Mozilla Messaging is looking someone who can help us drive forward Thunderbird’s test automation framework, tooling, coverage, and community. We’re looking for someone who combines the usual skills we need:

• Strong domain expertise: in this case test automation of a multi-platform desktop application
• Big-picture thinking: you’d be the first paid test engineer working on a huge codebase with lots of developers and millions of users, so the hard thing won’t be to find things to do, rather figuring out what’s the right thing to work on
• Ability to lead and build a community of peers and contributors
• Ability to prioritize and drive your own work, and happy to collaborate with a wide variety of contributors

Our current test infrastructure relies primarily on MozMill, and most tests are written in Python or JavaScript, so solid understanding of those technologies is obviously useful.

This is a unique opportunity for someone who takes testing, engineering, and community seriously, and who wants to have a huge impact on software that is used daily by millions of people.

Relocation not necessary.

Pass the word!

(resume submissions to jobs at mozillamessaging.com)

The idea made a lot of sense to us, so we decided to follow suit for Thunderbird. Rather than parks, we picked beaches. A good beach is a clear and compelling example of a public good. We can all go to the beach, share in the beauty and poetry of the place, swim, maybe surf. All that’s required of us in exchange is to treat it well — don’t fence it in, don’t litter, don’t crash your oil tankers into it. Yet beaches as a public commons are under threat. If Thunderbird can help beaches and beaches can help make it clear why Thunderbird matters, we all win.

Given the weather outside, it’s not too surprising that the codename for the next version of Thunderbird is Lanakai, in sunny Hawaii. “Warm turquoise green waters brush up against a fine sand beach while gentle trade winds offer a cool relief from the hot Hawaiian days. This beach is great for relaxing on the sand or taking a swim in it’s clear waters”. That pretty much sold us. Also, we can dream about having a Thunderbird summit there someday.

I suppose if you ignore all of the companies listed in the article who were sold for hundreds of millions of dollars, and you squint really hard, you can see their point: investors in open source companies in aggregate haven’t made as much money as investors in proprietary software companies. Given how short the age of open source has been, that’s hardly surprising. (Given how open source is missing the boat on services-based businesses, that’s also likely to continue, but that’s another story).

Others will I’m sure criticize the article based on proposing some better metrics for success for investors in open source companies. I don’t really care — what did strike me was this sentence:

The fight illuminates a larger truth about open-source companies: their societal and strategic importance far exceeds their financial value as operating businesses.

Exactly! It’s critical to me as CEO of Mozilla Messaging that it be a healthy business. But my requirements for “health” aren’t those of wall street. They include reaching a state of making more money than we need to operate, but they also include some variation on the triple bottom line, with some additional twists related to making sure that we operate in ways that are consistent with our values.

I was recently at a business meeting where a bunch of CEOs were “networking”. It was fascinating how quickly the conversation shifted when I answered the usual question about “exit” (the polite term for: “get rich by selling the company) with “well, no, I can’t, as we’re owned by a non-profit”. After a period of shock, it turns out that even CEOs (!) are interested in a business that isn’t all about financial rewards for shareholders. It can be about much more interesting pursuits, such as building a team of people who respect each other and work together for a common goal; it can be about providing awesome customer experiences; it can be about making the world better. There are lots of companies like that. It’d be nice if the “business” section of the newspaper spent more time thinking about that and less about how people who are merely shareholders can make money through speculation.

It’s probably healthy for Wall Street to realize that what’s interesting about open source isn’t some magically cheaper way to produce goods and services. To me, what’s much more important are the complex implications like transparency, a permeable barrier between your consumers and your staff, a built-in safeguard against complacency, and ideally a much more human relationship between your organization and everyone else. I look forward to seeing what the Economist’s new Schumpeter column on business says about it, whenever they get around to it.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to exploring how to work with business-savvy types who are interested in how to make a deeply healthy business. Based on talking to other CEOs of open source companies, I’m pretty sure that just like we can find talented programmers, quality nuts and localizers to contribute to the products, I’ll find some smart business types who will find it rewarding to contribute to the business challenges.

By far the largest set of support requests that we end up seeing for Thunderbird have to do with being unable to receive or send mail. By far the largest single cause of these failures is some unilateral change by the ISP which cause previously working configurations to stop working. In other words, people come to us for help solving problems we can’t solve. It makes us feel bad, it makes you look uncaring, and it certainly doesn’t help your customers (except for those cases when we go beyond the call of duty and help them as neighbors would, guiding them through the diagnostic & fix).

In our next revisions of Thunderbird, we’ll probably work on making our error dialogs better, so that we transmit whatever wisdom we can to your users to give them a fighting chance. But we can do better for your customers, if you get involved.

Let’s figure out how to work together to provide better experiences for your customers and our users. I’m quite sure that we can come up with solutions which would save you costs compared to having your customers tie up your tech support lines only to be rebuffed by your staff who often don’t understand how email systems work. It might also help you avoid commoditization…

Here are some ideas to start the conversation going:

• Let’s make sure that our configuration of ISP databases works for as many users as possible. We’ll likely need to evolve the format and protocol over time, but we can only do that with input (some ESPs have already joined the effort, which is great!).
• Consider making a useful add-on that would let you inform your customers of planned service downtime, configuration changes, etc. (no marketing messages, please, or your customers will not use it).
• If there are changes we could make in Thunderbird that would help you help your customers, let’s talk!.

Together, we can figure out how to get your customers setup with a Thunderbird that works for them, for us, and for you.

Looking forward to a productive conversation,

– David Ascher
(dascher at mozillamessaging)

• People don’t pay transparently for mobile services or devices
• People don’t pay for online news (although some surveys indicate many would)
• People often end up “subscribing” to brands (Apple, Google, Facebook) and becoming brand consumers rather than active participants in their own digital life.  That delegation of trust is often pragmatic, but it’s worrisome if unchecked by alternatives.
• The heterogeneity of the original internet can lead to an appearance of chaos, and many people prefer simpler, more uniform experiences.  Both technical and psychological factors encourage centralization of services with single providers.  Financially as well, “small, independent startups” have huge incentives to become part of one of the big centers of mass.

Finally, the huge psychological distance between the value of free services and the costs that funds them is one of the big topics that puzzle.  It applies to “how come I can get free map directions from Google but I have to pay to get them from TomTom?” as well as “how can I convince my neighbors that electing so-and-so to office will mean more tax revenue overall, which in turn will mean better schools?”.  In both cases, the number of steps between cost and service is huge, and coupling them tighter would destroy the huge advantages that centralization and scale offer.  (If I knew more about the derivatives crash I could make some pithy reference here).

I agree with Tim that “If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.”  I think he’d also agree that we need to think beyond code and copyright.  That’s like going to war with trucks but no tanks.  For the open, distributed, heterogeneous web to thrive, we need to incorporate thinking from a host of other fields, such as contract law, design, psychology, consumer behavior, brand marketing, and more.  Figuring out how to engage thinkers and leaders in those fields is likely one of the critical, still missing steps.

It’s going to be fun to have both an experimental platform for next-generation experiments on messaging, which leverages the web of the future, as well as a Thunderbird client which provides both an awesome desktop experience today, and lets more people build interesting, fun, and useful add-ons as well.

I want to make sure to express my thanks to everyone who contributed to Raindrop thus far: Andrew Sutherland who did some initial experiments a long time ago; Chris Anderson, Jan Lenhardt, and Damien Katz of the CouchDB project, who’ve been super helpful in helping us understand their awesome database; Bryan Clark, who’se done a great job juggling Thunderbird and Raindrop design leadership; Mark Hammond, who took Andrew’s original draft and built a great backend infrastructure (it’s great to work with Mark again!); James Burke, for whom no UI requirement is too much; Andy Chung, who makes everyone else look great; and Chris Beard, Myk Melez and Pascal Finette, of Mozilla Labs, for their advice, hosting, and feedback.

2010 will be amazing.

I’ve been so busy working on the Thunderbird 3 release that I forgot to blog about this new development:  I’m pleased to announce that Mozilla Messaging has engaged Philipp Kewisch, lead of the Calendar project, to help drive the release of a version of the popular Lightning calendar add-on.  The plan so far is for Philipp (who’se in school, but somehow finds time to do Mozilla work after that) to help fix bugs, drive the release, and generally make sure that people who want to upgrade from Thunderbird 2 to Thunderbird 3 will find their favorite extension working there.

If you’re keen to help, let Philipp know, and participate in test days, help QA release candidates that will show up, and if you can, chip in with patches!

Success for anything user-facing on the scale of Mozilla Thunderbird requires scalable approaches.  One person, no matter how well qualified and efficient, can’t help everyone who may have issues (especially as many people come to us with questions that are really about their mail provider).  So we need to look to systems and communities to help us help users.

Get Satisfaction

The first system that we’ve committed to is Get Satisfaction, an online website which is designed from the ground up for peer-to-peer support.  You go there to ask a question, and maybe you also help someone else who has a question you know the answer to.  The “take a penny, leave a penny” model.

There are two things that stand out for me with Get Satisfaction: their user experience, and their APIs:

Get Satisfaction clearly thought long and hard about what the user experience of a support site should be like, and it shows: Threads are categorized as being ideas, problems, and praise, and problems and idea threads can be marked appropriately when either there’s an solid answer of some sort, or to track the evolution of ideas.  This provides people who want to dive into a support role with great dashboards, which makes dealing with a high volume much easier.  It also provides users a way to communicate their input & mood effectively, which is an important part of a support interaction.

The second aspect of Get Satisfaction that was particularly compelling to me was that they have built their system with HTTP APIs in mind from the beginning.  This means that we can integrate it into our own websites, or even in future versions of Thunderbird, without anyone needing to rework the database.  We’re just starting to figure out how to use these APIs, but I’m hopeful it will allow us to streamline support interactions considerably.

You can find out more about Roland’s thoughts about Get Satisfaction in his blog post.

Knowledge Base

Even as we’re happy with the capabilities of Get Satisfaction, it’s clear we need to complement it with a knowledge base where we can build longer FAQs, helpful documents, etc. There, we got an unexpected assist from the Fennec (Mobile Firefox) project, as their need for a variant of SUMO for Mobile users made it so that the SUMO project had to refactor and “productize” SUMO.  Having more than one installation of SUMO supported by the core SUMO team made me feel that our use cases were likely to be supported well, which is great — we try to leverage as much of the Firefox infrastructure as we can, as efficiently as we can.  Thanks Fennec!  (For now, we’ll stick with Get Satisfaction, and won’t be using the SUMO forums or the Live Chat features).

SUMO will allow us to build a scalable, localizable document store — it’s been proven to scale (handling 22 million hits a day for Firefox!), and has a built-in localization system.  Given that Thunderbird 3 will likely be published in 40 languages, ignoring localization isn’t a realistic option.  (I should point out that while GetSatisfaction is currently only in English, that team is keen to explore internationalization and localization).

For English users, MozillaZine is the obvious alternative to both Get Satisfaction and SUMO.  And indeed MozillaZine currently has lots of great content, and a bunch of people who provide great support.  Unfortunately, it also lacks a bunch of features (APIs and RSS feeds), has an interface which we can’t improve upon, and is English-only.  An interesting observation is that with people relying on search engines ever more, it’s not really a problem to have multiple sources of information about a product.  I expect MozillaZine will continue to thrive, and we’ll definitely continue to work with the all existing knowledge bases on the web and link to them appropriately.

A web of communities

Going forward one of Roland’s tasks is to build or strengthen the bridges between Mozilla Messaging and the excellent Thunderbird related communities on the web. Mozillazine, of course, but also geckozone in France, and as many other support communities we can find.  Around the time of Thunderbird 3 launch (hopefully in November), Roland is planning some sort of worldwide support community online meeting. If you’re interested in participating, contact Roland.

One of my hopes is that better organization of support communities can lead not just to happier users, but to a better product.  One of Roland’s duties is to provide feedback to the product development team on frequent or emerging issues faced by users, or areas of Thunderbird that particularly please people.  That’s not something he can summarize accurately by himself — he’ll need your help.

Positive Feedback

Support is too often a one-way medium, with users complaining about problems.  That’s certainly an important function, but in a cooperative open source project, it’s equally critical that QA and developer contributors thank users for their input, and that users point out parts of the experience that they like, as positive feedback is the best motivator.  So take some time out and pick an open source project and generate some good karma!  For Thunderbird, it’s easy, go to getsatisfaction and click on “give praise”.  Roland will make sure that the people deserving of your praise get to see it.

There are lots of campaigns that sweep the social networks on a regular basis, and this one is somewhat noteworthy because it’s about plans for a very commonly used piece of software, coordinated by marketers, and because the twittersphere is very receptive to anti-Microsoft sentiments.  None of that is what I want to talk about.

What I want to dig into a bit is how Microsoft got there, and the implications for the Open Web.  I’m not an expert on Microsoft’s history, or Outlook.  But I can make a few guesses, based on how I’ve seen similar things evolve.

Outlook became the dominant enterprise email client during a phase of Microsoft’s life where embracing the web sometimes meant making stuff up and pretending it was a standard, or equivalent shenanigans.  This was clear in Internet Explorer’s explorations outside of the normative specs, but it seems that some of the same “we can just do our own version of HTML” affected the Word team.  This makes sense — if you’re a company with market dominance and the web is not central to your value proposition, but office productivity software is, then you’re going to do what you can to make the best user experience possible for your users, even if it means that messages sent to non-customers can’t be read with as much fidelity as those sent to customers. In fact, in a very basic way, that’s standard marketing — make using your product look better, so people want to use it.

Microsoft, again logically, invested lots and lots of millions of dollars into making design tools for Word, and HTML was thought of as an export format, where low-fidelity was almost a commercial virtue (”you don’t really want that”).  The poor folks in charge of Outlook, who are mail experts, not HTML rendering wizards, had to deal with the use case of: “I want to send rich documents by email”, which blended office concepts (rich documents) and network concepts (email).  They had to choose between a moribund IE6 engine, and the maintained, evolving HTML engine designed for use in Word.  Given that most emails read in Outlook probably are written in Outlook and that Outlook users know the Word authoring tools, it was a rational choice.  It made life hard for email marketers, and for a few people who like to use HTML to express their creative side and who do care that all their correspondents can see what they intended to send.  But compromises are inevitable in a gigantic, complicated company like Microsoft.  Had I been the manager in charge, given their constraints, I may well have made the same choice.

Now, it’s 2010 (or almost).  Outlook is due for a new revision (gotta get the upgrade revenue).  The choice is stark: adopting a more standards-compliant engine like IE8’s makes sense in the framing of “html email messages going out on the net”, but to deploy it in the reality of Outlook (mostly internal emails, lots of document ping-pong, etc.) it would require that Microsoft have a stack of design tools to offer that could realistically replace their existing stacks.  There’s the rub — good HTML engines aren’t useful in a user context like Outlook’s if the authoring tools weren’t built with real HTML/CSS in mind.  And neither Word’s venerable composition tools or  Silverlight’s new-fangled ones were.  So the Outlook team is stuck with a product that needs an upgrade and a need for both composition tools and a rendering engine, neither of which it can control.  It’s not going to end well for at least some people.

[As a side note: the pragmatist in me wonders whether Outlook could use the Word HTML engine to render emails from Outlook users, and the IE8 engine for emails not from Outlook users.  As long as no one ever edits forwarded emails it'd work!]

Now, it’s awful easy to make fun of Microsoft.  The story on the side of the Open Web is better in part, but there are areas needing improvement.  On the rendering engine side (displaying beautiful documents with fidelity and speed), the world is looking better than it has in years, with several rendering engines competing in healthy ways like standards compliance, leading-edge-but-not-stupid innovation, performance, and the like.  Life is good.  For email marketers, getting email clients to render real web content is all that matters — they pay professional designers to author their HTML content using professional web page composition tools, and the revenue associated with a successful email marketing campaign makes those investments worthwhile.  Email is just a delivery vehicle to them, and it’s a perfectly valid perspective.  They like Thunderbird a lot, because we’re really good at rendering the web, thanks to Gecko.

However, for regular folks, life is not rosy yet in the Open Web world.  Authoring beautiful HTML is, even with design and graphics talent, still way, way too hard.  I’m writing this using Wordpress 2.8, which has probably some of the best user experience for simple HTML authoring.  As Matt Mullenweg (the founder of Wordpress) says, it’s still not good enough.  As far as I can tell, there are currently no truly modern, easy to use, open source HTML composition tools that we could use in Thunderbird for example to give people who want to design wholly original, designed email messages.  That’s a minor problem in the world of email, which is primarily about function, not form, and I think we’ll be able to go pretty far with templates, but it’s a big problem for making design on the web more approachable.

There are some valiant efforts to clean up the old, crufty, scary composer codebase that Mozilla has relied on for years.  There are simple blog-style editors like FCKEditor and its successor CKEditor.  There are in-the-browser composition tools like Google Pages or Google Docs, but those are only for use by Google apps, and only work well when they limit the scope of the design space substantially (again, a rational choice).  None of these can provide the flexibility that Ventura Publisher or PageMaker had in the dark ages; none of them can compete from a learnability point of view with the authoring tools that rely on closed stacks; none of them allow the essential polish that hand-crafted code can yield.  That’s a gap, and an opportunity.

I think radical reinvention is needed.  Something with the chutzpah of Bespin, which simply threw away most of the stack that we all assumed was needed, but this time, aimed at the creative class (and the creative side in all of us), rather than the geeks. I know that lots of folks at Mozilla would love to help work on this, but we know we’re too small to do it alone.  We know what modern CSS can do, we just don’t know how to make it invisible to authors.

This is a hard task, because it’s about designing design tools, which combines psychological, social, product design, usability, and technical challenges. It’s a worthy task, though, and one that I’d love to see someone tackle, especially if we can get non-geeks involved.  There are tens of thousands of web designers who know the magic triad of 1) design, 2) HTML/CSS, 3) what aspects of existing tools make them productive, and what aspects fail.  If we could get them to work productively with the tens of thousands of open source developers who currently build the applications that power the net (web, email, and others), we could throw away the broken metaphors of the 20th century and come up with new ways of designing using web technologies that everyone could use.  Or maybe we just need one brilliant idea.  I’ll take either.

That’s pretty impressive!  If the motion passes (which it should, riding on a global wave of sentiment towards openness, and fitting in with the platform that got seven of the councilors elected), this could mean great things for Vancouver, especially at the intersection of software, business, and the public.

On the issue of open source, I would love to show that local governments are able to recognize the strategic and control advantages inherent in software that they can influence and modify, and help push back the fear-driven campaigns which bias towards monopolies at taxpayer expense.  Similarly, promoting the use of open standards is a no-brainer that the best technocrats realize can give them the power that befits them as customers.  These ideas have been well articulated globally over the last few years, and I would hope that all high-level government staff and officials are briefed on the topics by now.  (If any local officials want to discuss this in greater detail, there are many qualified experts in Vancouver, don’t be afraid to ask for names or opinions!).

Open data is a more recent concept, the implications of which are likely as important as the rise of the web.  With open data, governments have a unique opportunity to create economic growth, reduce operating costs, and enrich the life of their constituencies, simply by making a policy decision such as the one in tuesday’s motion, and following through.

As Sir Tim Berners-Lee (the creator of the web) discusses in this 15-minute TED talk, the simple act of releasing public data enables others to create value.  Of course, as the motion indicates, personal privacy rights trump, and we don’t want to release data on individual citizens — luckily that’s not needed in order to enable value creation.  As an example, this impressive screencast of Wolfram Alpha demonstrates the power of new computational platforms leveraging public data. Vancouver’s data belongs there.

Most government data is public data by definition.  What’s compelling about open data in the age of the web isn’t the fact that citizens have access to such data — they typically have the legal right to obtain it through administrative requests, even though those are inconvenient (and very expensive for the city).  What’s compelling is that by making what belongs to the public available via the web, the city can accomplish many laudable goals at once:

• In many cases, simply enabling self-service on the web will reduce costs for the city and provide better service to its citizens.
• By making data that it doesn’t have time to process and analyze available, the city allows others with time and expertise to do such analysis with no cost to the city.  This will sound unbelievable to bureaucrats unused to open source, but this kind of thing really happens.  You can’t predict who will do what with what data, but you can be sure that it can’t happen unless and until the data is available.
• Some of those activities will just be interesting. But some will create new businesses, or allow existing businesses to become more efficient.  What if local retailers could access demographic trend data for free on the web, today?  What if companies outside of Vancouver could get a deeper understanding of Vancouver simply by looking at the data?  Everyone knows that Vancouver is a great place to live.  The city’s economic strengths are not as well advertised.  Enabling an ecosystem of people who turn data into interesting, insightful, and useful applications and sites can only help.  Think of open data as the infrastructure of a chamber of commerce 2.0.
• The city is there to serve the citizenry.  To the extent that it is the caretaker of public data, and that the public has good ideas for using it, its job should be to get out of the way.  Part of being a transparent government is to be invisible — to not get in the way of experimentation and innovation.  Promoting open data while preserving privacy feels like a great goal for the city’s IT staff.

There are also intangible benefits that come from these kinds of attitudinal shifts in how the city relates to the internet and the software economy.  From a recruitment point of view in the software industry in particular, a city which embraced openness and the internet would be that much more attractive to the kinds of technical, creative, and public-spirited individuals that I seek.

Finally, local technology leaders are that much more likely to engage with the city and provide their help.  I know that the notion of an “Open Vancouver” makes me much more keen to engage with the city, as it would put the city on the short but growing list of governments who understand how they can leverage the web and openness to improve life for their constituencies.