John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and Mitchell Baker, Chair of Mozilla, co-wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal on October 29, 2009 called “Net Neutrality: Spur to Entrepreneurship”.
In the article, John and Mitchell publicly voice their support for the FCC’s recent “net neutrality” proposal. They say that since 1995, open Internet standards have spawned a generation of entrepreneurs who went on to create great companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Expedia, Monster, and Netflix. These companies alone represent nearly $300 billion of market capitalization. They say that users have also downloaded more than 1.6 billion Firefox add-ons created by a vibrant ecosystem of developers, from hobbyists to Fortune 100 companies, and that Mozilla has been able to compete on its own merits with the dominant browser, Internet Explorer.
Wow! Talk about validation for the small but growing add-on developer community out there. You have the CEO and Chair of Mozilla talking about how add-ons are a key part of the strategy in their competition head-to-head with Microsoft.
And John and Mitchell are right. Firefox does do a better job handling add-ons than Internet Explorer. It is commonly understood by add-on developers that Firefox is an easier browser to create add-ons for. One other supporting piece of evidence for this position is that the Firefox add-on gallery (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/) is over twice as popular as the Internet Explorer add-on gallery (http://www.ieaddons.com/).
Nice work, Mozilla, on the article and on your add-on strategy.
Here’s to net neutrality continuing into the future so another generation of entrepreneurs can build the next wave of great companies.
This evening I went online to BestBuy.com to pick up a new monitor for my home office PC. My old monitor crapped out a few days ago, and I’ve been meaning to get around to purchasing a new one. I tend to avoid brick and mortar stores for consumer electronic purchases, and BestBuy.com is usually the first website I start with when shopping for consumer electronics. (Apparently, I am like most other online shoppers… I read a recent analyst report that ranked BestBuy.com as number one in total online consumer electronic sales.)
After using BestBuy.com’s user ratings to sort through and find the best-rated 23-inch monitor, I settled on an Acer H233Hbmid 23 inch Widescreen HD LCD Monitor listed at $209.99.
Thankfully for me, I use a couple of different browser add-ons which provide me with timely shopping related information while I am browsing the web. For this purchase, I followed through a relevant message that came up from PriceGong, which I had installed through W3i’s Install IQ process a few months back. PriceGong alerted me that CompUSA.com had the exact same monitor for $199.99 with no shipping and handling, and no sales tax.
Later on, I proceeded through the checkout on BestBuy.com just to see what my final total would have been had I purchased this monitor through BestBuy.com. With $14.99 for shipping and handling, and $16.37 sales tax, my total would have come to $241.35. I saved $41.36 because my installed application, PriceGong, recommended CompUSA.com while shopping at BestBuy.com!
Most tech bloggers talk down about any application that requires an install, such as Windows applications and hybrid applications, like the PriceGong browser add-on. Most tech bloggers are so caught up in the cloud these days that they fail to remember why operating system integration can be so useful. How can the cloud compete with the kind of timely information an installed application can provide?
