Thursday, January 20, 2005

Thanks Joe and Garrett aka G-Unit

I was going to post this as a comment but it got too big so I decided to create a post out of it. It's in response to Bob's comment regarding FireFox not relating to the average user. Bob gave some great input and I want to recognize it as well as my own inadequacies.

Bob, you make a great point and I appreciate you bringing it up. One of my friends pointed out the same point and I wanted to include some examples in the post but I didn't have enough time. I actually wrote this post a month ago and just now put it up because if I didn't then it'd never go up.

My buddy, Garrett French, took the time to poke, prod and tear the post down into it's bare bones. Problem was that I'm not a journalist nor am I an editor and I just haven't had the time to get it in the shape it needs to be in.

Garrett pointed out your issues to me so I'll go into a bit of that here.

One of the reasons Firefox helps the average Joe computer user is because the techie community is contributing solid tools to the product. Yes, I pointed out a lot of the techie-type features but there are others as well.

Like tabbed browsing. This allows you to have multiple browser sessions open within the same Firefox window. Allowing the average Joe multitasker the ability to easily navigate through their browser windows and manage them easily without having several icons on your taskbar.

Also, Internet Explorer is hard to upgrade or even know what upgrades are available without being a msft robot and installing the service pack that automatically downloads itself onto your pc. The average Joe doesn't know whether or not it's okay to install an entire service pack even though it automatically downloads itself to their pc. With Mozilla, you know what's good and what's not because it's push based. Meaning, average Joe must want to download something from Mozilla's site in order to get an upgraded browser or a new tool. This puts control in the user's court and that's something marketers need to understand.

Additionally, the world has changed a lot since msft launched ie. We're in an api world. A world in which garage developers are looking to build apps on other people's data and data owners are looking for these garage developers to provide feedback on their existing products. msft has to relate to this push economy if they want to keep their marketshare, otherwise it's bye bye birdie.

One thing I want to point out here is that Garrett has given me great feedback so I won't write stuff that looks like crap. And that Bob has contributed a thoughtful, well formed post and that is the spirit of Marketing Shift. We can all be better if we just frikin unite instead of push our own agendas.