Mozilla at 1 year old

First off, hats off to the Mozilla Foundation and all of the folks that have made it a success over the last year (honestly its been longer than that as the key players had to work hard long before that to get Mozilla free of AOL and form the foundation). Congrats; its been a fantastic year.

And what an amazing year it has been. Many releases of the flagship Mozilla product; new initiatives in the form of Firefox and Thunderbird. Revamped website. Entirely new distribution mechanism (via volunteer software mirrors). Its been an amazing transformation and one that I’ve been lucky enough to see a portion of (I help maintain the primary mirrors).

So what’s the secret? That of course is the million dollar question. Something has changed in the last year at Mozilla and its not just that they aren’t a part of AOL anymore or that they have new offices. It’s something more.

I got a chance to visit the new Mozilla Foundation digs in Moutain View in March and got to meet with some of the folks there to see what it is that makes the MoFo tick. Their offices look like just about any other development shop you’ve ever seen; a huge 1/12 scale replica of the london bridge built from pop cans, their giant chess board and desks built quite economically from doors and 4×4’s.

In talking with the folks there it was clear that a few things have really made an impact on Mozilla:

Change of customer: While at AOL, the Mozilla teams first priority was helping AOL with Netscape. The end-users came second. Thus was born the one of the original reasons for the Mozilla release. Now free of AOL, the Mozilla developers have just one customer; the end-user. This shift in focus has had a huge impact on the quality and quantity of products released by the MoFo.

Visual identity: When you visit the website, download their products or buy a t-shirt, there is a definite visual identity associated with everything Mozilla. The creation of their visual identity team has had a huge impact on this. A lot of these folks are volunteers as well. To me, its almost like seeing the open source mentality reach across a new medium; marketing.

Rapid release cycles: Since its inception, the MoFo has put rapid release cycles high on its priority list. In the truest form of the “release early, release often” open source mantra, the Mozilla Foundation will see major releases of all of its products almost quarterly if not even more frequently.

Embracing the community: With the change customer focus to the end-user, Mozilla and several of its sister organizations such as Mozilla Europe, MozillaZine and MozDev really do get it. Each of these groups is one more place for users to voice what they want from Mozilla. MozDev even gives them a chance to do development if they so choose. With the recent announcement of updates.mozilla.org, we can see that the end-users are now going to get a chance to contribute directly to the success of the MoFo.

I’m excited about the possibilities for Mozilla. I believe their 2nd birthday will be even better than the first and look forward to continuing to work with them.