-
Well, how should I...?
-
I don't actually think I've ever given a talk on the history of Mozilla
-
to a large set of people, which is pretty shocking...
-
Ok! So...
-
I'm gonna give it a try.
-
I'm not sure if I've actually given a talk
-
on the history of Mozilla to this many people.
-
So that's probably an indication that I need to do more of it.
-
Mozilla's been around for a long time, since 1998.
-
And I thought when we got started...
-
I'd like to ask:
-
Of the people here,
-
how many have been in Mozilla for three months or less?
-
Can you raise your hand?
-
Ok, excellent.
-
How many have been here a year or so?
-
That's a pretty good group too.
-
Ok, how about the five year?
-
Pretty good and I'm gonna say the ten year.
-
How many people? Who's around, though?
-
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...
-
So there's nine people in this room that have been working on Mozilla
-
for ten years and more.
-
And there's probably another nine or ten people in this gathering today
-
who have been here that long as well.
-
And so I'm gonna explain the different roles that we had in the early days.
-
I'll try to name some names as we go along, I won't get all of those names,
-
but if you see this people and have questions about Mozilla or Mozilla's history,
-
find a good time and ask them, because we all have many memories.
-
So, Mozilla started in 1998. It came out of Netscape.
-
Netscape at one time had been the almost monopoly browser vendor.
-
It was the first commercial browser,
-
so we had, I don't know, 99% of the market share at one time.
-
And it was a pretty exciting time.
-
That was when the Internet and the Web actually really exploded.
-
Microsoft appeared. They started building its own browser.
-
Microsoft did a couple of things that ended up eventually building a good browser.
-
And it also engaged in a whole range of illegal activities.
-
And so the combination of that changed the landscape drammatically.
-
And Netscape management had the foresight to recognise they could not continue
-
and be successful in the way they had been operating.
-
And they realised with the help of the engineering folk set at Netscape
-
that the best opportunity was to convert their typical proprietary closed commercial product
-
into an open source product.
-
This was radical in its day.
-
Open source is mainstream now, but it was not then.
-
Open source was deep in the technical community,
-
it never surfaced in a product,
-
it was all sort of odd
-
and it was a very radical move.
-
The second thing that happened is that the management team,
-
I was there at the time,
-
a lot of us were,
-
but I was part of these discussions,
-
realised that an open source project had to be real.
-
So, inside Netscape there was created a small group of people
-
who were charged with the job of building a successful open source project.
-
And there was a larger group of people, engineering,
-
that was charged with building a successful Netscape product.
-
That Netscape product was designed to make money for Netscape
-
and ultimately money for AOL, after AOL bought Netscape.
-
So, in the very early days of Mozilla, through '98, '99, 2000,
-
we had these two different groups.
-
We had the engineering group, which was a 100-150 people
-
working on building the Netscape navigator product
-
managed by a set of people wanting to use that product to make money for AOL.
-
Then we had the small group of people who were charged with building Mozilla
-
as an open source project,
-
building contributors from all sorts of different places
-
and building a technology base that was useful for many different companies.
-
The open source side.
-
That was small in name.
-
There were six or eight of us.
-
Of those, Mick was one of them,
-
Gerv was one of them,
-
Dan was one of them,
-
Brendan was one of them,
-
I was one of them,
-
Shaver was one of them and there was a few of other folks
-
who aren't here any longer.
-
That was one group, then we had this very large engineering group
-
building the Netscape navigator product.
-
And in there Chofmann was there,
-
Johnny was there,
-
Jonas was there,
-
Dbaron was there...
-
Dbaron came actually a little later.
-
But there is a bunch of people here in that engineering group.
-
That went on for a little while
-
and it turned out to be not stable.
-
It turned out that the efforts of the Netscape management group
-
to build the product to make money for them
-
came into conflict with how we wanted to manage the code base
-
as a Mozilla open source project.
-
That conflict simmered for a while
-
and eventually it exploded.
-
Yes, please feel free to ask questions at any point.
-
[Question]
-
No, it turned out there are lots of ways to build a browser that makes money
-
that people don't like.
-
So in those days, Netscape had been acquired by AOL
-
and AOL was a website property.
-
So to that management team,
-
the browser was a tool to drive people to the AOL website.
-
You can do that, but it doesn't mean you like the product.
-
You can add user interface features to it,
-
you can focus on new buttons and menu items
-
that in those cases were AOL specific,
-
you can put your resources there
-
rather than on security and new features,
-
you might not be interested in features
-
that help people find things across the web,
-
because AOL wanted them going to AOL.
-
So we found that there were immense conflicts
-
and also, in an open source project,
-
you have contributors who have an "ownership stake",
-
meaning that they put effort in, they are building a product,
-
if they are using the product they have a set of needs
-
that might be different.
-
As part of the open source project
-
we were balancing the needs of our employers, Netscape,
-
with various other people.
-
And eventually,
-
that broke down.
-
So for example, we'll take user interface
-
which is always a contentious issue in a product.
-
The single most contentious issue,
-
way back in 1999 and 2000,
-
was user interface,
-
because Netscape would want a user interface
-
that drove people to AOL
-
and Mozilla wanted an interface that was good for people using the Web.
-
I was the General Manager of the small group of people
-
building Mozilla as an open source project.
-
In those days we called ourselves staff@mozilla.org
-
or mozilla.org staff.
-
When the tension exploded over the interface,
-
over really who controlled the code,
-
we had long fights about what would the basic process is
-
by which we build the product.
-
So things we take for granted today,
-
like you have to earn the right to be a committer,
-
we fought with Netscape over that.
-
Things like code needs code review,
-
it has to be good enough;
-
that being hired as an employee
-
doesn't automatically make your code good enough;
-
that even after you are hired as an employee
-
your peers need to decide your code is good enough.
-
So basic things like code review were immense fights.
-
I was the representative of Mozilla
-
and when those tensions came to a head,
-
I was fired.
-
Yes.
-
Was Mozilla the open source browser in those days?
-
Mozilla was in those days a technol..
-
Sorry, the question was "Was Mozilla the open source browser in those days?"
-
Mozilla in those days was seen as a technology development organisation.
-
And Netscape liked to think that it was building the browser.
-
[Question]
-
Did everyone hear Dan?
-
The initial theory was like the Linux kernel,
-
where Mozilla would be the technology development asset
-
that builds the kernel
-
and other organisation would build the commercial products from it.
-
So we had this ongoing tensions
-
and one of them was Mozilla was becoming a product
-
in its own right.
-
It turned out that as the Netscape and AOL management
-
began building their product to drive traffic to AOL,
-
more people started using the Mozilla version
-
than the Netscape version.
-
That was going on in the background
-
and let to some of these tensions.
-
So I was fired
-
and the belief at Netscape at the time
-
was that by getting rid of me,
-
Netscape management would then have the ability
-
to control the Mozilla open source project
-
and could convert it into a set of people that helped Netscape
-
build the product that they wanted.
-
Essentially, to view the community as a free work force
-
that would help build the Netscape product.
-
Of course, the competing view is that we're all building an open source project
-
that has to meet the needs of the community
-
and that people who contribute and build the product
-
have some say in what happens to it.
-
What happened at that point was that the two groups of people,
-
the small group of people that had been mozilla.org staff
-
and the larger group of people which were all the engineers
-
contributing to Mozilla
-
reunited to form one shared outlook.
-
What happened was that essentially the engineers working at Netscape
-
were very clear that the leadership that they were following was Mozilla.
-
And it was me.
-
And it was not their management.
-
So, everyone involved voted to continue to try to build
-
an open source project.
-
So I remained the General Manager of Mozilla.
-
I remained the leader of the Mozilla project
-
and the spokesperson for the development of the Mozilla project,
-
much to the surprise of the Netscape and AOL management.
-
We learned a lot of lessons out of that.
-
We learned from that that leadership depends on who will follow you.
-
You need to lead people.
-
My own view is that you have to be leading in the right direction
-
enough of the time,
-
that enough people follow or enough people also lead in that direction.
-
[Question]
-
This would be... I was fired in 2001 and yes...
-
Yes.
-
Yeah. So that was 2001 when I was fired.
-
[Question]
-
Yes.
-
The question was:
-
"The open web is here today it's easy to see why it's important
-
back then in those days before the open web, how did you know?
-
What makes you willing to risk your job?"
-
We'd been working on a browser for a while,
-
so we could tell that the browser was important.
-
It was clear at that time, when Microsoft had maybe 90-95% market share
-
in the browser, in the operating system and in the productivity suites,
-
Office and Excel,
-
which were the only things that people used in those days.
-
And so it was clear
-
that in those days,
-
Microsoft controlled access to the Internet.
-
We didn't call it the open web then but it was the Internet
-
and we knew it was great.
-
It was very clear that by controlling the browser,
-
Microsoft controlled how individual people experienced the Internet.
-
That the server side of the Internet in those days
-
was developing, growing and becoming richer and more capable.
-
But the client side was deteriorating
-
and through that client,
-
Microsoft was able to ignore formats
-
to make vast quantities of content unavailable to people.
-
And to determine the business model
-
through which you could access content
-
and to have an immense influence over the entire structure of the Internet.
-
So that much was clear.
-
It sounds melodramatic but the future of the Internet
-
was already an issue at that point.
-
It was very clear the browser was the leverage point.
-
We were very clear about our jobs.
-
One second, I'm gonna tell a couple of stories
-
and then I'll get you Chris.
-
But we were very clear that our jobs were on the line.
-
It wasn't just me.
-
It was everyone I named and Marcia.
-
Is Marcia here?
-
I didn't see her hand go up.
-
But we would have meanings as the small group that was mozilla.org
-
when the tensions got really high
-
and we would get together
-
and we would say things like
-
"What happens if AOL pulls the plug?
-
What happens if we're all fired tomorrow?
-
How do we keep Mozilla operating?"
-
Those would be things like...
-
Our release engineer at the time
-
had the keys to the server room where the Mozilla machines operated.
-
These are small details but they were really important at the time
-
and we knew that if he could do it
-
he would help us keep Mozilla operating
-
and we knew that Chofmann was running the engineering organisation
-
and we knew that he would be helpful as it turned out,
-
we needed him.
-
And Marcia had the keys to the closet that was our single supply of Mozilla t-shirts.
-
Which I bought with my own money.
-
Oh, no. That was later, nevermind. The ones I bought later.
-
But she had that key
-
and she had access to some other things.
-
So we would sit and think how many machines do we need,
-
how many employees do we need.
-
If we have one employee,
-
is it Leef who runs the build machines?
-
If we have one employee,
-
is it Brendan?
-
Who is he?
-
And what's the best way to keep Mozilla operating?
-
But when it came to it I was the only one who was fired
-
and so the rest of the Mozilla folks were left
-
and Chofmann provided a haven
-
for us to try and continue to be effective as well.
-
So this was this first era.
-
So after I was fired there were a bunch of people still at Netscape,
-
working on Netscape navigator.
-
As part of that we finally managed to ship our first product as Mozilla.
-
Mozilla 1.0 we called it.
-
And this had been a long time in coming.
-
That was in 2002.
-
We started Mozilla in 1998 and expected to have a product
-
very shortly afterwards.
-
But it turned out, when we got into it
-
that the technology was pretty old.
-
Brendan made the decision to really build the new technology base.
-
That technology base is Gecko.
-
It cost us years to get the rendering engine to a point
-
where we could really build a good application on it and ship it.
-
We finally did that in 2002.
-
It was Mozilla 1.0 and it was technically a good product.
-
It was technically a shockingly good product.
-
Across the open source space, where people knew it
-
they were retelling us they were really shocked
-
to how good a product it was.
-
But it was not a consumer product.
-
It was really built by developers, for developers.
-
It didn't have a clear designed aesthetic,
-
it didn't have an approach to consumers.
-
So it was a very powerful product
-
and if you couldn't figure out what was really the best user experience
-
you'd build both and have a pref for it.
-
It was known as loaded and overweight
-
and technically good, but a poor product.
-
That was 2002.
-
About a year later,
-
AOL decided they were tired of investing in the browser.
-
They still had, I don't know,
-
75 or a 150 people they were paying to work on the browser
-
and they weren't really getting anywhere with it.
-
At long last, they became interested in taking mozilla.org assets
-
and giving them to those of us who'd been running the project.
-
Again, to give you a sense of what life was like in those days,
-
mozilla.org assets were
-
the trademark, the name, mozilla.org,
-
four big servers we fought for that ran all mozilla.org
-
and some seed startup money.
-
That was really it.
-
Yeah, Mick.
-
[Question]
-
That's definitely the timing.
-
Yes, so that was why it may well have been.
-
What Mick said was
-
"wasn't it the case that the reason AOL stopped investing in browsers
-
and in Gecko is that they just completed a deal with Microsoft
-
where they had agreed to use IE
-
or the Microsoft rendering engine in their browser."
-
Is that right?
-
Yes, that's right. The AOL client, that I forgotten about.
-
So Microsoft managed to buy AOL out of their own browser effort.
-
But it was good for us.
-
Because that didn't seem like a lot of assets,
-
but it was really critical to us.
-
We had thought before about starting our own effort at mozilla.org
-
but without the name,
-
it would have been really hard.
-
And four giant servers doesn't seem like much today,
-
but in that era it was a big deal.
-
We also got some seed money from them,
-
we got 2 million dollars.
-
That was a funny story too because
-
I had ended up working with Mitch Kapor,
-
I don't know if you know, from Lotus,
-
those who remember Lotus 1-2-3,
-
and Mitch had come to see that open source was really important,
-
after he left Lotus and he had his own open source organisation,
-
and I was working with him.
-
And he really stepped in to help us.
-
So Mozilla has a history of things appearing when we need them.
-
There is that saying that is it luck,
-
or is it effort, or is it skill.
-
And Mozilla has been blessed with all three:
-
immense effort, tremendous skill and this luck that things appear.
-
So, Mitch appeared and he essentially arm wrestled AOL
-
for that seed money.
-
We look at the 2 million dollars
-
and we thought that we could support maybe 10 people
-
for two years.
-
Because we had set down as mozilla.org
-
and thought that to be effective as a project,
-
the minimum number of people we needed was 10.
-
Running the machines was one person.
-
You know, we keep the project alive but we couldn't be successful.
-
And Mitch had pitched a little bit of other money
-
and IBM and Sun were our first commercial partners
-
and they pitched in some money and started maybe with 12 or 13 employees.
-
What that meant was:
-
Johnny Stenback and D Baron,
-
that was the platform team.
-
One person on Firefox for the front-end team,
-
one person on Thunderbird,
-
one release engineer,
-
Chofmann as an engineering manager,
-
Mick did the ultimate sacrifice and ran our systems for us,
-
for a year or two before we were able to get him back
-
into a role that really fit him better,
-
we had one person helping us on sustainability,
-
Brendan as Brendan,
-
and me trying to be successful.
-
And that was it.
-
And that seemed like a lot to us.
-
[Question]
-
That's right, I forgot Asa
-
How can I forget Asa?
-
[Question]
-
And project management.
-
And still.
-
From that day till now, phenomenal.
-
Whenever I have a problem with my browser, Asa is always able
-
to figure out what it is.
-
So that's it.
-
No one else can ever do that.
-
[Question]
-
All of a sudden, we had our own independence.
-
It was pretty scary,
-
10 people is not really enough,
-
there was no ongoing financial sustainability that we knew of,
-
it was a gamble,
-
but we had our own independence and we could make a product.
-
We made phenomenal changes in that period.
-
It was our second set of phenomenal changes.
-
When we were founded we made up an organisation that was revolutionary,
-
as Chofmann described.
-
How do you work with a company?
-
How did we do code review?
-
How did you earn your authority?
-
There was nothing quite like it before.
-
When we started the foundation
-
we remade ourselves over again.
-
We were, as I said, a small number of people,
-
we made a bet on a new product that was Firefox.
-
We didn't have a product to ship at that time.
-
And Asa with our community involvement
-
continued to ship the Mozilla suite
-
for fifteen months,
-
as the only product we had in the marketplace
-
until Firefox was ready.
-
We made that bet, which is a scary bet.
-
Imagine not to have a browser,
-
I mean we didn't have a person working on the product we were shipping.
-
But we did that because we knew that Firefox was our opportunity
-
to make a commercial product.
-
Our first five or six years of life taught us that technology alone
-
will not change the industry the way we want to.
-
Technology alone does not change people's lives the way we want to do that.
-
Our opportunity with the browser is to have a product that touches people.
-
Yeah.
-
[Question]
-
Yeah. So that's where I'm trying to get to.
-
That technology alone is not enough,
-
that raw power of technology is not enough,
-
that if you really want to touch people,
-
not us, not power users, not developers
-
but if you want to touch consumers
-
and change their lives,
-
you have to be utterly committed to that.
-
You can't build the features that you want
-
just because you want them.
-
You can't tell people:
-
"Oh, you should behave this way,
-
you should want to be this way."
-
You have to build the product that is elegant
-
and beautiful and powerful under the covers
-
but that people love.
-
That was the first thing.
-
That is a big change.
-
Many open source projects never make that change.
-
I started calling it the tyranny of the product.
-
If you are serious about wanting to touch hundreds of millions of people
-
you have to be committed to those hundreds of millions of people.
-
You can't just think they're stupid,
-
or they don't understand.
-
You have to really be committed to making their lives better.
-
So that's what Firefox do.
-
So we didn't rewrite all these switches, and all the preferences
-
the way our first product had.
-
We also made an initial experience for people they could relate to.
-
That's our Start page.
-
Before...
-
[Question]
-
Do you want to?
-
You don't have mics, and there's no mic for that.
-
How about... you (...)
-
So I'm gonna step back.
-
How did Firefox come into being?
-
Firefox had started in a few years before, in 2001 maybe,
-
where it became clear that the old products had a bunch of problems.
-
Not only was it really built for developers and much too powerful,
-
not too powerful but not elegant
-
and not beautiful on how it displayed its power.
-
And it was a combined browser, email client, IRC client, app launcher environment.
-
This was a cause of intense fighting
-
and so a small group of engineers went off
-
and had an idea for doing something more elegant,
-
just a browser, that was focussed on a product
-
a family would want to use.
-
So there were five or six of them.
-
[Question]
-
Yeah. So Dan says a couple of those guys
-
were at Netscape working on the suite as their day job
-
and during their spare time some were community members
-
and some were not engineers like Asa was involved
-
So that had been bubbling a lot for a while, and so on.
-
It wasn't anywhere near done
-
and it was both a source of a relief and some contention
-
for the engineers working on it.
-
Was there more you wanted to say?
-
Ok. So it had been bubbling a lot and existed in a source code repository,
-
I think when we formed the foundation it was 0.2 or maybe 0.3.
-
That's probably a good time to tell the story of the name of Firefox.
-
So when it was first started, the engineers thought
-
"wow we're building a new browser out of the ashes of Mozilla 1.0"
-
and so it was named Phoenix.
-
[Question]
-
For a really non-product but Mozilla/Browser when it came to have a name
-
it was Phoenix.
-
Well, there is a company, Phoenix Technologies,
-
it's a BIOS company, it's been around forever,
-
they once had a browser kind of thing
-
and so the World of Trademarks contacted us
-
and said we couldn't use the name Phoenix
-
and we looked at it and they were probably right,
-
they had a product that was pretty close.
-
So of course, from Phoenix, the next obvious name is Firebird.
-
So our browser was Firebird for one or two releases
-
and it turns out there was, and still is,
-
an open source database project by the name of Firebird.
-
[Question]
-
So, not really legally trademark violation
-
cos it's distinct enough
-
but certainly perceived as unfriendly, awkward and difficult.
-
That went on for a while, and Brendan and the rest of us
-
posted something that said
-
"OK, you're right, we're gonna change the name
-
we'll change it before we ship our next version."
-
That was a problem,
-
because it meant that the version was ready to ship
-
before we had a name for it.
-
Shipping it with no name seemed like a loss of momentum,
-
Brendan had made a commitment
-
and we had a really intense emotional survival fight
-
like a couple of weeks, I think it was a couple of weeks,
-
to try to figure out what we were gonna call this thing.
-
The developer, Ben,
-
liked the idea of doing something with fire in the name.
-
So we went through a dictionary or a book
-
looking for all the words that started with fire
-
that might make sense.
-
So we started going through them.
-
On the side, we were doing a very professional process
-
of thinking about "oh, what does the browser mean?
-
How do you develop a brand?
-
Is it navigation? Is it freedom?
-
Is it these kinds of words?
-
What are the values you associate with it?
-
Is it trust or is it fun?
-
And there was this very professional process on the side.
-
But the reality was the name was chosen
-
when Ben had a list of words that started with fire,
-
we started looking at the ones we liked,
-
and then taking the ones we liked
-
and looking to see which of them didn't have trademark problems.
-
And Firefox was the one.
-
It turned out it had a slight trademark issue
-
but we were able to resolve that one.
-
We also knew that it had a mascot,
-
we could have an image that would be good
-
and I think it might have been Asa
-
who first found the Chinese red panda,
-
that there really truly is an animal called the Firefox
-
and it's adorable or whatever.
-
So there we were.
-
We picked the name and then were able to ship Firefox 0.8.
-
Seven!
-
Seven? Ok, seven.
-
So this would be in 2004.
-
This is in the spring of 2004,
-
we had the foundation for seven or eight months,
-
we're burning through our money,
-
we're trying to figure out how we're gonna support ourselves,
-
we have a good size community,
-
we have an office, a very funky sublet from some friends of the Mozilla project,
-
who when the giant .com boom had gotten a lot more office space
-
than they needed
-
and so they'd given us this little funky sublet,
-
there is one picture of it floating around
-
if you've seen that picture of 10 or 12 of us at a table
-
with the cables hanging down in the middle of it,
-
it had no running water, you had to go back into the janitor's closet
-
in the back of the building to get running water or to wash any dishes,
-
we bought a portable dishwasher
-
and we rolled it down to the janitor's closet to wash our margarine glasses, mostly.
-
So we were finally able, in the midst of all of that,
-
we have a name, we can ship our product.
-
So we shipped our 0.7,
-
and I think it was when we got to 0.8 with Firefox
-
which it would have been on May or June of 2004,
-
that we finally understood we had a chance.
-
Like a real chance.
-
Because 0.8 of Firefox was far enough along
-
that people started noticing it.
-
And the number of people using Firefox started to grow.
-
Pretty soon there were more people using Firefox 8
-
than had ever used the Mozilla suite.
-
Something like a million, or two or three million.
-
And the other way that I knew that we were on the right track
-
was Tim O'Reilly called us up.
-
I mean I know Tim forever
-
because I've been in the open source world for a number of years
-
but this time he called up to say
-
"Hey, we're hearing a lot about Firefox.
-
Can we come down and talk to you?"
-
Tim O'Reilly's greater skill is he has a phenomenal nose for what's new,
-
what's coming and what technology is gonna be interesting.
-
So there were a lot of clues.
-
Then, the summer of 2004 was a long summer.
-
Because in between 0.9 and 1.0 was five or six months,
-
that's when the extension system was built
-
and I think I've been the most nervous I've ever been in that phase.
-
I remember speaking and I could not...
-
I was on a panel but I walked across the stage constantly,
-
I was sick to my stomach
-
because we knew this was our big bet,
-
we could see the stuff was happening
-
but there was that pressure that you have to ship the product.
-
So the final phases of Firefox,
-
getting the first version out,
-
were the start page and we...
-
Before Firefox the start page had been a typical open source project:
-
"Hi! Wanna help? Here is Bugzilla.
-
Don't like Bugzilla? Here's Despot.
-
You don't like that? Here's the link for Tinderbox."
-
So when we made the commitment to ship a consumer product
-
we realised that doesn't help most people.
-
[Question]
-
Unlike Bugzilla, which is smooth and lovely...
-
That shows you our standards, right?
-
So this was again an immense emotional intense, like knocked-down drag-out fight.
-
What to do? How much commercial relationship do we have?
-
There's the point of maintaining our values
-
and doing things in a way that represents our values
-
and be where people are.
-
There's often no easy answer.
-
In the past we had voted we will go where people are.
-
That's how we have impact.
-
We could be an open source project.
-
We were a very successful open source project in 1999
-
where we had thousands of people already contributing to Mozilla.
-
We were irrelevant to the marketplace.
-
We were irrelevant to consumers' lives
-
and irrelevant to citizen's lives.
-
And we changed that with Firefox
-
by consciously deciding to go where people are.
-
We even did a commercial relationship with Google and Yahoo,
-
which of course turned out after the fact
-
to be what sustains us going forward.
-
But we did those commercial relationships
-
because we wanted their searchs and we thought that they would be good.
-
Now, after the fact, it turns out they generated the money
-
that allows us to grow.
-
So sustainability is also an important piece.
-
How do you build those relationships
-
in a way that have Mozilla values in them?
-
We've done that before and we'll continue to do that.
-
And now I'm trying to think about...
-
Do we wanna have questions?
-
Has everybody asked the questions they have?
-
I can keep talking or we can go on to questions.
-
I do wanna close at the end, but go ahead.
-
[Question]
-
So we knew that... so we shipped Firefox 4...
-
Firefox 1,
-
in November 2004
-
and we had a goal of, I don't know, 10 million downloads in 30 days,
-
which we past in 10 days.
-
So we knew by December that the amount of money we would be getting
-
was beyond our expectations.
-
We didn't know how far it would go.
-
So we had been hoping to be able to generate enough revenue
-
to sustain those 10 people, or 12 people.
-
At the time, we didn't even know how to sustain those.
-
By January 1st, we knew that we would be able to do that.
-
The response to Firefox 1
-
was sort of the stuff of dreams.
-
Now, it turns out, those were also stressful times.
-
What happened?
-
We shipped Firefox 1 by February or March,
-
there was a security issue
-
that we didn't actually know how to fix right away.
-
Like a lot of times when a security issue is reported
-
it turns out that figuring out the problem is the hard part
-
and fixing it is the easier part.
-
But this was one, it was a class of vulnerability
-
that someone, somewhere, is this the guy in Japan?
-
I think someone had figured out a new way of attacking products.
-
So we had this immense focus, attention and user base growing
-
and this phenomenally difficult product to try and deal with it,
-
really giant.
-
So, someday if you see Johnny Stenback and you wanna know
-
what immense pressure is really like
-
ask him about that period,
-
the one that... 0.5 and 1.0.6...
-
So success has its own issues.
-
That was one of things that we learned.
-
That it is phenomenal to be at the centre
-
and so we experienced that with Mozilla today,
-
that success is phenomenal but it brings its own stresses and tensions,
-
and if you're not careful and you just focus on the stress,
-
it's easy to forget that is the sign of success.
-
The sign of success in that era was that we had this product,
-
like it was critical to fix this problem right away.
-
And you don't know how to do it.
-
Everybody's looking at you,
-
you really have to be more than you thought you could be.
-
It's immensely stressful, that's success.
-
So if you find yourself in those settings today,
-
of course try to step back, take a deep breath,
-
be healthy, get some exercise, do all of those things
-
but remember that that level of stress and tension
-
reflects the importance that we have,
-
how critical we are to people's lives
-
and is a measure of success.
-
Not the best measure, there's more fun measures
-
but when you're in the middle of those settings
-
it is important to remember that
-
if we didn't matter then that stress isn't gonna be the same.
-
Yes.
-
[Question]
-
Sure.
-
When we started as a foundation
-
there was never any question about that.
-
AOL knew that would be the case,
-
all of us who wanted to work for it knew it would be the case.
-
So we set it up that way,
-
and then, as in December of 2004,
-
became clear that we were gonna get significant amounts of money.
-
I think December was probably a 3 million dollar check,
-
as I remember, something like that.
-
So we had (...) that much in a year and suddenly we had it in a month.
