Mozilla, You Must Love Your Business Users

The web browser is a topic that is filled with passion and drama these days.

There is an amazing opportunity to attract followers, but it is a moody crowd and you can lose them just as fast with a simple, careless remark somewhere on the Internet. It just happened to Mozilla, which is now in damage control mode and is telling businesses that it really wants to keep them as users.

Being Mozilla isn't easy these days. Once praised as an innovation machine that challenged the mighty Microsoft and its IE team with a little engine that could, it is now more and more considered a company that follows Google's lead and turns Firefox into a mozill-ified version of Chrome. Firefox is fighting to keep and evolve its identity and is being squeezed, in terms of market share (and perception) between the still dominant IE and Chrome. Firefox's market presence has become volatile outside its truly loyal user base as a result. If there is anything that Mozilla needs right now, it is a stable user base it can rely on and regroup from there.

Yet exactly the user base that has proven to be extremely sticky and loyal recently got a mouthful from Mozilla. Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler wrote a seemingly harmless comment on a blog post that complained about Firefox rapid release cycles and the fact that support for browser is dropped faster than a new browser can be implemented in a corporate environment. That comment expressed very clearly that Mozilla has no interest in business users and that businesses are not important in terms of market share to Mozilla. The tone: if you don't like Firefox, then leave.

It's not a tone that any business should use and typically always arises when there is a false sense of security that triggers and ugly form of arrogance. It's difficult to say why Dotzler wrote the comment as he did, but we know that he is usually someone who does not sugarcoat any issues. There is at least a certain impression that Dotzler communicated an official internal opinion of Firefox. There was no "I think" or "I believe" in his comment. It was expressed as fact, which suggests that this was Mozilla's official strategy. However, that is speculation on my part, of course.

The fallout was heavy criticism (as well as some support) for Mozilla and the claim that businesses simply need to deal with faster release and support cycles. I personally believe that a strong Mozilla that is a counterweight to the corporate desires of Microsoft and Google is good for the evolution of the web browser. Alienating businesses is just not something that fits Mozilla's image.

Today, of course, this all seems to be a non-issue. CEO Gary Kovacs tweeted that Mozilla is committed to serving every user. Vice presidents Jay Sullivan and Mike Shaver blogged that it is important for Mozilla to serve businesses and find solutions to do so efficiently and in a way so that businesses stay with Mozilla. That would be a 180-degree turn from last week. So, was this just miscommunication or is there a problem that goes much deeper? I am guessing here, but I believe that Asa Dotzler's initial comments may have been careless, but they surely reflected a certain culture at Mozilla.

Mike Shaver today said that Mozilla does not have a lot of people that understand the browser needs of businesses and that it needs to communicate with businesses to be aware of their requirements. Sullivan said that Mozilla wants to explore open source opportunities to make the rapid release cycle process work for companies such as IBM, which has more than 500,000 instances of Firefox deployed worldwide (and faces a big problem if it needs several months to deploy a new browser version due to the update need of software and documents). I am not sure how this will work out, but at least there is now the notion that Mozilla values business users and is looking for a solution. Mozilla does not have much time, given the fact that we are in transition to HTML5 and many businesses may be looking for a browser that can take them into the HTML5 future - safely. It appears that the new release process may not have been planned very well in its details as far as market effects are concerned.

Businesses, it seems, has never been a market that Mozilla tried to capture. Yet it has about 20% of it, according to Shaver. It may not be such a small drop in the bucket after all. Consider it a fortunate accident for Mozilla. IT users may be a pain in the rear for Mozilla to deal with right now, but once it has those users on board, they tend to stay as it is way too painful for them to switch to another browser - and validate it against software, fix bugs, adopt an upgrade process, hire new specialists and update hundreds of support documents with potentially thousands of screenshots. IE6 is a textbook example that shows just how sticky business users can be: it has taken Microsoft years to scrape users off the IE6 user base and required a good amount of self-sabotage to kill the browser (and encourage a transition to Windows 7 and IE9). I imagine Firefox' user base would be that sticky.

There are different preferences of market share analysis firms for web browser. I prefer StatCounter due to their consistency of available data (Net Applications changes its strategy on which data is made available free of charge frequently) and the latest data sets indicate that IE and Firefox have lost market share this month, while Chrome gained. Chrome could end up close to 21% share, IE could drop as low as 43% and Firefox could drop to about 28%. Firefox has been losing share since November 2009 and has experienced an accelerating trend of losses since the release of Firefox 4. However, while Firefox 4 was a complete disaster as far as market presence is concerned, Firefox 5's outlook is much better. The Firefox 5 browser has already hit a share of 10.8% as of today (and eight days after launch), and Firefox 4 is down to about 6.7%. The new transition machine appears to be working well. As a side note, it appears that Firefox 5 may have impacted market share of IE9, which has retreated a full point to just about 6% since Firefox 5's launch.

There are lessons to be learned for Mozilla. Arrogance does not work well and Mozilla has its strong points, as far as perception is affected, in modesty. Mozilla needs to focus on its core values to be the nimble and innovative advocate of the open web. It's what we believe Mozilla is and tampering with that image could prove to be disastrous for the company.