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Mozilla Is Too Big To Fail

Krishnan Subramanian — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:03:41 -0800

Larry Dignan at ZDNetmakes an important point about the financial future of Mozilla Foundation. In his post, he points to Mozilla's over reliance on Google and wonders if it is good for its future. The financial for 2008 didn't show any downward trend. Rather, they showed a consolidated revenue of $78.6 million, up 5 percent from 2007. So, why is Larry worried about it then? His reason is summarized in the following sentence

The worry: Google, now a competitor, is still bankrolling Mozilla.

Yes, 90+% of Mozilla's revenues comes from the search engine provider, Google. Anyone who has done Biz 101 course can tell the risks involved here. Obviously, Larry is worried about this fact and ponders about the future of Mozilla

Can Mozilla realistically diversify its revenue base away from Google? That’s unclear on many fronts. Google has the dominant market share in search. Yahoo is a non-factor. And Microsoft has the Bing search engine, but isn’t likely to support Firefox, a browser that competes (and often wins) against the software giant’s Internet Explorer.

This is a classic problem in any market segment where a single company holds monopoly-like marketshare. We saw it in the desktop era with Microsoft. In that case, our savior was Open Source. It is unfortunate that we don't have an open federated search engine with a reasonable marketshare here, to step in much like open source in the desktop era. (A note to my fellow Clouderati: This is one of the reason why we need open federated clouds). When a single company gains monopoly like marketshare, the other smaller players in the ecosystem are completely dependent on the whims and fancies of the powerful company. Mozilla is in such a position now. They are entirely dependent on a search provider with a huge marketshare. On top of it, the provider is rollowing out a browser and an operating system based on that browser. There is no way Google is going to worry about Mozilla after Chrome gains a decent marketshare.

However, using the term that is popular in politics today, Mozilla is too big to fail. No, I am not worried that Microsoft Internet Explorer will gain back what it lost. The browser market is fragmented right now for Microsoft to get back the lost share. I am worried because Mozilla Firefox is the only vendor neutral browser in the market, in spite of their close connections with Google. With SaaS becoming an integral part of both consumers and enterprises, the need for a vendor neutral browser becomes very important. SaaS vendors cannot rely on browsers coming out of Microsoft, Google, etc.. because of the conflict of interests these companies have in the SaaS space. So, it is imperative for the SaaS vendors to ensure that Mozilla stays stable even without Google's support. From their point of view, Mozilla is too big to fail. How can they ensure the longevity of Mozilla? I haven't thought about it much on this to offer my suggestions but I am pretty convinced that they are obligated (sorry, non US friends for the term) to keep Mozilla stable and succeed.

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Dogbert, the CEO

Zoli Erdos — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:31:42 -0800

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How to Crash a Party, or Do Not Send a URL and Password Through Twitter

Dan Morrill — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:05:04 -0800

Hey everyone, guess who is having a party at their house! Well everyone in the whole world knows at this point if you have been following people on Twitter. One of the basic rules of social networking is always work to keep yourself safe. If you post a link and a password to a protected page or web site, someone is going to simply follow the process and guess what, you got party crashers.

It is not like you could really host all 4000 of your favorite twitter friends at your house, but when you post a URL and password to a protected page on Twitter, someone is going to come along and follow the process which could potentially expose data that you might want to keep at least semi-private like the picture above.

I really appreciate the “edit this page” function as well as export and share with everyone across many social networks. What amazes me though is that this is live data, this really happened yesterday that someone posted a URL and Password for something obviously private across twitter. If you are reading this one, please take this as a cautionary note. No data was altered on the site or otherwise influenced.

How To Stop Following Everyone On Twitter (lockergnome.com)
‘Share-to-Social’ Email Tools Grow Up (marketingvox.com)
The Next Best Twitter Account Promotion Method Invented (profy.com)

(Cross-posted @ TechWag)

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November’s Semantic Web Gang podcast now online

Paul Miller — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:58:49 -0800

November’s episode of the Semantic Web Gang podcast, which I host, is now online.

Standard Podcast [61:45m]: Hide Player | Play in Popup | Download

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T-Shirt Friday #18 - TelecomONE

Ben Kepes — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:50:00 -0800

Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps).

TelecomONE is an internal unconference for Telecom New Zealand, the formerly state-owned, and now publicly listed, telco. I’ve been invited to attend as an external party on the two annual event run so far – as with all conferences, the camping was fun, the audience engaged, the food great and the Werewolf played long and hard (and badly by myself).

It was a great event and the t-shirt was a vast improvement on last years offering.

Hot

Brown is an unusual, but an elegant choice for a t shirt
The t-shirt is a reminder of some awesome conversations and a glimpse into the inner workings of a large corporate
It’s nice to have some subtlety and no massive slogans plastered over the shirt
100% Cotton

Not

The care label says “New Zealand Spirit” and “Made in Bangladesh” – oxymoronic methinks
It really raises the heckles of my friends from other telcos (looking at you Paul Brislen)
I’m still waiting for an XT device (that one’s for you Neal “with an e” Richardson)

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Libcloud Joins Apache Software Foundation Incubator

Krishnan Subramanian — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:01:00 -0800

Libcloud, the open source python library released by the vendor Cloudkick, has taken the first steps to be part of Apache Software Foundation by joining the ASF Incubator. Libcloud offers a single programming interface for apps to access different cloud providers including Amazon EC2, Rackspace, vCloud, Terramark, etc.. Even without any standards, Libcloud can offer interoperability between various Cloud providers.

Cloudkick, the company that originally developed Libcloud, offers a management platform for many different cloud providers. Cloudkick was launched during the Under The Radar event last year. It is a comprehensive management solution with a dashboard that can offer a quick overview of all your cloud based servers from different vendors. It is possible to reboot/shutdown/destroy instances right from the dashboard. They also offer a browser based SSH client to log into the server instances. Since Cloudkick uses Libcloud libraries, their employees are active in the Libcloud development.

Libcloud is not the only programming interface available in the marketplace for multiple cloud vendor interoperability. There are other language specific APIs like jclouds and Dasein Cloud API by enStratus. Sometime back, a Redhat supported project, Deltacloud, has emerged as an alternative to these language specific APIs. Deltacloud is a REST based API without being tied to a specific programming language. All these toolkits aim to offer a single programming interface to access many different clouds from multiple vendors.

Even though Libcloud is an independent project, the acceptance into Apache Software Foundation incubator will offer many advantages to this project. The two most important advantages include

Infrastructure support from the Apache foundation. They are currently hosted on Github and we all know about the reliability issues faced by Github in the recent past. ASF's infrastructure will offer them the much needed reliability.
Mentorship from experienced committers and other developers.

Once the project is in incubator, they have to show that they can attract diverse group of committers to the project before they are admitted to Apache Software Foundation. The emphasis on the diversity of committers helps these projects in many different ways including

A solid group of committers who could play by the meritocratic rules of the foundation
To offer a long term stability to the project
To offer a wide ranging technical visions that can help the project mature and grow

Having Libcloud project as a part of Apache Software Foundation can make it truly vendor neutral and it will also help create a trust that will lure more and more vendors adapt Libcloud.

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Video: Chrome OS Explained

Krishnan Subramanian — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 11:45:06 -0800

Today Google is holding an event to introduce Chrome OS. Here is a video explaining in simple terms the concept behind Chrome OS. Here is my skeptical post about Chrome OS immediately after the announcement and Zoli's post on how Google takes a Microsoft kind of approach to their release.

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What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI

Mark Suster — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 08:36:22 -0800

This is part of my Startup Advice series.

I had a picture in the office of my first company with the logo above and the capital letters JFDI. (In case it’s not obvious it’s a play on the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.”) I believe that being successful as an entrepreneur requires you to get lots of things done. You are constantly faced with decisions and there is always incomplete information. This paralyzes most people. Not you.

Entrepreneurs make fast decisions and move forward knowing that at best 70% of their decisions are going to be right. They move the ball forward every day. They are quick to spot their mistakes and correct. Good entrepreneurs can admit when their course of action was wrong and learn from it. Good entrepreneurs are wrong often. If you’re not then you’re not trying hard enough. Good entrepreneurs have a penchant for doing vs. over-analyzing. (obviously don’t read this as zero analysis)

I spent nearly a decade building software for large companies and then advising companies on the same. I didn’t have to make many serious decisions. So I was surprised at the sheer volumes of decisions that had to be made when I became a startup CEO. Most of them are completely mundane such as choosing which: bank, office space, 1-year lease vs. 2-year lease, logo, URL, pricing structure or which VC.

The technology team disagrees on direction and wants resolutions. Your head of sales thinks she should fire somebody. You need to decide whether or not to launch at TechCrunch50. Somebody asks whether you plan to set up 401k’s and do contribution matching. I think this paralyzes many people.

I learned quickly that I needed to just do things. Yet I initially had a team full of people that seemed to either over analyze things or more likely wait for a higher source within the company to make the tough decisions for them. You’re sales person is getting blocked by the CTO who says she shouldn’t go above him but the CTO isn’t approving the deal. Should she take a chance and potentially ruffle feathers?

Yes, I know it’s my job as the CEO to be the coach for people and that’s fine. But if everybody is looking for me to make their decisions we’ll never get anything done. I felt like I had done the hard bit and chosen people that I truly respected and I would rather empower them to make decisions and accept consequences.

Sometimes you need to break some eggs to get things done so if that’s what it takes I wanted my team to go for it and I wanted to symbolize that it was OK with me. I would far rather have some messes to clean up than to never have them cross the line trying.

So I took on the motto JFDI to symbolize this. And I think my team did a great job and rose to the occasion. Maybe it helps that I love controversy and pushing the boundaries so people felt it was OK for them to do it as well.

Another side of JFDI is finding ways to get stuff done that seem impossible. Entrepreneurs have a way of doing that. Getting suppliers to accept terms that they said they never normally agree, getting accepted to speak on a panel when the conference organizer initially said “no,” getting people to moonlight for you until you have the cash to bring them on board.

A couple of quick stories / examples:

1. Making Things Happen

There’s a guy in Los Angeles that I met at several tech networking events. He was a really nice and personable guy who had deep domain knowledge in an industry that he’d worked in for 10 years that is in need of technological advancement. He wanted to be the guy who did it. So we discussed his ideas several times. I usually try to avoid getting stuck reviewing people’s PowerPoint decks (I get this request too often and frankly I’m already behind on my own work!) but there are some people you just take an (extra) liking to and want to help. This was such a guy.

So over several months I went through a few iterations on his idea. He was stuck on capital raising. He wanted to know how to get started and “Could I intro him to a couple of local angels?” One night after a DealMaker Media event we got 20 minutes together after the event ended. I was blunt (warning: that sometimes happens with me) and told him not to bother and that I wasn’t prepared to help with angels.

“Why?” he asked. I told him he wasn’t a real entrepreneur. He looked stunned. I said that he had been talking about doing this for too long. He still had no website and no prototypes. But “he didn’t have the budget to hire a developer until he had raised money!”

I said that was my point. “A real entrepreneur would have done it anyway. He would have found somebody technical and inspired that individual to work for equity or deferred payment. Real entrepreneurs are contagious. They are filled with ideas and they get those ideas onto paper. That paper can be in the form of wireframes or in the form of a PowerPoint plan. Or worst case your ideas can be conveyed verbally. But they GET THINGS DONE. You have the skills and knowledge to do that.”

I walked away kind of feeling bad. I don’t like to intentionally crush people’s hopes. But I always view my job as being honest so that people don’t waste time, money or both if they’re ideas aren’t good or the positive execution isn’t likely. But then something awesome happened. He took my comments as a challenge. He went out and found a developer and built a product. He refined his business plan and he got commitments for $150-200k but needed some lead angels to commit first. When he re-approached me he had a much better plan and he had a prototype! I introduced him to some angels and his round was OVER SUBSCRIBED!

That is a true story. I don’t know whether the entrepreneur feels comfortable with my saying who he is so if he does and he reads this perhaps he’ll put his details in the comments section. But I bring up this story for a reason.

2. Analysis Paralysis

I used to sit on the board of a company (for which I DID NOT invest) with a very smart and very likable CEO. This person was educated at the best US schools and had worked for a top-tier strategy consulting firm – one of the big 3. The CEO led every board meeting with vigor and the board members (sans me) were always wowed. The CEO had 60-page Powerpoint presentations analyzing every micro detail of the business. The company had less than $5 million in revenue yet we had a multi-tab spreadsheet doing activity-based costing on our customer service staff, operations and technology.

We had every chart every invented by man (or McKinsey) showing failure rates of our product, mean-times-to-repair, detailed sales forecast charts, etc. Charts. What lovely charts! I know they would have been very useful in dissected the woes of General Motors. I was the only unimpressed board member. I was the one pointing out that we were behind on our sales targets and our “Elephant Deal” that had been promised was 6 months late.

After a few board meetings I finally spoke up. I was a bull in a china shop. I said (out loud), “I sure wish that some of the time that went into these PowerPoint slides would have gone into meetings with the COO, CFO or CMO of [Elephant Customer].” The CEO had never met with any of them.

With a CEO that likable, smart, educated and accomplished it made board members squirm that I was willing to call bullshit.

I’m sure you know what happens next. We missed our sales target by more than 66% for the year but we had great slides explaining why. The next year we set the sales budget equal to the previous year’s sales budget that we had missed. We missed the next year by more than 33%. Nobody seemed shocked. The company has burned through serious cash. I complained the whole way. It was not fun. No “independent” board members seemed to care (or even comprehend the lunacy of the whole situation).

To this day I’m sure they see the situation differently. Beautiful slides by top-tier consultants have hoodwinked large companies for years and I can see why. They are intoxicating, complex, insightful and tell a great story. But in the end they’re usually just that – a story. Sometimes a fantasy.

I still really like this CEO and have deep respect for this person outside of the role of being a CEO. The “Peter Principle” says that “everybody rises to their level of incompetency.” Read this as some people who are great at analyzing to not make great doers and therefore do not make great entrepreneurs. I think many VCs have learned this the hard way when they step in to temporarily run companies as I have seen happen.

The problem with the company that I described above was that there was somebody willing to fund ongoing losses and the board continued to believe that good times were just around the corner. Maybe they’ll be proved right some day. I certainly hope so. But in the UK we used to call this “promising jam tomorrow.” I was tired of jam tomorrow. I left the board. The company never JFDI.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

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Early Peek at Speaker Submissions for Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010

Hutch Carpenter — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:00:24 -0800

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston Call for Papers has been open for a little over a week now. While the final number of speaker proposals will number in the hundreds (450+ for SF 2009), the initial 29 submissions are a rich vein of current thinking about Enterprise 2.0.

As you can see in the tag cloud from the site, the top tags so far for the proposed sessions are:

technology adoption
social media
best practices
knowledge management
getting started
learning
business case

Technology is the top tag. There’s no denying that technology enables Enterprise 2.0. Adoption is running strong so far. Which is a pretty fair characterization of a key issue in the field. Social media comes on strong. There are plenty of conferences devoted to that topic, and here even a conference primarily addressing to internal collaboration has its share.

A Few of the Proposals

Based on page views, here are the five most popular submissions early on:

Three Keys to a Successful SharePoint Deployment (Rich Blank):

There are 3 keys to deploying SharePoint successfully for a large enterprise: Platform, Governance, and Marketing. The first part involves a stable, available, easily accessible, secure, well performing global technology platform. If users can’t access the environment, they won’t trust it or won’t use it. Next is governance – all things related to the overall project as well as the operational and support involved. Finally there is marketing — you need to market the application to end users, provide quick introductions to get them started, best practices, conduct demos that demonstrate business value, create proof of concepts, and show people what’s possible. You shouldn’t have to provide formal training if you market the application right. Each of these 3 are not mutually exclusive — you can’t have marketing without the platform and good governance.

Driving Adoption is anti-2.0 (Paula Thornton):

There’s way too much 1.0-thinking being applied to the 2.0 era. “Driving adoption” is the antithesis of the fundamental premises of 2.0. Starting with 2.0 axioms is critical to guide any 2.0 initiative.

Connecting the Dots to Competitive Advantage (Jon Ingham):

Enterprise 2.0 can increase efficiencies and help meet business objectives but it can also generate competitive advantage. To create higher levels of value, the use of social technologies needs to be linked to other organizational enablers, eg HR practices, OD interventions, facilities design etc. This session will show how.

Lessons from Religion about Evangelizing Enterprise 2.0 (Gil Yehuda):

The E2.0 marketplace has evangelists, non-believers, and faith-based ROI models. But the workplace is modeled after the hierarchy of government and the meritocracy of the marketplace. Wherein lies community? As it turns out, religion can teach us about the nature of community in context of preparing the workplace for E2.0.

Moving Beyond Email — Barriers to Knowledge Management (James Rosen):

Email is fast, free, and easy to use, but it has many limitations, especially in an enterprise context. Yet many employees, especially baby-boomers, rely on it nearly exclusively. This talk examines the use cases for which email is the wrong tool, and how to move to better ones.

That’s just a few of them, check ‘em all out. And be ready to vote come January 2010.

(Cross-posted @ I'm Not Actually a Geek)

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Executives are Still Rejecting Social in the Enterprise

Mark Fidelman — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:24:00 -0800

I recently finished a call with a company that chose a competitor over my company’s solution in order to solicit their feedback. I try to proactively reach out to clients and prospective clients when we don’t earn their business.

In this case, we did very well but ultimately lost on a couple of factors. Yet what most interested me was not so much the reason why we lost, but the difficulty she had in selling the concept of Social Business internally. Now I’ve long advocated the removal of “social” from business in any discussion with upper management, but she really brought it home for us.

According to her, the early discussions around bringing a Social Business tool into the corporation was met with fierce resistance from the C-Suite. In fact, the CIO is already chaffed from all of the Facebook usage around the organization. The rest of the executive team is weary of employee blogging and commenting. It doesn’t fit their command and control center mentality.

So how was she able to bring an Enterprise 2.0 tool into the company? By turning off all of the social features and beach heading the solution in one division. She believes it will catch on and the executives will see the benefit of the solution and request full functionality.

Interestingly, she believes the company will be at a competitive disadvantage in the near future if it doesn’t offer a Web 2.0 work experience for new employees (especially the younger generation). She expects lower retention and difficulties in hiring if the solution is not rolled out entirely and retained as the company intranet.

Her struggles with bringing Enterprise 2.0 philosophy and tools into her company are not unlike most of the stories we continue to hear. Yet slowly but surely, corporate champions are finding innovative ways of breaching the corporate fire wall to introduce E2.0 support columns in anticipation of adding the foundation later. They build success story after success story after initial launch. They focus on the people using the solution and use the boost from their early achievements to create momentum.

Questions: Do you have a similar situation? What has your experience been?

(Cross-posted @ Seek Omega)

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CloudAve

Mozilla Is Too Big To Fail

Dogbert, the CEO

How to Crash a Party, or Do Not Send a URL and Password Through Twitter

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November’s Semantic Web Gang podcast now online

T-Shirt Friday #18 - TelecomONE

Libcloud Joins Apache Software Foundation Incubator

Video: Chrome OS Explained

What Makes an Entrepreneur? Four Letters: JFDI

Early Peek at Speaker Submissions for Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010

A Few of the Proposals

Executives are Still Rejecting Social in the Enterprise