do.

466
00:25:10,991 --> 00:25:17,980
So we didn't rewrite all these switches, and all the preferences

467
00:25:19,849 --> 00:25:22,746
the way our first product had.

468
00:25:22,746 --> 00:25:28,894
We also made an initial experience for people they could relate to.

469
00:25:29,231 --> 00:25:31,154
That's our Start page.

470
00:25:31,695 --> 00:25:32,595
Before...

471
00:25:32,888 --> 00:25:33,626
[Question]

472
00:25:39,939 --> 00:25:41,935
Do you want to?

473
00:25:42,451 --> 00:25:47,316
You don't have mics, and there's no mic for that.

474
00:25:47,978 --> 00:25:49,932
How about... you (...)

475
00:25:49,956 --> 00:25:52,170
So I'm gonna step back.

476
00:25:52,170 --> 00:25:54,275
How did Firefox come into being?

477
00:25:54,275 --> 00:25:58,569
Firefox had started in a few years before, in 2001 maybe,

478
00:25:59,848 --> 00:26:05,581
where it became clear that the old products had a bunch of problems.

479
00:26:05,673 --> 00:26:09,724
Not only was it really built for developers and much too powerful,

480
00:26:09,724 --> 00:26:13,167
not too powerful but not elegant

481
00:26:16,069 --> 00:26:18,717
and not beautiful on how it displayed its power.

482
00:26:18,717 --> 00:26:25,025
And it was a combined browser, email client, IRC client, app launcher environment.

483
00:26:27,419 --> 00:26:29,477
This was a cause of intense fighting

484
00:26:29,477 --> 00:26:32,017
and so a small group of engineers went off

485
00:26:32,017 --> 00:26:35,142
and had an idea for doing something more elegant,

486
00:26:35,142 --> 00:26:39,988
just a browser, that was focussed on a product

487
00:26:39,988 --> 00:26:41,985
a family would want to use.

488
00:26:41,985 --> 00:26:44,283
So there were five or six of them.

489
00:26:44,399 --> 00:26:45,214
[Question]

490
00:26:52,746 --> 00:26:55,111
Yeah. So Dan says a couple of those guys

491
00:26:55,111 --> 00:26:58,719
were at Netscape working on the suite as their day job

492
00:26:58,719 --> 00:27:02,713
and during their spare time some were community members

493
00:27:02,713 --> 00:27:05,235
and some were not engineers like Asa was involved

494
00:27:06,320 --> 00:27:09,290
So that had been bubbling a lot for a while, and so on.

495
00:27:09,290 --> 00:27:12,147
It wasn't anywhere near done

496
00:27:13,101 --> 00:27:17,092
and it was both a source of a relief and some contention

497
00:27:17,092 --> 00:27:19,174
for the engineers working on it.

498
00:27:19,360 --> 00:27:22,269
Was there more you wanted to say?

499
00:27:22,699 --> 00:27:27,634
Ok. So it had been bubbling a lot and existed in a source code repository,

500
00:27:27,634 --> 00:27:32,270
I think when we formed the foundation it was 0.2 or maybe 0.3.

501
00:27:33,844 --> 00:27:37,711
That's probably a good time to tell the story of the name of Firefox.

502
00:27:37,711 --> 00:27:41,136
So when it was first started, the engineers thought

503
00:27:41,136 --> 00:27:45,296
"wow we're building a new browser out of the ashes of Mozilla 1.0"

504
00:27:45,296 --> 00:27:47,658
and so it was named Phoenix.

505
00:27:47,758 --> 00:27:48,865
[Question]

506
00:27:54,261 --> 00:27:57,239
For a really non-product but Mozilla/Browser when it came to have a name

507
00:27:57,239 --> 00:27:58,872
it was Phoenix.

508
00:27:59,033 --> 00:28:02,633
Well, there is a company, Phoenix Technologies,

509
00:28:02,633 --> 00:28:05,098
it's a BIOS company, it's been around forever,

510
00:28:05,098 --> 00:28:08,440
they once had a browser kind of thing

511
00:28:08,440 --> 00:28:11,705
and so the World of Trademarks contacted us

512
00:28:11,705 --> 00:28:14,058
and said we couldn't use the name Phoenix

513
00:28:14,058 --> 00:28:15,819
and we looked at it and they were probably right,

514
00:28:15,819 --> 00:28:17,974
they had a product that was pretty close.

515
00:28:17,974 --> 00:28:21,998
So of course, from Phoenix, the next obvious name is Firebird.

516
00:28:23,285 --> 00:28:27,216
So our browser was Firebird for one or two releases

517
00:28:27,216 --> 00:28:31,187
and it turns out there was, and still is,

518
00:28:31,861 --> 00:28:35,691
an open source database project by the name of Firebird.

519
00:28:36,845 --> 00:28:37,998
[Question]

520
00:28:43,610 --> 00:28:48,083
So, not really legally trademark violation

521
00:28:48,083 --> 00:28:50,167
cos it's distinct enough

522
00:28:50,167 --> 00:28:55,319
but certainly perceived as unfriendly, awkward and difficult.

523
00:28:56,227 --> 00:29:00,042
That went on for a while, and Brendan and the rest of us

524
00:29:00,042 --> 00:29:02,928
posted something that said

525
00:29:02,928 --> 00:29:06,520
"OK, you're right, we're gonna change the name

526
00:29:06,520 --> 00:29:09,221
we'll change it before we ship our next version."

527
00:29:10,057 --> 00:29:12,197
That was a problem,

528
00:29:13,692 --> 00:29:18,161
because it meant that the version was ready to ship

529
00:29:18,161 --> 00:29:20,023
before we had a name for it.

530
00:29:22,391 --> 00:29:26,628
Shipping it with no name seemed like a loss of momentum,

531
00:29:26,628 --> 00:29:28,682
Brendan had made a commitment

532
00:29:28,682 --> 00:29:35,939
and we had a really intense emotional survival fight

533
00:29:37,253 --> 00:29:39,776
like a couple of weeks, I think it was a couple of weeks,

534
00:29:39,776 --> 00:29:42,960
to try to figure out what we were gonna call this thing.

535
00:29:42,960 --> 00:29:45,297
The developer, Ben,

536
00:29:45,297 --> 00:29:49,717
liked the idea of doing something with fire in the name.

537
00:29:51,076 --> 00:29:53,812
So we went through a dictionary or a book

538
00:29:53,812 --> 00:29:55,548
looking for all the words that started with fire

539
00:29:55,548 --> 00:29:56,802
that might make sense.

540
00:29:56,802 --> 00:29:58,410
So we started going through them.

541
00:29:58,625 --> 00:30:01,419
On the side, we were doing a very professional process

542
00:30:01,419 --> 00:30:04,079
of thinking about "oh, what does the browser mean?

543
00:30:04,079 --> 00:30:06,366
How do you develop a brand?

544
00:30:06,366 --> 00:30:08,765
Is it navigation? Is it freedom?

545
00:30:08,765 --> 00:30:10,588
Is it these kinds of words?

546
00:30:10,588 --> 00:30:12,992
What are the values you associate with it?

547
00:30:12,992 --> 00:30:14,553
Is it trust or is it fun?

548
00:30:14,553 --> 00:30:17,146
And there was this very professional process on the side.

549
00:30:17,156 --> 00:30:20,326
But the reality was the name was chosen

550
00:30:20,326 --> 00:30:22,845
when Ben had a list of words that started with fire,

551
00:30:22,845 --> 00:30:24,996
we started looking at the ones we liked,

552
00:30:24,996 --> 00:30:26,850
and then taking the ones we liked

553
00:30:26,850 --> 00:30:29,709
and looking to see which of them didn't have trademark problems.

554
00:30:30,369 --> 00:30:31,976
And Firefox was the one.

555
00:30:31,976 --> 00:30:34,192
It turned out it had a slight trademark issue

556
00:30:34,192 --> 00:30:35,880
but we were able to resolve that one.

557
00:30:35,880 --> 00:30:38,448
We also knew that it had a mascot,

558
00:30:38,448 --> 00:30:41,668
we could have an image that would be good

559
00:30:41,668 --> 00:30:43,614
and I think it might have been Asa

560
00:30:43,614 --> 00:30:45,847
who first found the Chinese red panda,

561
00:30:45,847 --> 00:30:48,711
that there really truly is an animal called the Firefox

562
00:30:48,711 --> 00:30:51,498
and it's adorable or whatever.

563
00:30:51,498 --> 00:30:53,152
So there we were.

564
00:30:53,152 --> 00:30:58,340
We picked the name and then were able to ship Firefox 0.8.

565
00:30:58,340 --> 00:30:59,086
Seven!

566
00:30:59,117 --> 00:31:01,351
Seven? Ok, seven.

567
00:31:01,436 --> 00:31:03,664
So this would be in 2004.

568
00:31:03,664 --> 00:31:08,053
This is in the spring of 2004,

569
00:31:08,113 --> 00:31:11,357
we had the foundation for seven or eight months,

570
00:31:11,357 --> 00:31:13,165
we're burning through our money,

571
00:31:13,165 --> 00:31:15,940
we're trying to figure out how we're gonna support ourselves,

572
00:31:15,940 --> 00:31:18,812
we have a good size community,

573
00:31:18,812 --> 00:31:25,932
we have an office, a very funky sublet from some friends of the Mozilla project,

574
00:31:25,932 --> 00:31:30,967
who when the giant .com boom had gotten a lot more office space

575
00:31:30,967 --> 00:31:32,452
than they needed

576
00:31:32,452 --> 00:31:35,391
and so they'd given us this little funky sublet,

577
00:31:35,391 --> 00:31:37,758
there is one picture of it floating around

578
00:31:37,758 --> 00:31:40,453
if you've seen that picture of 10 or 12 of us at a table

579
00:31:40,453 --> 00:31:43,502
with the cables hanging down in the middle of it,

580
00:31:43,502 --> 00:31:48,502
it had no running water, you had to go back into the janitor's closet

581
00:31:48,502 --> 00:31:53,161
in the back of the building to get running water or to wash any dishes,

582
00:31:53,161 --> 00:31:55,761
we bought a portable dishwasher

583
00:31:55,761 --> 00:32:01,064
and we rolled it down to the janitor's closet to wash our margarine glasses, mostly.

584
00:32:05,499 --> 00:32:07,945
So we were finally able, in the midst of all of that,

585
00:32:07,945 --> 00:32:09,830
we have a name, we can ship our product.

586
00:32:09,830 --> 00:32:11,668
So we shipped our 0.7,

587
00:32:11,668 --> 00:32:16,847
and I think it was when we got to 0.8 with Firefox

588
00:32:16,847 --> 00:32:19,735
which it would have been on May or June of 2004,

589
00:32:19,735 --> 00:32:24,021
that we finally understood we had a chance.

590
00:32:24,128 --> 00:32:25,782
Like a real chance.

591
00:32:25,782 --> 00:32:29,014
Because 0.8 of Firefox was far enough along

592
00:32:29,014 --> 00:32:31,068
that people started noticing it.

593
00:32:31,068 --> 00:32:34,664
And the number of people using Firefox started to grow.

594
00:32:34,664 --> 00:32:37,358
Pretty soon there were more people using Firefox 8

595
00:32:37,358 --> 00:32:39,073
than had ever used the Mozilla suite.

596
00:32:39,073 --> 00:32:42,140
Something like a million, or two or three million.

597
00:32:42,378 --> 00:32:45,333
And the other way that I knew that we were on the right track

598
00:32:45,333 --> 00:32:47,202
was Tim O'Reilly called us up.

599
00:32:47,202 --> 00:32:48,941
I mean I know Tim forever

600
00:32:48,941 --> 00:32:50,834
because I've been in the open source world for a number of years

601
00:32:50,834 --> 00:32:52,165
but this time he called up to say

602
00:32:52,165 --> 00:32:54,610
"Hey, we're hearing a lot about Firefox.

603
00:32:54,610 --> 00:32:56,633
Can we come down and talk to you?"

604
00:32:56,633 --> 00:33:01,144
Tim O'Reilly's greater skill is he has a phenomenal nose for what's new,

605
00:33:01,144 --> 00:33:04,240
what's coming and what technology is gonna be interesting.

606
00:33:04,240 --> 00:33:06,304
So there were a lot of clues.

607
00:33:06,795 --> 00:33:11,011
Then, the summer of 2004 was a long summer.

608
00:33:11,225 --> 00:33:15,167
Because in between 0.9 and 1.0 was five or six months,

609
00:33:15,167 --> 00:33:17,867
that's when the extension system was built

610
00:33:18,530 --> 00:33:23,649
and I think I've been the most nervous I've ever been in that phase.

611
00:33:23,649 --> 00:33:27,427
I remember speaking and I could not...

612
00:33:27,427 --> 00:33:30,213
I was on a panel but I walked across the stage constantly,

613
00:33:30,213 --> 00:33:31,729
I was sick to my stomach

614
00:33:31,729 --> 00:33:33,976
because we knew this was our big bet,

615
00:33:33,976 --> 00:33:35,846
we could see the stuff was happening

616
00:33:35,846 --> 00:33:39,106
but there was that pressure that you have to ship the product.

617
00:33:39,179 --> 00:33:41,578
So the final phases of Firefox,

618
00:33:41,578 --> 00:33:43,309
getting the first version out,

619
00:33:43,309 --> 00:33:46,227
were the start page and we...

620
00:33:46,596 --> 00:33:51,219
Before Firefox the start page had been a typical open source project:

621
00:33:51,219 --> 00:33:54,803
"Hi! Wanna help? Here is Bugzilla.

622
00:33:54,856 --> 00:33:56,584
Don't like Bugzilla? Here's Despot.

623
00:33:56,584 --> 00:34:00,253
You don't like that? Here's the link for Tinderbox."

624
00:34:01,561 --> 00:34:05,355
So when we made the commitment to ship a consumer product

625
00:34:05,355 --> 00:34:10,020
we realised that doesn't help most people.

626
00:34:11,266 --> 00:34:12,512
[Question]

627
00:34:16,318 --> 00:34:20,777
Unlike Bugzilla, which is smooth and lovely...

628
00:34:21,999 --> 00:34:25,214
That shows you our standards, right?

629
00:34:25,214 --> 00:34:34,023
So this was again an immense emotional intense, like knocked-down drag-out fight.

630
00:34:34,023 --> 00:34:36,979
What to do? How much commercial relationship do we have?

631
00:34:36,979 --> 00:34:41,886
There's the point of maintaining our values

632
00:34:41,886 --> 00:34:46,143
and doing things in a way that represents our values

633
00:34:46,143 --> 00:34:48,588
and be where people are.

634
00:34:48,588 --> 00:34:50,942
There's often no easy answer.

635
00:34:50,942 --> 00:34:54,271
In the past we had voted we will go where people are.

636
00:34:54,271 --> 00:34:55,802
That's how we have impact.

637
00:34:55,802 --> 00:34:57,462
We could be an open source project.

638
00:34:57,462 --> 00:35:01,561
We were a very successful open source project in 1999

639
00:35:01,561 --> 00:35:05,478
where we had thousands of people already contributing to Mozilla.

640
00:35:05,478 --> 00:35:08,341
We were irrelevant to the marketplace.

641
00:35:08,341 --> 00:35:10,802
We were irrelevant to consumers' lives

642
00:35:10,802 --> 00:35:12,830
and irrelevant to citizen's lives.

643
00:35:12,830 --> 00:35:15,053
And we changed that with Firefox

644
00:35:15,053 --> 00:35:19,231
by consciously deciding to go where people are.

645
00:35:19,685 --> 00:35:23,859
We even did a commercial relationship with Google and Yahoo,

646
00:35:24,817 --> 00:35:27,956
which of course turned out after the fact

647
00:35:27,956 --> 00:35:30,493
to be what sustains us going forward.

648
00:35:30,493 --> 00:35:32,959
But we did those commercial relationships

649
00:35:32,959 --> 00:35:36,297
because we wanted their searchs and we thought that they would be good.

650
00:35:36,297 --> 00:35:40,091
Now, after the fact, it turns out they generated the money

651
00:35:40,091 --> 00:35:41,730
that allows us to grow.

652
00:35:41,730 --> 00:35:46,145
So sustainability is also an important piece.

653
00:35:46,145 --> 00:35:48,594
How do you build those relationships

654
00:35:48,594 --> 00:35:50,450
in a way that have Mozilla values in them?

655
00:35:50,450 --> 00:35:53,387
We've done that before and we'll continue to do that.

656
00:35:53,387 --> 00:35:56,235
And now I'm trying to think about...

657
00:35:56,235 --> 00:35:58,372
Do we wanna have questions?

658
00:35:58,372 --> 00:36:01,158
Has everybody asked the questions they have?

659
00:36:01,158 --> 00:36:04,982
I can keep talking or we can go on to questions.

660
00:36:04,982 --> 00:36:07,582
I do wanna close at the end, but go ahead.

661
00:36:07,689 --> 00:36:08,951
[Question]

662
00:36:26,395 --> 00:36:31,896
So we knew that... so we shipped Firefox 4...

663
00:36:31,896 --> 00:36:33,681
Firefox 1,

664
00:36:34,182 --> 00:36:37,004
in November 2004

665
00:36:39,923 --> 00:36:45,857
and we had a goal of, I don't know, 10 million downloads in 30 days,

666
00:36:46,133 --> 00:36:48,279
which we past in 10 days.

667
00:36:48,279 --> 00:36:54,038
So we knew by December that the amount of money we would be getting

668
00:36:54,038 --> 00:36:56,538
was beyond our expectations.

669
00:36:56,627 --> 00:36:59,572
We didn't know how far it would go.

670
00:36:59,657 --> 00:37:03,713
So we had been hoping to be able to generate enough revenue

671
00:37:03,713 --> 00:37:06,840
to sustain those 10 people, or 12 people.

672
00:37:06,840 --> 00:37:10,508
At the time, we didn't even know how to sustain those.

673
00:37:10,508 --> 00:37:14,285
By January 1st, we knew that we would be able to do that.

674
00:37:14,285 --> 00:37:17,160
The response to Firefox 1

675
00:37:17,168 --> 00:37:19,788
was sort of the stuff of dreams.

676
00:37:20,312 --> 00:37:24,426
Now, it turns out, those were also stressful times.

677
00:37:24,426 --> 00:37:25,789
What happened?

678
00:37:25,789 --> 00:37:27,543
We shipped Firefox 1 by February or March,

679
00:37:27,543 --> 00:37:29,259
there was a security issue

680
00:37:29,259 --> 00:37:33,081
that we didn't actually know how to fix right away.

681
00:37:33,081 --> 00:37:35,125
Like a lot of times when a security issue is reported

682
00:37:35,125 --> 00:37:38,653
it turns out that figuring out the problem is the hard part

683
00:37:38,653 --> 00:37:41,128
and fixing it is the easier part.

684
00:37:41,128 --> 00:37:44,038
But this was one, it was a class of vulnerability

685
00:37:44,038 --> 00:37:46,910
that someone, somewhere, is this the guy in Japan?

686
00:37:46,985 --> 00:37:51,019
I think someone had figured out a new way of attacking products.

687
00:37:51,019 --> 00:37:58,222
So we had this immense focus, attention and user base growing

688
00:37:58,222 --> 00:38:02,043
and this phenomenally difficult product to try and deal with it,

689
00:38:02,043 --> 00:38:03,512
really giant.

690
00:38:03,512 --> 00:38:07,323
So, someday if you see Johnny Stenback and you wanna know

691
00:38:07,323 --> 00:38:09,137
what immense pressure is really like

692
00:38:09,137 --> 00:38:11,330
ask him about that period,

693
00:38:11,330 --> 00:38:14,286
the one that... 0.5 and 1.0.6...

694
00:38:14,286 --> 00:38:17,181
So success has its own issues.

695
00:38:17,181 --> 00:38:19,502
That was one of things that we learned.

696
00:38:19,502 --> 00:38:22,119
That it is phenomenal to be at the centre

697
00:38:22,119 --> 00:38:24,735
and so we experienced that with Mozilla today,

698
00:38:24,735 --> 00:38:29,056
that success is phenomenal but it brings its own stresses and tensions,

699
00:38:29,056 --> 00:38:32,491
and if you're not careful and you just focus on the stress,

700
00:38:32,491 --> 00:38:35,920
it's easy to forget that is the sign of success.

701
00:38:37,589 --> 00:38:41,233
The sign of success in that era was that we had this product,

702
00:38:41,233 --> 00:38:45,896
like it was critical to fix this problem right away.

703
00:38:45,896 --> 00:38:47,657
And you don't know how to do it.

704
00:38:47,657 --> 00:38:49,259
Everybody's looking at you,

705
00:38:49,259 --> 00:38:52,198
you really have to be more than you thought you could be.

706
00:38:52,198 --> 00:38:55,751
It's immensely stressful, that's success.

707
00:38:55,914 --> 00:38:58,686
So if you find yourself in those settings today,

708
00:38:58,686 --> 00:39:01,131
of course try to step back, take a deep breath,

709
00:39:01,131 --> 00:39:03,729
be healthy, get some exercise, do all of those things

710
00:39:03,729 --> 00:39:07,878
but remember that that level of stress and tension

711
00:39:07,878 --> 00:39:10,419
reflects the importance that we have,

712
00:39:10,419 --> 00:39:12,673
how critical we are to people's lives

713
00:39:12,919 --> 00:39:15,079
and is a measure of success.

714
00:39:15,079 --> 00:39:18,312
Not the best measure, there's more fun measures

715
00:39:18,312 --> 00:39:20,388
but when you're in the middle of those settings

716
00:39:20,388 --> 00:39:22,180
it is important to remember that

717
00:39:22,180 --> 00:39:24,740
if we didn't matter then that stress isn't gonna be the same.

718
00:39:24,740 --> 00:39:25,525
Yes.

719
00:39:26,254 --> 00:39:27,100
[Question]

720
00:39:31,151 --> 00:39:32,121
Sure.

721
00:39:33,607 --> 00:39:35,668
When we started as a foundation

722
00:39:35,668 --> 00:39:37,568
there was never any question about that.

723
00:39:37,568 --> 00:39:39,315
AOL knew that would be the case,

724
00:39:39,315 --> 00:39:41,875
all of us who wanted to work for it knew it would be the case.

725
00:39:41,875 --> 00:39:45,243
So we set it up that way,

726
00:39:47,180 --> 00:39:48,810
and then, as in December of 2004,

727
00:39:48,810 --> 00:39:52,448
became clear that we were gonna get significant amounts of money.

728
00:39:52,448 --> 00:39:56,408
I think December was probably a 3 million dollar check,

729
00:39:56,408 --> 00:39:58,839
as I remember, something like that.

730
00:39:58,839 --> 00:40:02,204
So we had (...) that much in a year and suddenly we had it in a month.