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March 09, 2005
I'm tired of the superficial analysis
I'm reading this article from Managing Technology @Wharton. It's the same set of observations, same set of questions, and nothing new. I was expecting more especially from Wharton professors. The article was fine, the observations from the Wharton professors were superficial.
The same comments and questions:
- Firefox is successful because of the security woes with MSFT and IE. (partly true)
- This is MSFT's game and once IE 7 is out, a whole new ball game. (time will tell, but I think they're wrong)
- What will happen when Firefox gets hit with security issues too? (umm, as we've said, no one builds bullet proof software, we've been fixing security issues all the way back to '94)
- Mozilla can't maintain it's marketing efforts. (absolutely false)
The observations I want to see are:
- Wow, these guys are able to build software and features really fast, oh and the localization is easy too. Mozilla's architecture is really good.
- Wow, Mozilla's open source model has trickled to get contributions from designers and marketing professionals, and legal folks and more. What an interesting model, I'm wonder what's next and where this model can be applied.
- How does a commercial entity compete with a non-profit? Did Mozilla change the game here?
- (and the kicker) Wow, Firefox has taken market share from Internet Explorer. Do you know what that means? It means that more people are converting and using Firefox than there are new users to Internet Explorer or new computer users in general. That's different from the "browser wars" before when the Internet population was doubling/tripling. Guess that would mean the Internet population is nearing a fixed population and browser market share is a zero sum game? Hmmm...
Think. Where's the good analysis? Btw, I thought the Gartner report was rather weak as well (anyone citing it should know that the folks who wrote the article didn't even bother to speak with folks at the Mozilla Foundation to get a briefing. We did speak to other folks at Gartner but not those authors).
Posted by rebron at March 9, 2005 11:29 PM