Mozilla Branding Strategy Clarified

scottfi writes "Christopher Blizzard has published to mozilla.org an article entitled Mozilla Branding Strategy, which clarifies the position of mozilla.org on naming of the application suite and the separate applications in milestone 1.4 and beyond. The Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird names are simply codenames, and the resulting products will be referred to as 'Mozilla Browser' and 'Mozilla Mail'." This makes the whole name debate seem kind of moot. Luckily Futurama has yet to contact us for using their character names as our development codenames.

Comments

I can't believe there even IS a name debate...

[Nijika]

Talk about some petty squabbles. Sorry, but that's really what it is. Mozilla is a solid browser that's free. The codename thing makes sense to me, as one who uses Debian on a regular.

why now?

[Anonymous Coward]

couldn't they have said that a bit earlier, or did they just find the flame wars funny?

Re:why now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, the flame wars made them change their mind.

[shiki soku ze kuu!]

Re:why now?

[NickFortune]

I think that's what is known as an "graceful climbdown" - the mozilla crew back away from an unpopular (and poorly thought out, IMO) descision without losing face.

Of course, it could have genuinely been a misunderstanding. Throwing away the all good publicity mozilla-the-browser has gathered by choosing a new name always did seem an odd sort of move.

Re:why now?

[squiggleslash]

I wrote a flame here, then actually RTFA. The article does not match the summary. The article is adamant that the gecko-based Firebird and Thunderbird must continue to be refered to as such - with one caveat, and are seperate projects

3. Products
2. Firebird/Thunderbird: These are the basis for the second generation Mozilla products. They split our application into two separate applications with separate identities: a web browser and an email program. In talking about these projects, we should allow them to have their own identities.

The major caveat comes in 5. Rules of the Game:, where they say that, at present, these products should be refered to as "Mozilla Firebird" and "Mozilla Thunderbird":

3. When referring to Thunderbird or Firebird before or during the 1.4 release cycle, make sure to use the project name with Mozilla pre-pended as "Mozilla Thunderbird" or "Mozilla Firebird" instead of Mozilla alone or Firebird/Thunderbird alone.

...which I'm quite sure will be as universally adopted and respected as RMS's request that people refer to the combination of a certain operating system kernel with a certain operating system userland as "GNU/Linux". But, can't blame Blizzard for that I guess.

The one hope on the horizon is the immediately following two paragraphs:

After the release of 1.4 we will be doing our primary development on the Firebird and Thunderbird projects. When we do releases of that codebase we should be using self-descriptive brand identities for the public and the press. New rule:

4. Use the names "Mozilla Browser" and "Mozilla Mail" to describe the Firebird and Thunderbird projects after the 1.4 release.

ie Mozilla will back down on the naming issue, but NOT until 1.4 is out of the door, which presumably is a matter of months, not years.

I'm looking at this as an attempt to wiegh some ugly politics. There's no logical reason why the stripped browser should continue to be refered to as "Firebird", virtually nobody calls it that NOW, and it's perfectly possible to give it an uglier name if the thing is temporary, "TBFKAP", FearNicks, or whatever. This would avoid any damage to other parties and would satisfy those who feel Mozilla.org has not been a fair player in the open source movement. I can only assume there's a pride issue going on - nobody wants to hurt Asa's feelings or something.

This has not been the FOSS communitys' finest hour, and at least it's being resolved now.

Re:why now?

[rossjudson]

They "researched it for months", and didn't come up with the fact that one of the most significant open source database efforts had the same name? That's pretty crappy research, if you ask me. Fire that guy.

It seems that there are a lot of people who think that the Interbase/Starbase/Interbase/Firebird group is after publicity. That's plain stupid.

I've worked with it, on and off, for almost 18 years. That's hard to believe. My first job, while still in college, was coding automated test suites for Cognos' rebranding of Interbase.

It's a badass DB when it comes to self-maintenance. I've never encountered any other database that could just run, uninterrupted, for a couple of YEARS, underneath some pretty heavy duty stuff (industrial equipment).

Why all the drama?

[grafikhugh]

From a marketing stand point it would be a large step backwards to remove "mozilla" from the naming scheme. I am glad this is not the case, but now wonder why they made such a big deal of the code names in their newest roadmap? And why not just develop the projects under the decidedly less h4x0r names "mozilla mail" and "mozilla browser"?

Sounds good to me.

[ivern76]

This is good news, in my opinion. Pointless fights over a product name don't help the cause...call it Mozilla B for all I care, it's still going to be the browser I use.

"What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet." -Juliet

Re:This doesn't change much IMO

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it so hard grasping that they changed their mind after all the negative feedback?

Re:This doesn't change much IMO

[Anonymous Coward]

The Firebird DB homepage comes out at the top of a Google search for "firebird". That is something everybody would hate to lose. But on the other hand: ..."of about 681,000". Is it reasonable to expect the name "firebird" to have any distinguishing effect all by itself? If you're looking for something specific, chances are that the additional search terms (for the specific topic) will distinguish the scope as well. That said, I'm relieved to see that they won't ditch the brand "Mozilla" and are going to use professionally unimaginative but descriptive names for the components. Mozilla has enough image problems without extra help from muscle car names, thank you very much.

give a simple name

[mcn]

Whatever the final name, make it simple and more `layman', for the sake of the less technical consumers. I find open source software has names that look foreign and cryptic to these people. Eg, Ark vs Winzip, Kppp vs dialup networking, noatun or xine vs media player or realplayer. They usually can't remember such names, and make them difficult to communicate with their peers (such as those newbies who, like them, could have just started to experiment OSS, non-windows, non-mac from the windows world) regarding such softwares & their use.

Happy ending

[arvindn]

The document clearly says that the names Firebird and Thunderbird will be discouraged after the 1.4 release. Note that the 1.4 release is scheduled less than a month away..

So this is really a face saving way of retracting the name change. This should definitely put an end to the heat from firebird database fans, without making mozilla.org or AOL legal look like jackasses. Diplomacy at its finest!

So, the *bird names will be used only by developers during a one-month period to refer to the codebase not the product. After that it will be called mozilla browser and mozilla mail. Which is GREAT, because there was NEVER a need to use these pseudo-catchy names instead of just Mozilla/ComponentName building on the brand value and recognition.

Stupidity

[Organic_Info]

This whole naming argument is a good example of the lack of thought people put into naming their products. The firebird database people should have distiguished their name e.g. FirebirdDB or what ever just as Mozilla should have been firebirdbrowser firebirdweb or whatever.

If you use a really generalised term to name your project/product there are bound to be clashes and cross branding. This is only going to happen more often until people give more thought to their naming schemes.

The stupidity of who has more right to the name is bollocks paticuarly if the name is ripped straight out of a dictionary and not individualised.

Why change then?

[Stefan Fredriksson]

If the Firebird name is only for internal use etc, why was there a need to change?

They changed from Phoenix because that was already taken, why is it diffrent with Firebird?

The Netscape connection

[UnConeD]

IMO the first thing the Mozilla team needs to do is get rid of ALL similarities with Netscape.

I don't care whether Netscape 6/7/whatever is a good browser, the way they completely FUCKED up the 4.x series had made me lose their trust forever. And I know I'm not alone. I did a summer this year which involved some HTML, and we still had to make sure it worked on NS4 because it was still used by something like 1% of their users. Yay. Forget about using CSS, let's stick to tables because that's the only way of guaranteeing your elements don't fly around the page in NS4.

So when Phoenix/Mozilla has a classic theme that says it 'recreates the familiar look of the classic Netscape 4.x series', it's actually saying that it 'makes this cool browser look like antiquated crap that everyone hates'.

For everyone except Un*x users, Netscape died when IE5 was released as it turned out that IE didn't have completely b0rked support for basic HTML features such as CSS and DHTML. They still view Netscape as the really crappy browser that does everything wrong.

So for everyone except those 5-and-a-half people who never stopped using Netscape 4.x because it was 'so much better than IE', please don't call it 'Mozilla Navigator'. The Navigator name is tied to the crap called Netscape and should die along with it. Seriously, has Netscape done anything remotely interesting ever since NS4? NS6/7 is just a branded version of Mozilla. I personally couldn't care less if a huge asteroid obliterated Netscape headquarters today.

Besides, brand recognition and naming depends on your users. Look at how Apple's Safari has become a household name in a couple of months, but how Mozilla is still squabbling over details like this. Maybe we should stop letting the geeks choose names and get some marketing droids to do it instead?

Call me cynical, but..

[robbo]

imho, the world's gone to hell in a handbasket when an open source project worries about its brand identity. Stick to writing solid, standards-compliant code and let the community take care of promotion, imho.

Quibbling about whether to call it Phoenix, Mozilla Phoenix or Mozilla is a waste of everyone's time, and when you compose documents like this, you usually find yourself on the receiving end of a large flame attack.