In all the reviews I have read of IE8 (and I read a lot of them), the feature that most IE8 testers seem to like are “Accelerators”, (i.e. context menus for web services).   Indeed, the estimable Jack Schofield seemed to like the feature, describing IE8 as helping “get stuff done” and having innovative features “not found elsewhere”.

Of course, that most fertile of jungles the Mozilla Add-ons community has an answer for Accelerators, or indeed, three of them: IE8 Activities for Firefox, Kallout, and Select-n-Go.  So far, I have tried Kallout, and mighty fine it was too.  Just as I suspect that Accelerators are a way for Microsoft to make its own (and other) web services more accessible, there is a conceivable opportunity for Add-On developers to offer any number of online services a customisation to make their service more accessible to the (burgeoning) Firefox user base.

One more observation: at least one other Mozilla employee in Eskilstuna remarked upon my own use of context menus for shortcuts as “epic” (and not in a good way).  But he might be right about my right clicking.  It does imply a huge bottleneck in the interface, one that Ubiquity seems ideally positioned to fix.  Anyone that likes Accelerators really ought to give that a spin.

You can follow Don’s advice by visiting the Mozilla Add-On Workshop mashup page, and hopefully videos of all presentations will be available before long.

Yup, I’m back from the Mozilla Add-On Workshop (MAOW) in Berlin, and recovered from my 11 hour journey home. A special mention must go to the baggage handlers at Stockholm Arlanda airport whose heroic efforts allowed me to savour an unexpected 3 hour addition to my journey: my luggage’s progress from plane to collection belt vividly evoking, as it did, the great glacial movements that helped to sculpt this fine peninsula.

My own contribution to the MAOW was probably summed up by this sympathetic portrait of community legend KaiRo, attempting to get his presentation to work:

The one talk where I would like to have contributed more was probably Daniel Glazman‘s on making money with add-ons. Without rehashing all the talk, Daniel was essentially proposing that addons.mozilla.org (AMO) needs a system for micro-payments (he was proposing around $1 / download I recall), so that add-on developers can charge for their works.  I should make it absolutely clear that I am not part of the AMO organisation, and I should also make it clear that Rey Bango, who is, is totally committed to enabling whatever makes sense for add-on developers.

But still, my personal opinion is that such a micro-payment system is not a recipe for success for developers, users, or Mozilla as a whole. Firstly, today there is no truly widespread payment system that users will easy use for 1-click purchasing on a new install of Firefox. Requiring registration to a payment service before a user can fully use AMO seems an uncomfortable arrangement to me.

Secondly, how would you price such software? Daniel was suggesting a figure of $1 for a good add-on. I would estimate that even in the affluent west, that is already enough to make many users search further to find something of approximate functionality, and that pricing would need to be much, much lower to ensure clicks (if such a system even existed). Moreover, for the many Firefox users in the developing world, $1 is not a micro payment.  And there is a great wealth of add-ons today (over 4,000, soon to hit 5,000). As Daniel pointed out, if you area not near to the top of a search, you might be invisible. However, if you are successful in achieving visibility for your add-on, pay-for-play immediately incentivises the user to search further if their first results.

Thirdly, how are you going to compete? If you are producing open source add-ons, any add-on which achieved traction would be subject to forking. We would probably need to be talking about closed-source add-ons. And this would inevitable need some license key mechanism, as Daniel indicated. Again, uncomfortable.

Fourth, what kind of license would you be selling? How committed would a developer have to be to forward compatibility to sell and add-on?

Now, all these questions can all be answered to a greater or lesser state of satisfaction, but the likelihood of gouging a successful business out of such an arrangement seems pretty thin to me. Let us consider two perspectives.

One, every business today which relies upon charging for access to something which has no marginal (or opportunity) cost of unit production (software, music, information in general) is facing a challenge in the face of the network – rightly or wrongly, long established businesses which are charging for access are in difficulty. The App Store on the iPhone may buck this trend, but it does not invalidate it. The Internet is eroding all of these business models, even the ability of television networks to command exclusive audiences for sporting events (to Don King’s dismay, one presumes).

Two: software is not intrinsically valuable, not in monetary terms. Anyone who has attempted to rate the value of software using the COCOMO methodology realises this. Software’s value is a function of its usage. If one placed market values on Windows, UNIX, Linux and Mac OS X, their relative values would not have a direct relationship to the quality of code, but to the profile of their usage.

So, how do we make money with software? Well, we should consider what you can monetise software against, and a good rule of thumb is to monetise against something that does have an (implicit) cost of unit production. If you want to make money with software, charging the user for a copy implies either a heavily locked-down system (as Daniel suggested in his talk), an entrenched market position (such as the ability to have software bundled), or both.

But there are other ways to make money from software. In most cases, I would suggest we might think of a way to offer access to a service via an add-on. Allowing users the benefit of particular running infrastructure over time clearly has an associated cost that they may be inclined to pay for. Many free services (Gmail, Twitter) even allow such access for free, and make money by displaying adverts to users (in the case of Gmail) or by raising capital by the sheer promise offered by millions upon millions of users (in the case of Twitter). Twitter does not yet have a clear business model, after all, but you can bet that Jack Dorsey has done alright. In these straightened times, VC opportunites may be fewer and further between – but there certainly are many other online commercial opportunities that do exist and could capture more market share with add-ons.  Considering an add-on like CoolIris, I can imagine being certified compatible with the add-on would be worth money to those sites whose value is based on offering up image-content.

And so I do not agree with the advice that add-on developers should attempt to build something cool or, in the parlance of our times, “shiny”, and then try to make money by selling access, at least, not if they want to earn a good living. The result may be the coolest piece of software that no one has ever heard of. And let us not forget the power and influence of those that scratch their own itch, or even those great souls who enjoy scratching the itches of others. Freely available software will always command a consumer’s preference in an open system.

I hope we can have a good debate about what developers need from AMO, and those who wish to build, or augment a business using AMO, can get their points across and feel their needs are met, just as those who wish to build free / gratis software hopefully will. A big thanks to Daniel for raising the topic and addressing it so squarely.

I mulled all this over on the way home, until I managed to find somewhere selling English newspapers at which point I needed to switch my attention to controlling the pedantic rage that burns inside with the intensity of a thousand suns. Sadly, I failed. And so I offer this picture. I am sure that Mr Gough’s own writing is most illuminating, but, copy editors note, it is hard to take recommendations from an author seriously when they include incorrect spellings of pronouns.

I see that the CyberMentors programme made this news on Tuesday.

Talking with my friends at BeatBulliyng about the launch of the CyberMentors programme gives me pause for thought.   They are clearly pretty busy.  But more to the point, they are busy because the CyberMentors programme is fulfilling an important need.  And I can also hear it in their voices that they have heard some pretty tragic and difficult stories.  As Sarah at BeatBullying told me, it cuts two ways.  The more successful, relevant and important the project seems to be, the more there is to be sad about.

At the moment, BeatBullying is trying to recruit members in South East England, because that is where they are able to train CyberMentors.  But I understand that they hope to hold trainings further afield, and maybe make the programme international.  Well, when I say international, it actually already is.  I hear that the CyberMentors site is receiving requests from young victims of bullying from all over Europe, and as far as the Middle East.  It makes you think that many of these youngsters may have had no one to turn to before the programme.

Mozilla is proud to be a CyberMentors partner.  If you are interested in volunteering as a CyberMentor, Mozilla can help pay for your training and background checks: please contact me for more information.

News reached me last week via Erick Leon Bolinaga of a remarkable apparition in the streets of Havana:

Erick, I will raise a glass to you tonight!

Regular readers of this blog (me, mostly), will recall that last November I came over all George W, with the post Wanted: A Guide To Community Marketing At Mozilla (the dead or alive was implicit).  Three months, roughly 50 litres of coffee, one baby and another apparently failed Liverpool Premier League title attempt later*, we have such a beast: the Mozilla Community Marketing Guide.

The genesis of this idea came from Jane.  When we first met up, she was keen to make it easier for people to get involved with everything we’re doing.  Sure, there is a very vibrant community at SpreadFirefox, the exciting appearance of SpreadThunderbird, (and seriously, spread Thunderbird – I cannot believe the mail clients that some members of my family have been persuaded to use), but if you are passionate about, say, Firefox, and want to get involved, it can be hard to know where to jump in.

Similarly, many people already have well-formed ideas about something they want to do.  We want it to be as easy as possible to find the resources that were available, and to get in touch with other people to make things happen.

And along the way, it’s been great to meet people like Alina, who confirmed to me something else that we need to do: to make Mozilla marketing as “buildable” as we can, so that she can go and do the things she wants to do, and tell her story.  Above all, that is what Mozilla means to me.

So, I am happy that today we’re launching our Community Marketing Guide: a big thanks to everyone who has contributed text, pictures, ideas and, yes, corrected spelling mistakes.  The guide is an attempt to catalogue all of the marketing resources we have, and as such is bound to be incomplete.  But over time we will add to it, and identify what is missing.  Indeed, it should also help us to identify those things that we do not have today but that we want (presentation templates, anyone?).  Please visit the site, and let us know what you think.

*p.s. Don’t give up, it’s only February