I was excited to read about plans for The Coop, a Mozilla Labs project that plans to add some basic social networking functionality to Firefox. There is obvious complementarity with AllPeers, and I’ve spent quite a bit of time discussing this with involved parties and thinking hard about how this type of system should be architected. The following is an overview of my thoughts. I’m also planning to write up a technical spec for building a generic, extensible, persistent contact list in Firefox using some components from the AllPeers platform. I hope that this will be of some use to the Coopers and help to stimulate further discussion.
Contact Lists Gone Wild
One of my very first blog posts, way back in August 2004, lamented the lack of interoperability between instant messaging clients. Even an antisocial introvert like myself had three or four contact lists floating around his desktop with overlapping but distinct contents. This was a hassle in so many ways: starting up all those clients takes time, they clog up the taskbar and/or system tray, and finding contacts requires tedious trawling through multiple lists.
If anything, the situation has gotten considerably worse since then. I did manage to get rid of some of my chat software since so many of the people I know now use Skype, but on the other hand I now use both AllPeers and IRC constantly. In addition, I belong to any number of social networking sites, each of which has kindly afforded me access to yet another random cross-section of the people I know. And of course I have two email clients (Thunderbird and Gmail) with their own address books, and the list of contacts on my mobile phone. And I’m neither a high-powered businessman nor a spotty teenager… heck, I don’t even use Twitter. So I’m quite sure that there are many people for whom this is a far, far bigger problem than it is for me.
Some sort of consolidation is a no-brainer. But the typical Web 2.0 “put everything on our server and we’ll take good care of it for you, honest” approach is not going to fly. Most of my contact lists are tied to desktop applications that would be hard to integrate with a web solution. Plus I want access to this information all the time on all devices, whether or not they’re currently connected to the internet. And I’m not particularly keen to entrust personal data of this type to a third party.
The alternative is a local application. Multiprotocol chat clients like Trillian and Gaim are good examples of desktop apps that aim to alleviate this problem. But more and more contact lists are web-based, so this approach suffers from the flip side of the Web 2.0-style solution. What we really need is a local application that provides consolidated access to both local and remote contact lists. In other words, it needs to run on my computer but have excellent web integration. Ideally it would be a extensible tool, based on our a power platform, that I already have installed on my machine. Anything spring to mind?
I was recently talking with the owner of one of the largest DJs booking company in The Netherlands who told me how AllPeers has completely changed his business life. This is the kind of statement I always love to hear.
Every week, their DJs send back demos, radioshows and mixes. We’re talking about more than 50 150+MBytes files every week! Upon discovering AllPeers, he asked all all the DJs to install it too and since then, the moving of these large music files “has never been easier”. He is now trying to convince all the radios they are working with to install it too so he does not have to burn and mail 100s of CDs every month. He used to use YouSendIt but finds AllPeers more convenient for him since he does not need to upload the files to a server. Not only AllPeers makes the whole process easier, it also allows this company to decrease their fixed costs.
I personally always thought DJs would greatly benefit from our product and this conversation obviously prove me right (one of my favorite feeling). Indeed, if you are one of our friend on MySpace, you already know a lot of DJs are in our network. If you have not done so join us on MySpace too!
And you, do you use AllPeers to facilitate one of your business process? Let us know.
Note: distributing pictures of your drunken boss/colleague from the last company party does not count as a business process!
Just a few short weeks ago I wrote that:
Another recent article credits Apple’s growing market share on the halo effect of Apple’s celebrated consumer electronics devices, a point I also mentioned. The author points out that this effect is likely to grow with the launch of the iPhone. I’ve spoken in the past about the tendency of exponential curves to appear linear in the early stages. There’s probably a magic market share number that will cause the Mac to “tip” and really take off. It’s hard to say what this number might be, but it’s looking more and more likely that Apple is going to hit it at some point.
And sure enough, Mac sales growth was apparently far stronger than expected for the first quarter. I’m convinced that Apple is poised for much bigger market share gains to come, particularly if they can nail the sticky gaming issue. Will they please just buy Nintendo and be done with it?
Mozilla head Mitchell Baker published a very thoughtful and thought-provoking post today about the focus of the Mozilla Foundation with respect to Firefox and other Mozilla-based apps.
And that’s not all. Adobe just announced that it is open sourcing Flex, which is notionally a XUL competitor, tempering significantly one of XUL’s biggest advantages: its openness. Brendan Eich commented on this, going as far as to moot some sort of harmonization of XUL and MXML (the markup that underlies Flex). Funnily enough, I remembered inquiring about this during the IRC chat set up by Brendan and Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s Chief Architect, to discuss the announcement of Tamarin, Adobe’s open source JavaScript implementation (on November 7th, 2006):
<gavin_> *plasticmillion* is there any potential for harmonization of XUL and MXML?
<brendan> plasticmillion: that’s a great question — is neil deakin here?
<shaver> nope
<kevinlynch> there is always potential for harmonization 
<brendan> many XUL folks saw similarity in MXML, at widget and layout model levels
<brendan> which matter more than superficial XML vocab
<brendan> i think we could harmonize XUL and MXML so that either vocab could map onto either runtime (XULRunner or Flash Player)
<brendan> if anyone is interested in this, please mail me
The volume of new information appearing on this topic from influential folks, along with some very interesting public and private discussions that I’ve had today on IRC, have my head spinning, so I’m planning to write a longer piece on the topic to try to set my ideas straight. Stay tuned.
My previous post stirred up more controversy than I had expected. There seems to be broad consensus that Mozilla is focusing on its platform for the most part only in the service of future Firefox improvements. One commenter goes as far as to link to a posting by Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, which is so revealing that I will repeat it here:
The XULRunner-based apps (Songbird, Joost) all roll their own, with platform additions. We anticipate versionitis and under-use of any standard XULRunner shipped under Firefox 3. I’m not sure where that plan sits, but to me it looks like a malinvestment. Our platform wins have always been in service of particular apps. Pure platform companies fail (MS has Office as well as Windows, and they’re diversifying). Platforms are great, but not in isolation.
While I agree strongly with Brendan that a platform without a killer app is an unappealing proposition, I still take issue with his position. I don’t think that anyone is suggesting that Mozilla bin (in the “adorable British accent sense”) Firefox and become a “pure platform company”. There are, however, two questions that are certainly worth considering:
- How big a priority should it be for Firefox 3 to ship on top of XULRunner?
- What effort should Mozilla invest into platform features and tools that do not benefit Firefox?
(Note that the authoring tools that Paul Rouget mentioned in his Adobe vs. Mozilla article (English translation), which I agree are the single biggest gap in the Mozilla arsenal at present, aren’t relevant here since they will make it far easier for extension developers to ply their trade and are thus of major benefit to Firefox.)
The answer to these two questions is substantially the same, as I have argued ad nauseum (and when I argue ad nauseum, it’s not just a picturesque turn of phrase so keep a sanitary receptacle handy). Having a near ubiquitous runtime is a huge argument for installing Firefox. Microsoft Office achieved its dominant market position as a direct result of the success of Windows. I bet the Firefox download would be under 1Mb sans runtime, and as some commenters pointed out this could be a great trojan to get Mozilla into corporations that are for some reason Firefox-averse. Pushing out Firefox and the growing number of cool XUL-based apps with separate, incompatible runtimes is thus, in my opinion, to squander a huge opportunity, and one that likely has a limited shelf life. If not Firefox 3 (and thus 2007), then when?
Moreover, none of us has a crystal ball (apparently this is something of a running joke in the Mozilla world right now though as usual I am blissfully ignorant of the origin). The best way to protect against an uncertain future is to prepare for as many contingencies as possible. Yes, we need to consider cost and benefit when deciding whether to include features in the platform. But the single criterion of “does Firefox need it?” is increasingly insufficient as a growing number of Mozilla-based projects has a good shot of contributing significantly to the Foundation’s stated goal to “preserve choice and innovation on the Internet.”
One of my favorite business insights is Andy Grove’s notion of a strategic inflection point. What this boils down to is a willingness to innovate or die, even when existing bread-and-butter products are put at risk. Mozilla did this once when it killed off the Suite to focus on Firefox. I don’t think by any stretch of the imagination that Firefox should be put out to pasture, but I do believe that the relative importance of Firefox and the platform itself is shifting, and that this should be reflected in Mozilla’s allocation of resources.
When I posted my translation of Paul Rouget’s essay about challenges facing Mozilla as a platform for RIA (Rich Internet Applications), I promised that I would add some of my own comments on the matter. I agree with Paul unequivocally that Mozilla’s success as a platform independent of Firefox is essential. He is right that there is a window of opportunity to become a (and perhaps the) leading player in this space, and that it might be missed it is not grasped in time, as new entrants from Microsoft and Adobe start to present serious competition.
Where I differ from Paul is in his implicit assumption that the platform has been written off by Mozilla. “Why isn’t Mozilla investing seriously in its framework?” he asks, speculating that “the effort to design a complete framework is… too great when measured against its potential benefits.”
Like Paul I’m not privy to the discussions of the Mozilla inner circle, but I wonder nonetheless how many influential Mozillians would really subscribe to that last statement. Certainly the bulk of development effort appears to be focused on general platform issues rather than Firefox-specific code. A number of Mozilla employees (most notably Benjamin Smedberg) are spending a great deal of time working on “productizing” XULRunner. And the scope and scale of Devmo would hardly make sense if it were only meant to target Firefox extension developers.
Why then the perception that Mozilla is not taking its platform ambitions seriously enough? Clearly Firefox’s phenomenal success is a factor. The web browser market is a huge and hugely important one, and Firefox is a major contender. The RIA platform space may never really materialize, for all we know, and even if it does Mozilla’s role in it is a matter of conjecture at this point. So neglecting Firefox would clearly be an epic mistake, but this doesn’t rule out more significant investment in the platform as a product in its own right.
I think it’s closer to the truth to view the current situation as a transition period. It took a long time for Firefox to establish itself as Mozilla’s premier product, and it’s reasonable to expect the same to be true of the platform. I would expect the platform’s momentum to ramp up in a virtuous circle as it gains broader adoption, attracts more investment, improves correspondingly, gains broader adoption and so on. Certainly Paul is right that better development tools will make a massive difference. I haven’t talked to anyone at Mozilla about this, and so I may be way off base, but I think it’s only a matter of time until the platform grows up and becomes as or more important than Firefox to the Foundation’s long-term strategy.
I don’t often solicit advice here, but this post is an exception. One of the best things about developing on top of the Mozilla platform is getting to steal the best ideas from their development suite, made up of both home-grown tools and general-purpose open source tools which we could use even if we weren’t coding on top of Mozilla, but probably wouldn’t. While I might grouse about the build system (and I do, frequently), it is an incredibly powerful beastie that really works in a multiplatform environment. I use the source code browser LXR constantly, and just today I used Bonsai (the source control “blame” system) to find a bug in minutes that might have eluded me for hours if I’d had to search for it manually in the database. But to me the best tool of all is Bugzilla, which we have co-opted as our project management-cum-bug tracking-cum-feature planning system, just like Mozilla. And one of the key features of Bugzilla is the ability to submit and review patches before they get checked into the source repository.
I was surprised how easy it was to get our team to accept the procedure of getting a formal review for all patches before they are committed. And I’m convinced that this has significantly reduced the number of defects in our code that have to be caught after the fact by QA. At the same time, I’m not sure that we’re reviewing stuff as thoroughly as we should, so I wanted to solicit opinions from people out there who may have more experience with this than we do.
Personally I tend to review code in a relative rush. (Heck, I do pretty much everything in a relative rush.) I read every line of code and think about possible errors and problems, but if it’s complex code that I don’t know intimately, I usually don’t take the time to understand it at a deep level. As a result, subtle errors can easily creep through. On the other, I’d have to devote far more time to reviews if I really wanted to grok every nuance. I have a feeling that this description probably applies to a greater or lesser extent to every member of our team.
What do you think? Is this pretty typical? Is it inevitable and perhaps even correct considering the much greater time investment required to do more thorough reviews? Or should we adhere to the maxim that defects cost more to fix the later they are caught and pull out all the stops to catch them in the review stage? What is the optimal percentage of a developer’s time that should be spent on reviews as opposed to coding? I’d appreciate any input that folks out there can provide, including links to articles or blog entries that discuss this topic.
A while ago Cedric and I met with a very well-known blogger, and as always I tried to slip a plug for Peer Pressure into our conversation. His reaction surprised me, as it basically boiled down to “oh my god I wouldn’t want to be on your blog. You are so harsh with everyone.” That made an impression on me, and since then (believe it or not) I’ve tried to temper my unbridled criticism of other people’s stupidity… at least in public.
That said, Engadget’s commentary on the Apple/EMI decision to make DRM-free tracks available on iTunes really pissed me off. I’m not sure whether they really believe what they wrote or whether they are just trying to stir up controversy, but either way they do a disservice to consumers who are trying to figure out what the announcement actually means.
First of all, they claim that “for years Apple has said that given the choice between DRMed and DRM-free media ecosystems, it would always choose the former.” Unfortunately no supporting evidence is provided for this statement, which contradicts diametrically everything I’ve ever heard on the subject. Consider the follow exchange in the transcript of the Apple/EMI joint press conference with Steve Jobs and EMI CEO Eric Nicoli:
Q: It’s a pretty radical step, Eric. How did you reach the decision to do it? Was it Steve Jobs’ letter that convinced you? Was it the internal surveys you’ve done? What was the moment in which you said, “Damn it, we’re gonna go DRM-free?” And will the extra sales be enough to compensate for the declining physical sales?
A: We’ve always known Steve’s view on the subject, long before his open letter.
The Engadget piece goes on to lament that “we’re still nowhere near there yet” since “the other big labels, Sony BMG, Universal, and Warner, haven’t switched over to DRM-free… With his $4 billion+ stake in the media megacorp [Disney] and his seat on the board of directors, you’d think Jobs would be quick to encourage Disney-owned labels, like Hollywood Records, Lyric Street Records, Mammoth Records, and Walt Disney Records” to release their music DRM-free.
One has to wonder whether the author of the article has ever set foot in a large company. They may speak with one voice, but they certainly don’t think with one mind. Obviously there are huge tensions within these companies as to whether the rewards of eschewing DRM are worth the risks. What’s more, we know that Big Media’s aversion to liberating its content has bordered on the irrational for years. It isn’t like Steve Jobs or anyone else can simply waltz in and demand that they give it all up, $4 billion stake or not (which by the way represents about 5% of Disney at today’s market capitalization, significant but hardly a controlling interest).
They then go onto bitch about the fact that unfettered content is being sold for a higher price. Why didn’t they just do away with the crappy old DRM stuff completely? Could it be (mercy me!) that “Jobs is waiting to see whether this is actually the right move for the business”? And what about video? The article rightly states that Jobs is on record as saying that films “aren’t distributed without DRM at the same frequency of sales as music” and that the same rules might therefore not apply.
Well that’s that then. Like many others I’ve been arguing since this blog’s inception that DRM is one of the biggest factors holding back online media sales. When Steve Jobs proclaimed his opposition to DRM a couple of months ago, I believed him while skeptics put it down to a ploy. After all, everyone knows that without DRM, artists will starve, creativity will die, the sun will set never to rise again, and we’ll spend the rest of our existence listening to Englebert Humperdinck and watching Happy Days reruns.
The only problem with this doomsday scenario is that Apple and EMI announced today that the latter will henceforth be selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes. The price is higher than that of protected tracks by 30% (and higher than it should be, in my opinion, by about 75%) but this is a monumental step in the right direction. Jobs apparently expects that half of tracks sold will be DRM-free by the end of the year. My prediction: the uninfected tracks will sell so much better than the others that we will begin to witness a slow but steady shift to DRM-free content, not just in the music world but for all digital media.
The following is a translation from the French of Paul Rouget’s provocative essay entitled “Apollo décolle“. Paul explores an issue that anyone involved with Mozilla would do well to think long and hard about: to what degree do we favor Firefox, a proven success story, over the Mozilla platform itself and its potential to revolutionize web application development. Unsurprisingly the piece hits on many of the same points as my recent “Future of Applications” essay.
Note that I don’t necessarily agree with everything that Paul says, and I plan to post some of my own commentary in a follow-up post. In the meantime, I hope that this translation will help to spark debate and discussion on these topics among the non-French speaking inhabitants of Mozilladom.
Serious Competition for Mozilla Technologies
Recently there there has been a lot of discussion about two new frameworks that compete with Mozilla: WPF and Apollo. Three important web players (Microsoft, Adobe and Mozilla) thus have their respective frameworks for RIA (Rich Internet Applications). AJAX is old hat, folks. There’s a new buzzword in town.
Word of the newly released alpha version of Apollo is on everyone’s lips. A real coup, then, for Adobe.
And naturally the XUL crowd are starting to gnash their teeth.
The Risk
The risk is that Apollo and/or WPF becomes a de facto standard and that Mozilla technologies (XUL and co) are forgotten just when they look to be gaining credibility.
Why are we faced with this risk?
Because these frameworks have real advantages over Mozilla.
- Multimedia
- And, most of all: authoring tools
…and of course they are supported by two heavyweights with a major league budget and team behind them.
Moreover, we can’t really say that they are starting from scratch since they already have significant developer communities: Adobe with Flash and Flex, and Microsoft with its .NET fans.
The Mozilla framework also has some advantages:
- Based on standards with strong ties to the web
- It’s been around the block, with existing applications and skillsets in place
- Open source technology
The arrival of these technologies represents a logical evolution for the web: the need for web applications gives rise to more advanced languages.
But, besides technological distinctions, there is a fundamental difference between WPF/Apollo and the Mozilla framework: their underlying goals.
Different Goals
It’s easy to feel frustrated when Adobe and Microsoft release technologies with objectives similar to what we’ve been doing for three years, and suddenly everyone is talking about a revolution. XUL hasn’t generated as much buzz because it has evolved more slowly. We’ve seen the difficult birth of the Mozilla framework take place over time without people realizing that not just XUL, but RIA in general, represent a new incarnation (or revolution?) of the web.
Seeing Microsoft and Adobe’s efforts to release a framework devoted to RIA, it’s natural to conclude that we’re witnessing the future of mainstream applications, the real Web 2.0. Meanwhile, Mozilla has had something similar up its sleeve for ages, but efforts to turn it into a solid, stable, complete and neatly packaged technology have actually been fairly limited. We could get angry watching these frameworks grow in importance while Mozilla progresses in fits and starts, never straying far from its mother’s (Firefox’s) nest.
