PKB

Firefox 1.5 and Mozilla.com just went live.

I expect we’ll find many things that need fixing as we fully migrate the product content for Firefox and Thunderbird from mozilla.org, but I need to give a shout out to the team that just worked their tails off making this launch happen.

So thank you: Steven & Daniel, beltz, cbeard, deb, tristan, pascal, olivier, axel, rebron, john, mitchell, polvi, mscott, schrep, asa, cheryl, ian, karen, mary, todd, judi, alex, elizabeth, morgamic, blake, and the rest of the team here at Mozilla.

You rocked this launch.

Wanted to share a host of recent articles on Firefox for your (US) holiday reading pleasure. So after the prandial celebration, but before the brandy nightcap, put the Cowboys or Lions on mute, and check out some of the good news below.

Firefox 1.5 Review
PC Magazine, Nov. 22, 2005

Firefox plans mass marketing drive
ZDNet, Nov. 22, 2005

Mozilla Releases Latest Firefox 1.5 Preview
TechWeb, Nov. 21, 2005

Firefox 1.5 Nears Shipment
PC World, Nov. 21, 2005

Paris accelerates move to open source
TechWorld, Nov. 21, 2005

Film-makers asked to spread Firefox word
Times Online, Nov. 21, 2005

Firefox accelerating development cycle
ZDNet Blogs, Nov. 20, 2005

UK financial organisations offer Firefox support
ZDNet, Nov. 16, 2005

One-year-old Firefox looks back to the beginning
NetworkWorld, Nov. 16, 2005

Free Thinkers
CRN, Nov. 11, 2005

Didn’t realize when I gave this interview that this eWeek article on Firefox and Mozilla was for their site (I’d assumed it was for their print edition), but there you go. On balance, I think it’s a helpful overview of some of the differing perspectives on Firefox’s momentum. There’ll be a lot more to chew on soon as the press start to report on 1.5.

There’s nothing like an impending launch to kill your ability to blog.

In the meantime, please do pay a visit to the truly awesome developer contest at Extend Firefox. Or sign up for a community account over at Spread Firefox. Even better, help your friends and neighbors Get Firefox.

While you’re at it, we’ll be down here in the labs, doing our best to Launch Firefox. See you on the other side!

Before I started working at Mozilla, I used to enjoy my Google-semi-anonymity.

One of the blessings of having a rather common name is that anyone trying to Google me would have to spend several hours sifting through the results.

Today I was looking at referrer stats for this blog and followed a referral link to a Google query for “Paul Kim.” Results below.

This blog is #1 out of 31,800,000 results for “Paul Kim.”

What this says to me:

• Mozilla bloggers have serious search mojo. (Ya feeling me, Asa, Tristan? :-)
• The other Paul Kim’s on page 1 of search results are gonna have to hustle to leapfrog me. Especially the guy with the Sitting on the Toilet blog. (I swear that’s not me.)
• I should consider going the Rodney Allen Rippy route and add a third name to differentiate my brand.

Thank you Mozilla, for the juice.

It’s been two weeks of jumping into the deep end of the pool at Mozilla for me. I’m pretty well soaked. :-)

Where we’re at with the spread of Firefox is amazing, and in many respects unprecedented. Mainly due to the incredible work of the Mozilla community. I hope to share with you soon some directions on a broader approach to growing Firefox adoption.

For now, I’d like to introduce some concepts that I’ve been exposed to.

One common framework for technology marketing planning builds on Everett Rogers’ seminal modeling of the diffusion of innovations.

Rogers segmented adopters of a new innovation along a bell curve, categorized as: innovators (2.5%), early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%). Percentages here are pulled from the Wikipedia entry cited above.

Rogers’ model has been most famously updated by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm, which is also part of the lingua franca of Silicon Valley marketing.

These models for chunking target markets are widely used in tech enterprises because they’ve held up in practice. Where things get funky, and why I’m posting on this subject, is that both of the above frameworks for understanding customers presume a traditional business model — one where a company offers their product(s) for sale and segments their markets to maximize profitability.

Mozilla’s goal is to “promote the health of the World Wide Web itself by providing free, open source client software,” thereby helping to fulfill the mission of our parent foundation. I believe both Rogers and Moore’s adoption models are still valid to our planning, but there are interesting implications not addressed by either model with respect to the time horizon for adoption that Mozilla’s goal affords.

Mozilla doesn’t answer to VCs or Wall Street. Our timeframe for moving through an adoption model is not driven by the short-term considerations of a liquidity event or meeting analyst expectations. Yet the competition is to some degree influenced by both of these factors.

What the traditional tech adoption model drives is a sense of progression (seed with innovators, reap with the majority, close on laggards at the end of a product cycle) within a fixed, typically product lifecycle-based timeframe.

I’m trying here to map this model to a product that doesn’t live within the context of a short-term business objective, and to understand the implications for our planning.

Your thoughts, as always, are vital to this exploration.