The recent
blog entry on Asa's weblog got me thinking... The entry itself is about auctioning off a copy of Wired magazine (the one with Blake Ross on it) which is autographed by some of the lead engineers. Now the question that came into my mind is that, is firefox becoming one of those products which have cult status? If so...is that good or bad?
The big problem in my view with this is the fact that the product/company becomes revered in the eyes of a few who then see the product not in with a critical view but instead see it from a biased perspective. If firefox wants to become accepted to the common person it has to lose this public image of an open source product and become ready to be criticised in the way that purchased software is subjected to. However, in my view this is exactly where Firefox has excelled compared to other open source products. The good balance has been achieved by the technical staff who make the stuff, and the marketing machine out there who promote its benefits (not to mention most open source products are backed with huge budgets - or interests from the likes of IBM / Google / AOL). Too many products in the open source arena never hear their name outside small circles mainly because they are too difficult to use by the average joe bloggs. I mean who really has the time nowadays (aside from computing people) to try out a new product if it requires time and effort to understand? We are a society of "if it is easy i'll do it" and so unless it reacts to common human metaphors we are unlikely to use the product.
When looking at some of the products who are seen in this way I see Apple and Linux very much as perfect examples. Taking Linux, for people who understand and use it...they could talk for hours about its FUNCTIONAL advantages over windows, but at the end of the day.... for a person who just wants to use the computer to surf / watch movies / listen to music ...Linux ultimately fails in its HCI (Human Computer Interaction). I can just see all the linux lovers screaming that Linux has built in video player / music player / open office / browser etc but at the end of the day are they as intuitively designed as say Microsoft?
Sure, I agree that MS lacks in the security department but no one in their right mind (apart from mac users) can argue with the fact that the usability of MS products or more appropriately the ease of use is the reason for their success. Its not usually MS who invent all these new technologies and innovate....no they take a decent idea slap a more than decent interface onto it and then market it like hell.
If open source technology started doing that...i.e separating functionality from GUI then I believe we'll see a much greater uptake of such products.
As for the cult status.... the relevance of the above two paragraphs is that MS only innovate if they see a competitor going for their throat.... If some product has cult status they are unlikely to react as they wont see it harming their mass audience.
Firefox in my view is getting out of that bracket and is becoming much more common place as it is easy to use and functionally superior to MS IE. However, until they do not do more to help push it towards adapting to the commercial sector, then i cannot see a great uptake in that field. The argument for ActiveX in corporate environments cannot be solved by saying... just install the ActiveX extension some guy has made... why? well because companies want tried and tested solutions. They dont want to commit to firefox only to find out that some part of their intranet is now disfunctional because it used IE specific tags or that it had badly coded HTML which IE accepted but Firefox didn't. Compromises need to be made....but the simple solution is to package up the extensions relevant to different users and then offer them as being integrated into the download of firefox. Its a bit like selective install but do it on the site so only the selected extensions are bundled with the download.
