Mozilla Featured in Singapore's 'The Sunday Times'Saturday January 24th, 2004This weekend's edition of Singapore's The Sunday Times (produced by the same team as The Straits Times, the country's most widely-read newspaper) features an article about Mozilla. Noting that "tech publications have been heaping non-stop praise on Mozilla's Firebird browser," the report states that while Mozilla may be better than Internet Explorer, most potential users have never even heard of it. Charles Upsdell of Browser News and Peter-Paul Koch of QuirksMode are quoted as saying that this is due to a lack of marketing and the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. It appears that the article points to two reasons people have never heard of Mozilla. Namely these are the lack of marketing and the embeding of IE into Windows. There is little that we can do about the issue of embedding (unless the EU comes up with something in their anti-trust case). We can do something about marketing. The only thing which may hold us back here is a lack of marketing resources. Can anyone (in the know) comment on Mozilla's marketig plan? What is it and how well is it progressing? There's a bit of info about the Mozilla marketing efforts at: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/marketing/ Mozilla, though having a central gatekeeping organization, is a loose groups of coders, testers, innovators, etc. Marketing is thus equally loose. You'll never see Mozilla on television or on the back of a magazine, but rather on the a fleet of personal sites of people who care enough about the browser to try to spread it to others. > this is due to a lack of marketing and the "bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows". Whatta u know, the same thing that killed Netscape (the company). Fortunately, there are now OSes other than Windows that run versions of Mozilla perfectly fine. Some Linux distributions already come with Mozilla out-of-the-box. Too bad Apple didn't embrace Camino (or similar). Once Camino reaches 1.0 couldn't Mozilla marketing work to encourage Apple to include Camino on the MacOS instalation disks as an alternative to Safari? Mozilla.org defeats itself if the phrase "too bad Apple didn't embrace Camino (or similar)" to mean there is no point in attempting to market a gecko based browser to Apple to be included on the OS instalation disk. Now it would be a waste of time and self-defeating to market Firebird to MS in hopes of gaining a spot on the instalation CDs. Apple, unlike MS, may just be open to distribute an alternative browser to Safari. And if Camino every does surpass Safari in quality by a significant margin may just be open to adopt Camino as its default browser. Originally Apple partly did not adopt a Geko browser due to a lack of a native UI and other flaws in the Gecko design. The faults Apple rightly saw in Gecko's design (which lead them to not adopt it) either have been or will be shortly fixed as work progresses to improve the Gecko Runtime. Hopefully When Camino reaches 1.0 Apple will have a OS X browser light years ahead of Safari. Apple adopt Gecko insted of KHTML? Only if they would be crazy. Some people are trying hard to make Gecko less clumsy but some very basic desing "flaws" can't be overcome in current architecture AFAIK. Eg. content being rendered locking UI is not solvable in Gecko 1.0 and would require probably a complete rewrite as we were told. Sounds familiar? *hint - NN4* As the product has been developed by a loose association of developers and I for one am using the product and recommending it, could there be a similarly loose association of marketeers who can take steps to promote the product? I'm thinking press awareness, project publicity, even publicising how the loose association of developers works because that's one of the great strengths of Mozilla - a co-operative effort. I don't have the coding skills to participate in teh main project, but I can (and do) use what knowedge I have of the product to promote it. I know I'm not the only one - so maybe some co-operative effort in this field will pay off. If you're interested in the marketing side of the project, consider joining the marketing_public mailing list (details are probably somewhere on mozilla.org or in a past mozillazine article). You can also query bugzilla for bugs in the marketing component if you want some ideas to work on. Young people on schools should be the primarily target. I as parent, and I have four kids, will hear from them, if they like it. My kids, and most other youngsters one this school, are already using the mozilla/MultiZilla combo because my son told them why :-) Why young people only? I personally "converted" to Mozilla 27 adult people (actually households). It requires a little bit more effort than simply point a person to the product, it requires sometimes support to show some settings (the "Quick Start" menu topic will help a lot to promote Mozilla). The future should be today. The more people are using Mozilla the more companies will switch to it. Speaking of marketing, I've been glad to see 1.6 on the main ZdNet downloads page for somewhere around a week. (still there today 1/25). That can't hurt to get exposure that way. Although I'd like to see some more positive user opinions there. But at least the 3 it has gotten are all good. And there's a poll on download.com asking your favorite browser. So far: IE 60.8%, Mozilla 14.6%, Opera 10.4%, Netscape 5.8%, Avant 4.4% other 4.1%. Second Place but way out of first. I see that snapfiles.com lists mozilla under their freeware broswers but doesn't offer the correct version. They currently offer 1.5 RC 2. :( They're also not up to date with firebird which they list 0.61. I think we'd even rather have someone get 1.4.1 rather than get 1.5 RC 2 beings 1.4 is the stable branch. So, the question for me is: What can *I* do to promote Mozilla? I already recommend it to my friends and the people that visit my homepage, but aren't there any additional (official) logos, which I can put on my homepage??? Or is there something else I can do??? Here, you can find some nice banners, and link to official logos: http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=17089 Agreed with point that teens will lead (as they have in cell phone trends). What teens in Singapore and Hong Kong do feeds back to the "web literate" young Asians of the US and outward from there. Simply having a few fans in Asia use publicity banners on pages of such blogging services as Xanga could start the ball rolling, IMO. I note that Xanga has created a Mozilla-aware XTools for creating posts. Is this article cached anywhere online? Google doesn't seem to have it. |