InformationWeek reports that Firefox is still gaining market share. It’s rate is slowing, but it doesn’t seem to be stopping. Certain tech oriented websites are already reporting that as many as 20-25% of their hits are coming from Firefox. Overall, the market share is apparently around 5.7. The same article reports that IE market share seems to have dropped below 90% for the first time in… well the first time WebSideStory has ever reported such a thing.
How did such a thing happen? It’s mainly been driven by word of mouth…
Sure, the media’s covered it. SpreadFirefox even coordinated donations for a two-page ad in the NY Times. But all of this, (the ad is a great example) is driven by word of mouth, by… Firefox Evangelists.
The ad spread in the times is a stunning example of why Firefox, and open source software in general, is an amazing phenomenon. Can you imagine a group of users getting together and donating enough money to place a two-page ad for Microsoft… or GMC… or GE… in the NY Times? I can’t see it. Of course, you may say, those companies don’t need the public to pay for their advertising. That’s a great point… but what if they did? SCO is dying, but I don’t see the fanatical SCO-supporting community raising money for SCO advertising. Of course, the simple explanation for that is that people don’t love SCO.
For some reason, people love Firefox.
Is it just because it isn’t Microsoft? Well, for some people, that’s probably a plus. I’m sure a lot of others don’t care. It’s not just because it’s free — there are other free web browsers. Internet Explorer is free, for all intents and purposes; it’s part of the OS. Even for the MacIntosh, you can download it for free. So it isn’t price either (though that probably helps it compete with Opera).
I don’t have a whole lot of statistics, and I’m not going to look up a bunch right now, but I can remember using Firefox when it was still called Phoenix, and it was version 0.2. At the time, I had been using Mozilla for some time, and I kept hearing about Phoenix, which was apparently Mozilla without the "extras" — mail, IRC chat, HTML editor — that I didn’t use anyways. I decided to try it out. It was not hard to install, but it wasn’t that friendly, either. There weren’t too many themes for it. I don’t know if there were many extensions at all.
But it was fast, and even in version 0.2, it worked great..
I think I told everyone to try it. Some did. Some waited until it became Firebird, which it was for a long time. That was when there was a big kerfuffle with the Firebird database community, who felt (perhaps rightly so) that the mozilla-browser sub-project had co-opted their name. A few minor versions later, it became Firefox.
Somewhere around that time (between the Firebird and Firefox) some kind soul created a Windows installer for the browser. Before that time it had not been a simple "run the installer and click next to install" process — I honestly don’t even remember how I used to install it. I have a feeling it just involved unzipping a zipped package in the right place. Anyways, I’m pretty sure that this installer helped speed up the adoption process, although it was still an unofficial project. Eventually, I don’t recall when, mozilla-firefox had it’s own "official" installers. The websites and logos were all consistent, clean and well-designed. Firefox, and the Mozilla site, no longer looked like some slapped together hacker’s websites; it looked great! It looked slick, professional, and it kept growing.
Somehow, our little, clean, fast alternative to the Mozilla browser had gone mainstream with a vengeance, and had just become better and better along the way.
Is there a lesson for word-of-mouth marketing, here? Sure! Just be better than everything, and you win. No, wait that might be too, uh, biased and simplistic.
How about this? If people love the product/service, so much that they want to share it with others — you can’t be stopped. Nothing revolutionary about that statement, I guess… it’s a lot easier said than done. How do you get people to love the product or service?
You could always just try to be better than everything else in the market.
Get Firefox:
