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

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?

[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?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think that's quite true. As someone who's worked on Mozilla for a couple of years now (not a member of mozilla.org, no official capacity, blah blah blah), this is basically consistent with everything that's happened before: the stuff released by mozilla.org is known simply as "Mozilla" or "Mozilla [component]" to refer to a specific component. Side projects like native browsers, etc. get the non-descriptive names like Firebird, Galeon, etc. Naming controversy or no, I wouldn't ever have expected the "Firebird" name to be applied to the browser once it became the main, shipping product of mozilla.org.

The one backdown I think I see came earlier, and it's prepending "Mozilla" to Firebird and Thunderbird; normally, "Mozilla" hasn't been attached to any of the subsidiary products.

Personally, I haven't been able to get too heated up about the whole debate: I think it would be courteous to change the name if it were reasonable, but by the time we came up with a name everyone liked, ran it through legal again, and so forth, Firebird would be so close to landing on the trunk and becoming "Mozilla" anyway that I don't think it's worth the effort.

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"?

"Mozilla Branding Strategy"?

[exhilaration]

I was expecting this article to be about *real* branding, like Mozilla dolls, Mozilla Cola, Mozilla Mega Hold Hairspray, etc.

I had my credit card ready. :(

What a disappointment.

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

Think Dilbert

[MyNameIsFred]

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

I would suggest asking Dilbert. I think the scenario played like this -- a worker bee noted the flamewar, suggested to management that a response was needed. Schedule three meetings to decide if a response is really needed. Schedule two more to examine potential responses. Present proposals to management, with a recommended solution. Management sends the study team back to research the idea further. Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Four days later, after a grand total of 52 meetings, a response is made. Management is now reconsidering their decision.

Re:This doesn't change much IMO

[Build6]

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

In one word: Apple.

Apple had a nasty experience where - as a mark of *respect*/homage for the fellow - the internal development team for one of their PowerMacs decided to use "Sagan" as the code name for the machine that was in development. This is a name that would *never* be used externally in marketing or branding or promotion, but when Sagan heard of it he got pissed off and went at Apple with his lawyers etc. - he basically felt that use of his name would suggest that he endorsed it, or that Apple would gain free-publicity etc. -- which certainly came as a surprise to the devteam. After that they decided they didn't like Sagan that much anymore, so they changed the code name to BHA. Sagan sued again when word spread (true or not :-) that "BHA" stood for "Butt-Head Astronomer".

You can read more if you google, but here's one link:

http://www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/582 .h tml

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.

Let's just accept it...

[unlinear]

...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.