3 ms·

That reasoning applies to many startups. You should give motivational speeches in SV. What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft? What were Fa

That reasoning applies to many startups. You should give motivational speeches in SV. What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft? What were Facebook's chances against MySpace, backed by multinational News Corp? Airbnb against the entire hotel industry, which has a few multinationals in it?

davidgerard 10y ago
> What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft? Pretty good given they had the backing of Netscape. (Even if AOL messed them around at the time.) I recall that Mozilla 1.0's value proposition to naive users at the time was "No popups" - even in 2002, adblock-like behaviour was a selling point. (The value proposition to geeks was vastly different and more elaborate, but "Mozilla blocks popups" was radical enough to make it into web comics.)
- curt15 10y ago
  The EU, with its (ineffectual and many years too late) forced browser ballot, would probably disagree though.
- BrendanEich 10y ago
  Where were you in 2002 (when Mozilla 1.0 came out, four years after mozilla.org was founded, two years before Firefox 1.0)? The conventional wisdom then was the same as the comment up two from yours in this thread -- that we had zero chance against IE, which had monopolized the browser market. No one had ever beaten Microsoft then in any market it had taken over. It would help if you were on the record way back then, as opposed to now, about how good our odds were. Because everyone from VCs to bigcos (IBM, Sun) to many of our own people saw very long odds against us retaking any browser market share, let alone enough to restart browser competition. Lots of people leave comments years later about how stuff I did was easy. I expect the same will go for Brave's success. I'll do my best to make history repeat.
  - ekiru 10y ago
    I think he was working on the start page for Mozilla 1.0 in 2002. The credits page [0] for the 1.5 start page lists him among the contributors to 1.0's. I couldn't find any remarks from him in 2002 about Mozilla's chances, but in 2001 he said "I think not. In a world of free browsers, the flavour of the month can change like that." [1] in response to a mailing list message saying that Mozilla would not be viable competition on Windows due to bugs, which is somewhat less optimistic than the "pretty good" odds in hindsight, but it's much more so than "very long odds against us retaking any browser market share". [0]: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html [1]: http://marc.info/?l=mozilla-ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw http://marc.info/?l=mozilla-ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw
    - davidgerard 10y ago
      I was working on the documentation for 1.0 http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/ http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/ Specifically I co-wrote the 1.0 FAQ http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/ http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/ I also wrote (and Gerv hacked right down) the page explaining Open Source/Free Software (while trying to keep both camps happy) http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/opensource.html http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/opensource.html I'd basically been a volunteer tester and bug reporter through 2000 and 2001. Mozilla wasn't a good browser then, it was rubbish and it crashed even more than IE5. But it was important to keep testing it and crashing it and sending in the talkback crash dumps and so on.
      - BrendanEich 10y ago
        Thanks, sorry I didn't remember you or check about:credits. Now the part you didn't answer: did you lay good odds at the time? Not putting you down at all if you did not. If you had, my hat would be off to you -- and you should try predicting other stuff, and betting large if you are accurate! Again, the notion of Mozilla succeeding in any restart-the-browser gambit was considered long odds by all pundits and almost everyone involved in Mozilla at the time. Phoenix (née mozilla/browser) was a pirate ship in 2002.
- BrendanEich 10y ago
  Rob Helmer on twitter reminded me to make the separate point that Netscape was a hindrance over time, not a help. At first, it endowed hundreds employees with CVS commit access, while volunteers -- some of whom were much better hackers -- had to submit patches and beg for reviews to get access. As time passed and we rewrote the old codebase to do XUL-based apps (a multiyear mission, by definition), Netscape management suffered via a series of misadventures culminating in Netscape 6 in Y2K, a terrible release decision, made against mozilla.org and grass-roots engineer advice. After that, AOL replaced the VP in charge and repeated the process in 2001, with another VP decapitation that fall. However, we at mozilla.org who were inside Netscape/AOL by then had the evidence from Netscape 6 to show new management that Mozilla was the better way to develop and test code, and (as important) to recruit talent. We leveled the CVS access playing field after Netscape 6, forcing Netscape to put new-hires on the same footing as volunteers and people who came fresh from Red Hat or other companies to hack the code. I've given some of the history here in other podcasts, as well as in this one. Bottom line is Netscape, while it paid lots of the contributors (all, on day one), was in short order a problem. Money does not equate to success; it has downsides. Too much money, with a crappy agenda and bad hiring legacy (and the code those people wrote, and the design costs they sunk), can and does hurt. Money from Netscape and then AOL indeed helped pay the top engineers with whom I worked to rebuild the code starting in October 1998, and I'm grateful for that. Money from Netscape/AOL did not help Mozilla gain market share or build product -- we did that in spite of Netscape, it was a total hindrance on us doing products intended for end users. We created and distributed our own binaries at first for QA builds to testers who did not or could not compile, as I said in this 'cast. Netscape was offended by our success, and this (in part) drove Dave Hyatt to quit and go work for Apple in 2001. I could go on but I'll save it for "the book".
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    I was just on the volunteer documentation side for 1.0 (working under Gerv), but I do recall how very annoying the corporation could be. Was the basic fact of paying devs better than not, though?
    - BrendanEich 10y ago
BrendanEich 10y ago
> You should give motivational speeches in SV. https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp /be
- biocomputation 10y ago
  > You should give motivational speeches in SV. > https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp > /be But it's been, what, 10 months since Brave launched? http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-browser/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-browser/ The Wikipedia article on browser market share doesn't even list Brave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers According to StatCounter, 'other' browsers constitute 12% of the market. http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/ Brave isn't listed, and I assume that it would be in 'other'. I wonder how much share it has? According to Google Play store, Brave has 50-100K installs. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.browser https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow... Whereas Chrome has 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 installs. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.chrome https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ch... In a few months it'll have been a year since Brave launched and it basically has no users as far as I can see. I don't know a single person who uses it. This thread on HN is the only place I've ever seen anyone talk about Brave. I feel like my original remarks in this thread are entirely on point.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    10 months? What is the official standard timeline for success? And let's say a venture doesn't succeed eventually; does that make it not worth the effort? By that standard, the best venture capitalists waste about 90% of their efforts.
    - biocomputation 10y ago
      I'm not involved in Brave and I'm certainly not the arbiter of what constitutes success for their company or their browser. My remarks above were made in the context of my original remarks, which discussed the amount of work required to succeed in conventional terms. If you make a web browser, you need to get tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to make a dent in the market. My original remark said that it didn't matter if Brave did anything cool if it never gained traction. I think those remarks are on point for the discussion: does it matter of Brave does amazing things if their browser ends up in the dustbin of history? Awesomeness in Brave won't matter if it doesn't get market share because it without market share it won't present a competitive threat to any of the established browsers. My reply above was just pointing out that commonly available statistics show that Brave has no real market share, but instead of presenting vacuous arguments, I provided some hard data. I personally think it would be wonderful if Brave was a huge success. I don't believe that any single company ( Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook ) should have so much dominance over search, mobile, browser, social etc. It's not good for consumers and the almost unchallenged dominance of a small group of companies is turning into an utter disaster for the Internet.

davidgerard 10y ago

> What were Mozilla's odds when they took on IE and Microsoft? Pretty good given they had the backing of Netscape. (Even if AOL messed them around at the time.) I recall that Mozilla 1.0's value proposition to naive users at the time was "No popups" - even in 2002, adblock-like behaviour was a selling point. (The value proposition to geeks was vastly different and more elaborate, but "Mozilla blocks popups" was radical enough to make it into web comics.)

curt15 10y ago
The EU, with its (ineffectual and many years too late) forced browser ballot, would probably disagree though.
BrendanEich 10y ago
Where were you in 2002 (when Mozilla 1.0 came out, four years after mozilla.org was founded, two years before Firefox 1.0)? The conventional wisdom then was the same as the comment up two from yours in this thread -- that we had zero chance against IE, which had monopolized the browser market. No one had ever beaten Microsoft then in any market it had taken over. It would help if you were on the record way back then, as opposed to now, about how good our odds were. Because everyone from VCs to bigcos (IBM, Sun) to many of our own people saw very long odds against us retaking any browser market share, let alone enough to restart browser competition. Lots of people leave comments years later about how stuff I did was easy. I expect the same will go for Brave's success. I'll do my best to make history repeat.
- ekiru 10y ago
  I think he was working on the start page for Mozilla 1.0 in 2002. The credits page [0] for the 1.5 start page lists him among the contributors to 1.0's. I couldn't find any remarks from him in 2002 about Mozilla's chances, but in 2001 he said "I think not. In a world of free browsers, the flavour of the month can change like that." [1] in response to a mailing list message saying that Mozilla would not be viable competition on Windows due to bugs, which is somewhat less optimistic than the "pretty good" odds in hindsight, but it's much more so than "very long odds against us retaking any browser market share". [0]: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.5/credits.html [1]: http://marc.info/?l=mozilla-ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw http://marc.info/?l=mozilla-ui&m=100168107415632&q=raw
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    I was working on the documentation for 1.0 http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/ http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/ Specifically I co-wrote the 1.0 FAQ http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/ http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/faq/ I also wrote (and Gerv hacked right down) the page explaining Open Source/Free Software (while trying to keep both camps happy) http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/opensource.html http://www-archive.mozilla.org/start/1.0/opensource.html I'd basically been a volunteer tester and bug reporter through 2000 and 2001. Mozilla wasn't a good browser then, it was rubbish and it crashed even more than IE5. But it was important to keep testing it and crashing it and sending in the talkback crash dumps and so on.
    - BrendanEich 10y ago
      Thanks, sorry I didn't remember you or check about:credits. Now the part you didn't answer: did you lay good odds at the time? Not putting you down at all if you did not. If you had, my hat would be off to you -- and you should try predicting other stuff, and betting large if you are accurate! Again, the notion of Mozilla succeeding in any restart-the-browser gambit was considered long odds by all pundits and almost everyone involved in Mozilla at the time. Phoenix (née mozilla/browser) was a pirate ship in 2002.
BrendanEich 10y ago
Rob Helmer on twitter reminded me to make the separate point that Netscape was a hindrance over time, not a help. At first, it endowed hundreds employees with CVS commit access, while volunteers -- some of whom were much better hackers -- had to submit patches and beg for reviews to get access. As time passed and we rewrote the old codebase to do XUL-based apps (a multiyear mission, by definition), Netscape management suffered via a series of misadventures culminating in Netscape 6 in Y2K, a terrible release decision, made against mozilla.org and grass-roots engineer advice. After that, AOL replaced the VP in charge and repeated the process in 2001, with another VP decapitation that fall. However, we at mozilla.org who were inside Netscape/AOL by then had the evidence from Netscape 6 to show new management that Mozilla was the better way to develop and test code, and (as important) to recruit talent. We leveled the CVS access playing field after Netscape 6, forcing Netscape to put new-hires on the same footing as volunteers and people who came fresh from Red Hat or other companies to hack the code. I've given some of the history here in other podcasts, as well as in this one. Bottom line is Netscape, while it paid lots of the contributors (all, on day one), was in short order a problem. Money does not equate to success; it has downsides. Too much money, with a crappy agenda and bad hiring legacy (and the code those people wrote, and the design costs they sunk), can and does hurt. Money from Netscape and then AOL indeed helped pay the top engineers with whom I worked to rebuild the code starting in October 1998, and I'm grateful for that. Money from Netscape/AOL did not help Mozilla gain market share or build product -- we did that in spite of Netscape, it was a total hindrance on us doing products intended for end users. We created and distributed our own binaries at first for QA builds to testers who did not or could not compile, as I said in this 'cast. Netscape was offended by our success, and this (in part) drove Dave Hyatt to quit and go work for Apple in 2001. I could go on but I'll save it for "the book".
- davidgerard 10y ago
  I was just on the volunteer documentation side for 1.0 (working under Gerv), but I do recall how very annoying the corporation could be. Was the basic fact of paying devs better than not, though?
  - BrendanEich 10y ago

BrendanEich 10y ago

> You should give motivational speeches in SV. https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp /be

biocomputation 10y ago
> You should give motivational speeches in SV. > https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp https://imgur.com/gallery/eMZCONp > /be But it's been, what, 10 months since Brave launched? http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-browser/ http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/20/brave-browser/ The Wikipedia article on browser market share doesn't even list Brave. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers According to StatCounter, 'other' browsers constitute 12% of the market. http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/ Brave isn't listed, and I assume that it would be in 'other'. I wonder how much share it has? According to Google Play store, Brave has 50-100K installs. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.browser https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.brave.brow... Whereas Chrome has 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 installs. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.chrome https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.android.ch... In a few months it'll have been a year since Brave launched and it basically has no users as far as I can see. I don't know a single person who uses it. This thread on HN is the only place I've ever seen anyone talk about Brave. I feel like my original remarks in this thread are entirely on point.
- hackuser 10y ago
  10 months? What is the official standard timeline for success? And let's say a venture doesn't succeed eventually; does that make it not worth the effort? By that standard, the best venture capitalists waste about 90% of their efforts.
  - biocomputation 10y ago
    I'm not involved in Brave and I'm certainly not the arbiter of what constitutes success for their company or their browser. My remarks above were made in the context of my original remarks, which discussed the amount of work required to succeed in conventional terms. If you make a web browser, you need to get tens of millions or hundreds of millions of users to make a dent in the market. My original remark said that it didn't matter if Brave did anything cool if it never gained traction. I think those remarks are on point for the discussion: does it matter of Brave does amazing things if their browser ends up in the dustbin of history? Awesomeness in Brave won't matter if it doesn't get market share because it without market share it won't present a competitive threat to any of the established browsers. My reply above was just pointing out that commonly available statistics show that Brave has no real market share, but instead of presenting vacuous arguments, I provided some hard data. I personally think it would be wonderful if Brave was a huge success. I don't believe that any single company ( Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook ) should have so much dominance over search, mobile, browser, social etc. It's not good for consumers and the almost unchallenged dominance of a small group of companies is turning into an utter disaster for the Internet.