Correction: This post was updated to correct the time line of John Lilly's meeting with Jerry Yang.
John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla
(Credit: Matt Asay)I spent an hour Thursday with John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's vice president of Engineering, and learned a few things. For one thing, I once argued that Mozilla should hire more "capitalist pigs." John's riposte Thursday was, "We have more capitalist pigs than you think."
John didn't mean that Mozilla is just another commercial open-source company. It's not. Clarifying that comment, John went on to point out that four out of its five executives are entrepreneurs. In other words, though Mozilla is tiny compared to its proprietary competition (and big by open-source project standards), Mozilla's team and community are well-architected to compete. It's not going to fall over at Microsoft's feet anytime soon.
But while competing, Mozilla is heavily focused on its customers first and its competitors second. As John indicated to me:
Our question is always, how do we grow in a way that is leveraged? We always lead with the user experience and think about the money secondarily.
That user experience is starting to evolve beyond today's browsing experience. The most interesting topic discussed in our meeting was just how compelling Mozilla's Firefox will increasingly be as the platform for much that happens on the Web. Forget Facebook, MySpace, the iPhone, and other so-called platforms. Firefox could well prove to be the most disruptive Web platform on the market. Here's why.
... Read moreMicrosoft is readying releases of its Web development tools as it looks to replace Adobe's Flash platform with Microsoft's own Web browser plug-in Silverlight.
Later this week, Microsoft is set to release a string of a tools, including Silverlight 1.0 Release Candidate and a second beta of Visual Studio 2008.
It said that Silverlight 1.0 is scheduled for final release in the fall, which should automatically be updated to users who download the Release Candidate. Visual Studio 2008 and the .Net Framework 3.5 are set for release by the end of the year.
Silverlight is a download for displaying media and interactive content in Web pages. It competes with Flash and other plug-ins that add interactivity to Web sites.
To spur creation of Silverlight applications, Microsoft also released a community technology preview of the Silverlight Add-In for Visual Studio 2008. The plug-in is expected to be ready soon after the final release of Visual Studio 2008.
The 1.0 version of Silverlight is optimized "mainly for media scenarios," said Scott Guthrie, general manager in Microsoft's Server and Tools division in charge of its Web development tools. Microsoft is trying to sign on Internet video publishers to use Silverlight instead of the Flash platform, which is currently the de facto standard for Web video.
Silverlight videos embedded within a Web page can be resized and have higher fidelity than Flash videos, according to Microsoft.
The follow-on Silverlight 1.1 version will include support for the Dynamic Languages Runtime, which will allow programmers to use dynamic, or scripting, languages to write Windows or Silverlight Web applications using .Net-based tools.
The suite of tools are important components to Microsoft's overall software development strategy. Visual Studio 2008 and the latest .Net Framework include several enhancements specifically for Web development, Guthrie said.
Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft's Expression Web design tool share a common front-end design tool, which should make it easier for developers and designers to collaborate, he said.
The tool is also designed to make it easier to work with database and XML date, he added.
Programmers can use these tools to build applications and get support from Microsoft under its GoLive License.
eBay gets the highest overall marks from developers as a Web platform provider followed by Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, according to a new survey by Evans Data.
Amazon.com, which is trying to develop a large Web services business, scored near the bottom while Google gets good marks for its tools--even better than Microsoft.
Although simmering for a while, the idea of building Web applications on top of large-scale commercial sites like Yahoo or Google has picked up steam significantly in the past two years.
This is an important transition in the application development area--and the Internet overall. As more computing moves toward the Web, the companies offering Web services that provide mashups and other Web applications are gaining more clout.
The survey highlights some of the items that developers are seeking from Web platform providers to build mashup applications or add-ons.
Specifically, developers need documentation and community support from the vendors. as well as a solid technical foundation. Financial incentive can also be a big driver although it's not critical, according to the survey.
The survey found that each of the Web platform providers has different strengths and weaknesses.
eBay developers suffered the most outages and downtime, but it has well-crafted application programming interfaces (APIs) and offers developers financial incentive. The company is hosting its developer conference in Boston next week.
Looking forward, the data again tilts toward eBay, which is projected to gain more "integration" from developers over the next year.
But the other vendors on the survey's list--PayPal, Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Amazon--do not appear to be far behind on the integration ranking. Salesforce.com, another Web platform provider primarily tied to its customer relationship management applications, was not included in the survey.
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