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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.
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.
Luck favors the prepared, darling.
"Luckily Futurama has yet to contact us for using their character names as our development codenames."
Well if they do, you could always say "Bite my shiny metal ass"
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
couldn't they have said that a bit earlier, or did they just find the flame wars funny?
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"?
The Surgeon General says sigs are bad for me.
Use those "codenames" for another 5 years until it
reaches 2.0!
I had my credit card ready. :(
What a disappointment.
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
Microsoft's Palladium, now renamed "Next Generation Secure Computing Services" .Not Server is Windows Server System 2003
Opera's Bork edition targeting MSN
Mozilla Firebird, Thunderbird chaos...
Banias codename - Centrino branding by Intel
Windows
and
Trustworthy Computing Platform Alliance is now Trustworthy Computing Group.
Should be interesting to see actual market share/ market penetration vs. Confusion. Methinks Mozilla would be lucky to have as many downloads as posts on Slashdot, more so the database chaps.
Good fun all, while it lasted.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
How about naming their product "Bob", I'm sure no-one would mind that...
I have nothing to do with firebird, the database, but I can understand their concerns. And while this document seems to try to remedy much problems, I expect that not to work in the real world.
The biggest problem for firebird the db is IMO namespace pollution on search engines. Not from the dull marketing standpoint, but from the developer standpoint, because it makes it harder to find archived mailing list/news messages which might cover a problem a developer might face.
This document won't change that, I fear.
PS: I'm no legal expert, but if they wanted to use the names as codenames, why did they have to involve the legal team before?
I build phoenix from source (for XFT support) every week or so. I have some questions:
.mozconfig to build Firebird? Will I just stop defining MOZ_PHOENIX and then moz will build like phoenix?
(1) What changes will I have to make to
(2) What additional (cough bloat) features will Phoenix acquire when it becomes the main branch? I don't want Firebird to bloat up at all! If anything, it should go *more* in the faster/smaller direction, not the other way!
If they name it "Bob", they'll have the evil empire itself on their case. Shiver.
Good, now the three people using the Firebird database should be satisfied.
http://www.talknerdy.org
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.
Yes, the old Mozilla Application Suite will eventually be no more. It will live on perhaps for a few years on the 1.4 branch, but the Mozilla trunk will change over to Mozilla Firebird and Mozilla Thunderbird after the 1.4 release. For more details, see the Mozilla Roadmap.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason 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.
Current nightly snapshot of Phoenix is called phoenix-i686-pc-linux-gnu.tar.gz, the executable is called phoenix, however, the title bar has "Mozilla Firebird". It's not like they are using that name internally - it's exposed to the end users.
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.
"Things that you own end up owning you" - Tyler Durden (via Diogenes of Sinope).
Does anybody know what will happen with the other components from the Mozilla Suite? I haven't seen them mentioned.
Venkman (JavaScript Debugger) will propably be an extension to Firebird Browser, but what about the remaining components like Composer, ChatZilla etc?
I doubt that Composer will be an addon to Firebird or Thunderbird. That wouln't make any sense.
No-one is going to talk about Mozilla Browser, except maybe on the Mozilla mailing list. It will get shortened to Mozilla, which now apparently means at least 2 different programs that do two entirely different jobs. It's going to be like dropping the second word of "MS Word" and "MS Outlook" and then wondering why everyone gets confused.
Can't we have short if arcane Linux-like contractions such as moznav and mozmail? At least then we would know what we are talking about.
Virtually serving coffee
...All browsers are named after cars.
Microsoft/Ford Explorer
Apple/GMC Safari
Netscape/Lincoln Navigator
Omni Group/DodgeOmni[web]
iCab... not even going to bother. I'm hoping you'll see the connection.
My point?
The Mozilla group is making a Big Mistake with the upcoming changes.
Point one: not naming their browser after a car. People want to see their browsers named after cars. If Microsoft does it, it HAS to have been researched on the market.
Two: People want to see monolithic browsers using up resources like there's no tomorrow. With every major browser out there named after either an SUV, a minivan or a sporty pickup-type-car, gas guzzling is a must-have feature in a browser.
Therefore, I proclaim Mozilla's 1.5 efforts flawed, and doomed, like BSD.
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?
K.I.S.S.
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.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish