competing for an open (generative) web

John Lilly pointed people at a really good article in the New York Times by John Markoff about the Olympics as a hook to get Silverlight onto people’s computers. It’s a good overview and is worth reading.

The article covers well tread ground: People are worried that Microsoft will leverage its market power to create a leadership position for multimedia on the web. Replacing the (proprietary) Flash video codecs with the (proprietary) Silverlight video codecs and associated tools. In some ways it looks like a battle between two companies and strategies that no one would care about. More lock-in, more proprietary tools, more opportunities to undermine the main single item that makes the web great: it’s open nature. But those companies have existing market reach and they will do anything they can to convert that into even more leverage over how you interact with the web. If nothing else, they will buy their way with cold hard cash onto your computers. These two industry players should be taken seriously.

John Lilly is quoted in the article as talking about the “generative Web” (via Jonathan Zittrain.) I like this phrase quite a bit. I think that might be an even be a better way to describe what we (as in the Mozilla Project) think is the most important part of the open web. That is, by the act of creation on the web you are also creating things that other people can build on. Everything from scraping data to create a search engine like Google to being able to look at other people’s HTML and JavaScript to discover how they do something clever. Transparency and openness creates innovation – innovation by thousands and thousands of people, each of which has a positive impact on the millions who use the web.

Think about it another way. The main metric that I would use to describe the health of a truly open web is this: That as the ecosystem expands, the raw number of people, companies or groups who hold power inside the ecosystem, and can affect its direction, grows as the ecosystem grows. Put another way, the power center is decentralized over time. Change inside of that ecosystem require more voices to agree that change is good. That’s healthy. And that’s an open web.

Then there’s the other side of the metric. That as an ecosystem expands it enhances the power of a single player in the market instead of creating many players in the market. Change in that market requires the permission of only that one player and that one player can make decisions on behalf of everyone who is also part of it. That’s not healthy. And it’s not the open web.

Based on those metrics for health the battle is between those who would expand for the sake of expanding the opportunity for everyone vs. those who would expand for the sake of centralizing their own market power. In one phrase: it’s expansion vs. centralization. That’s what you should be looking for and what you should be thinking about when you hear someone talking about the open web.

All of this is nice, of course, but it doesn’t really describe what we have to do to create the world we want to live in. It talks about the nature of the marketplace but it’s not really a roadmap for people to understand how, as the good guys in this picture, we can continue to compete and win against much larger competitors. I first word in the title for this post is “competing” for a reason. Because that’s what we really need to do.

Recently at the Firefox summit I was reminded in one of Mitchell’s talks about how Firefox is a mechanism. Firefox is the best representation of our vision for an open + generative web that we can come up with: As a rule our users love it, we’ve built an ecosystem of thousands of add-ons, we continue to protect our users from the worst aspects of the web, we continue to both compete and collaborate with other browser vendors and we manage to do all that in an open forum with open source code. Firefox is a reflection of our larger view of the transparency that we want to see in an open web. Put simply: We are the change we want to see on the web.

So that’s a lot of talk. Back to the issue at hand. Silverlight, video, adobe, multimedia, market power. How do we compete? Or, really, how do you compete? Because Mozilla isn’t going to create this change alone. We’re very very small by any standard in the tech marketplace. Our reach is pretty good with Firefox 2 + Firefox 3, and we’re starting to have real market effects, but we’re not going to be able to buy our way onto millions of computers by sponsoring the olympics.

People who have talked to me have heard me talk about two things on this topic. I usually say something like “you need to learn how to build a product” or “you need to find out what you can lead at and go do that.” There’s usually more than that, but that’s the main part of the message. And I think that if we want to make sure that the web isn’t overtaken by the acts of industry giants, that there are real actionable things we can do to make that happen.

I’ll use video on the web as a simple example. Here are the things that I think need to happen to make Theora a player in the real world.

1. Make sure there’s a really great video plugin for Apple Quicktime that delivers the OGG Theora video format to people who use the video tag in Safari. When I tried to play the ogg theora video from my post the other day the ogg plugin jumped around, showed a white screen for long periods, paused for a few seconds at a time – bad!

2. Create a control that brings the video tag to IE like Vlad did for the canvas tag. The world is much bigger than just Firefox. This would make it very easy to deliver and build content and make it easy for consumers to get access to it. Bring ubiquity to content like Adobe was able to do with Flash. (Note: Cortado isn’t good enough – it’s still stuck in the plugin prison!)

3. Make a super-easy, consumer-focused, high-quality encoder for ogg theora that anyone can use to encode their videos for the web. (Here’s a hint: Handbrake is still too hard to use.) Hook it up to the various video camera providers on mac and windows so that it’s super easy to create content, encode it, and with the tools listed above, upload it and make it available to others.

4. Even better, build a business around the tools above. Or even a service for people to upload to. Sustainability is an important component and it should not be left behind.

5. Create awesome demos of what you can do with the video tag, or even better mixed with the recent stuff we’ve been showing off with video + svg filters. Blur effects, video driven by content, content people can create and overlay onto existing videos, etc. Some of this stuff is out there, some of it isn’t. But it’s a start. Try mixing video with other content on the web – mash it up, cover it up, add value and context to otherwise boring videos. Its easier to do with the video tag than it is when it’s hidden inside of Flash or Silverlight.

So that’s just a short list of things people can do to help with video. There are lots of other things that people can do in other areas, other than just video, but I wanted to give an example of my thinking around OGG Theora as an example.

People seem excited about us including OGG Theora in our next Firefox release. But keep in mind it’s only a start. If the same ecosystem that we’ve seen develop around the open + generative web doesn’t grow around open video like it has around the web then we will end up with the status quo: a vibrant growing web but with large parts that are hobbled by a model that doesn’t grow on itself. Mozilla isn’t going to be able to do this job entirely on its own, but we’re doing our part. It’s going to take others to understand how we do what we do, copy its model and try to create the same effects in the other important parts of the ecosystem.

I wonder what the world will look like five years from now. It’s going to be an interesting ride.