Online education evolves to be user-driven, not vendor-driven

By definition disruptive innovations allow users to do things they could previously not do, or could do only at great expense and/or effort. But while disruptive innovations make users’ lives easier, they typically make vendors’ lives harder, at least initially, because creating truly disruptive products can be difficult and expensive. (For example, think of all the industrial design, usability engineering, software development, and other work that Apple put into creating the iPhone and its simplified user experience for running mobile applications and using the web from a handheld device.)

The first products that embody disruptive innovations thus tend to have a high degree of internal integration and a relatively closed architecture (again, consider the iPhone). However over time the state of the art advances to the point where vendors can create comparable products using modular components communicating through standardized interfaces. (Christensen’s favorite example here is Microsoft Windows vs. Linux distributions; in the mobile space would-be contenders include Android and Limo.) This move to modularity also allows disruption in the “commercial system,” i.e., “the context within which a firm establishes its cost structure and operating processes and works with its suppliers and channel partners to respond profitably to customers’ common needs” (Disrupting Class, p.124).

In particular, Christensen and his co-authors believe that the first-generation commercial system for online education is too tied to the current commercial system for education in general, and shares its orientation to expensive “one size fits all” solutions. They predict an eventual move to a new commercial system organized as a “facilitated user network,” in which users exchange with each other as opposed to being supplied by traditional vendors, with one or more third parties facilitating that exchange (as, for example, YouTube facilitates the exchange of video content):

[In] the first phase of disruption of the instructional system the software will likely be complicated and expensive to build. . . . Within a few more years, however, two factors that were absent in stage 1 that are critical to the emergence of stage 2 will have fallen into place. The first will be platforms that facilitate the generation of user-created content. The second will be the emergence of a user network. . . . The tools of the software platform will make it so simple to develop online learning products that students will be able to build products that help them teach other students. Parents will be able to assemble tools to tutor their children. And teachers will be able to create tools to help the different types of learners in their classroom. . . . User networks . . . will be the business models of distribution. This will allow parents, teachers, and students to offer these teaching tools to other parents, teachers, and students. (p.134)

So: modular interoperable standards-based products, user-created content, and user networks within which such content gets created and freely distributed. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like something Mozilla knows something about.

Tasks for the Mozillas

Let’s assume that education will indeed involve in the direction of user networks producing user-generated and -distributed content for customized online education. Let’s further suppose the continued growth of a movement to ensure that this and other educational content is freely available for others to use and adapt. This certainly sounds like a movement that is in line with the goals of the Mozilla Manifesto (which notes, among other things, that “the Internet is . . . a key component in education”), and a trend we might like to encourage. How we might do so in a manner consistent with the Mozilla DNA? I think the answer varies based on the particular Mozilla entity in question (what I call “the Mozillas” within the overall Mozilla project).

The task of the Mozilla Corporation I think would be mainly to continue on the path it’s currently on. Any modular standards-based “personal learning environment” or “open learning network” is likely to be based on web technologies, and the goal is to have Firefox be the very best way there is to bring the web to end users. There are some particular areas that might be relevant to an educational context, though not necessarily limited to that context.

For example, the Mobile Firefox effort will help bring the full power of Firefox to future low-end “4P computing” systems that might be deployed for primary and secondary education, and initiatives to support open audio and video formats would assist in efforts to provide rich learning experiences whose delivery doesn’t depend on proprietary technologies. There might also be some supplemental work that might be called for; for example, robust out-of-the-box support for MathML and other specialized markup languages is clearly more important for the educational market than for the general consumer market to which Firefox is pitched.

Mozilla Messaging is a somewhat different case, and perhaps a more interesting one in terms of how a focus on education (which, again, would not be the sole focus) might help shape a future strategy. As I see it, one problem with Thunderbird is that its user base is often conceived of in negative terms: they’re people who don’t like webmail and don’t want to use Outlook. I think Thunderbird and related technologies need a real constituency, a group of people for whom the product is designed to fit their special and distinct needs, and who respond to that focus with enthusiasm. That constituency might be found within the traditional enterprise market, but I confess I’m concerned about Mozilla Messaging trying to re-fight the “groupware wars” that Netscape lost a decade ago.

Might Mozilla Messaging be able to find its constituency, or at least a significant part of it, within the educational market? Educational institutions are certainly more open to standards-based open source products than your typical enterprise. Also, to the extent that Mozilla Messaging is about not just email but about the broader market for collaboration and communication tools, the education market certainly has a lot of models for collaboration and communication—one to many instruction, one-to-one tutoring, small group collaboration, synchronous vs. asynchronous, text vs. video vs. audio, and so on. So perhaps this might be a fruitful question for Mozilla Messaging to explore: What types of collaboration and communication products would be needed to support advanced online learning environments, and could Mozilla technologies be instrumental in creating such products?

Next comes what might be called the “missing Mozilla.” As Gerv Markham recently noted, with minor exceptions (e.g., the HTML editor in SeaMonkey) the Mozilla project has for the most part left to others the task of creating tools for web content creation and application development. Is this an area we should look at re-entering over the coming years? In the educational context, consider what sort of rich content might go into a simple “Physics 101” online course: mathematical equations, static and dynamic graphs, interactive simulations of experiments, perhaps some archival video, and so on. It would be a shame if people created, distributed, and collaborated on lots of great open education courses like this, but they turned out to be a collection of glorified Flash or Silverlight apps. Should Mozilla do something about this and, if so, how might it best be done? This is a question that extends beyond the context of education, and I think one that needs to be discussed.

Finally we come to the Mozilla Foundation. What role if any might it play in an educational context? The Mozilla Foundation could certainly endorse and perhaps help shape a particular vision for education along the lines discussed above, and could lend moral, financial, and other support to other groups working on the front lines to make it happen. (By coincidence the proposed new executive director for the Mozilla Foundation has relevant experience in this area.) It could also encourage the Mozilla Corporation, Mozilla Messaging, and others within the overall Mozilla project to make Mozilla-based technologies and products the preferred ways by which next-generation customized online education is experienced by end users; where there are gaps in capabilities, the Foundation could provide some funding and other support to help fill those gaps (as we did with accessibility, for example). Finally, the Foundation could go further and pick a particular subproblem within the broad educational space and seek to play a leading role in addressing it.

Most notably, the Mozilla Foundation has a clear interest in (and has already financially supported) the work at Seneca College to bring open source development methodologies into the classroom. The Foundation could continue and expand upon that work, including working with Seneca to promote the adoption of similar Mozilla-related curricula at other like-minded institutions and the creation of Mozilla-related materials suitable for self-education. Beyond focusing just on Mozilla, the Mozilla Foundation could also work with others to change the entire manner in which the next generation of software developers is educated. This could include teaching software development in a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary manner in which topics like QA and release engineering, project organization and governance, user experience, marketing and evangelism, copyright and other legal issues, and others assume equal importance to traditional computer science and programming language instruction. It could also include expanding the range of contexts within which software development is taught—not just in formal academic institutions but also within informal “learning collectives” associated with open source projects or other groups of people with common interests and objectives.

Ten years until the revolution?

If Christensen and his co-authors are correct, in about ten years time we could very well reach a tipping point in which the educational system in the US and elsewhere will rapidly transition from the traditional instructor-in-the-classroom model to a model based on customized online education provided on standards-based platforms and supported by a network of teachers, students, and others collaboratively creating, distributing, and recombining rich collections of instructional materials. Today we stand at a point in online education comparable to the late 1970s and early 1980s with respect to personal computers or the late 1980s and early 1990s with respect to the Internet and the web: We can envision the promise of what might come, and have early examples of that promise to learn from and build on. But we do not know exactly how the story will play out, who its heroes (and villains) will be, and whether it will have a happy or sad ending for those of us who value openness, freedom, and grassroots participation. We may have an opportunity to help shape how that story unfolds. Should Mozilla grasp that opportunity? That’s the question I’m putting forth for discussion.

datilcowman - 2008-07-25 03:40

well written, really ten years to revolution, I think not. Think home schoolers, education is already changing rapidly, and as such, the traditional system no longer applies to the growing number of home school students, or to the number of college courses taken on line. Fifty years ago, I would have really liked the change. Mozilla should continue with the fine work in progress, including looking forward to all opportunities.

Steve Lee - 2008-07-25 07:39

Frank, that’s a very interesting post and It’s great to think Mozilla will play a more direct role in education (above being the best thing to use with Moodle :-)). We’ve been working on these issues at schoolforge.org.uk and hope it is less than 10 years. One import disruptive is Ian Lynch’s INGOTS courses which are now QCA approved. Another positive influence is those educators who are to embracing the possibilities that WEB 2.0 enables in their students learning (e,g http://fullmeasure.co.uk/comingofage.htm). Progress seems slow but does seem to happening and we can hope we are rapidly approaching that tipping point. I’ve passed this onto the schoolforge.org.uk mailing list where I guess it will be met with much head nodding.

Steve Lee - 2008-07-25 07:57

I forgot to mention that Fureture Lab http://www.futurelab.org.uk/ are a source of interesting ideas and discussion.

Ian Lynch - 2008-07-25 08:41

Just to clarify as probably outside England, QCA will not mean much. QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) is the government regulator of all school exams in the UK. If you want to change the curriculum you need courses that lead to government recognised qualifications. This then gives confidence in other countries too. Awarding Bodies are accredited by QCA and we are further endorsed by the Sector Skills Council for ICT and Telecoms, e-skills. Small and new but applying principles of disruption we already have 20,000 certificates awarded for knowledge of Open Systems and basic skills in ICT with exponential growth and unsolicited interest from all over the world. Our main problem is simply capacity to expand to mee the demand.

hecker - 2008-07-25 10:49

@datilcowman: By “I think not” do you mean the revolution is closer to now, or further out? I certainly don’t think it’s here now, at least not in the US. “Revolution” to me implies changes significant enough to impact public consciousness in a major way, as for example the introduction of the IBM PC did for the PC industry, or the Netscape IPO for the web. Also, regarding Mozilla continuing the “fine work in progress”, this thought experiment doesn’t imply any significant change in the work of Mozilla, just doing a bit more in support of initiatives already in progress (e.g., Foundation funding of open source education efforts).

hecker - 2008-07-25 10:52

@Steve: Note that this is a personal thought experiment only; it is most decidedly not a commitment or even a prediction that “Mozilla will play a more direct role in education”.

commonspace - 2008-07-25 18:44

Prototyping the open ed revolution… Frank Hecker has a series of posts up today on ‘Mozilla and the Future of Education’. It’s a bit of a thought experiment to imagine what Mozilla might do if it dipped it’s toe further into the education pond. The line I like most is:…

skierpage (info@skierpage.com) - 2008-07-27 02:03

Agree. I think some of the OLPC deployments are using Moodle. As I understand it, they’re now struggling with the disconnect between organizing courses in the browser, then children have to run an external program to do the coursework. One answer is to do everything in the browser. With rich JavaScript+canvas animation and physics engines, Web-based apps like docs.google.com, and offline storage, next-gen browser engines like Mozilla (as used in OLPC’s Browse activity) have the technology to make this happen, and I assume it will. E.g. I looked for a better world atlas than the CIA’s (!) PDF maps and found research prototypes of interactive maps made with SVG and JavaScript, but nothing shipping. Mozilla should encourage and promote such Web standards-based innovation. OLPC’s Sugar environment still has the edge in “sharing activities” without depending on a central server, but I hope Mozilla Messaging + extensions can incorporate the underlying technologies of jabber servers, presence detection, Telepathy, etc. to foster collaborative work and communication. For adults as well as kids! So, I agree.

hecker - 2008-07-27 19:45

@skierpage: As an XO owner/user I understand your point. I think the folks developing Sugar, eToys, etc., are doing great work, but I sometimes wonder if they’re betting against the web - not necessarily a good strategy.

Michael Horn - 2008-07-28 13:09

Frank - This is a fascinating post.

Michael Horn - 2008-07-28 13:11

Frank, this is a fascinating 2-part post – thank you. You make some great points in here, and I loved the connection to Mozilla (as an avid-user of what the community creates myself). Dr. Christensen and I have cofounded a non-profit think tank, Innosight Institute (www.innosightinstitute.org) to continue research on this work and to promote the ideas and so forth. Please let me know if we can be helpful. It sounds like there might be some synergies with the Mozilla Foundation.

hecker - 2008-07-28 15:56

@Michael Horn: Thanks for stopping by and commenting! I’ve been a big fan of Christensen’s ideas for many year, and am familiar with the Innosight Institute, though I’ve never looked into its work in detail. Thanks for reminding me to do this.

David Bolter - 2008-08-05 18:45

Frank, I’m not sure when, or how, but having read this post (in two parts) I realize I need to stick you in a room with my boss Jutta Treviranus. Will you travel schedule bring you to Toronto anytime soon?

Prototyping the open ed revolution « commonspace - 2008-08-29 21:38

[…] Hecker has a series of posts up today on ‘Mozilla and the Future of Education’. It’s a bit of a thought […]

Learning 2.0黃頁 » Mozilla and the future of education - 2008-09-30 01:06

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Lately there have been a flurry of posts and associated comments discussing possible future activities that the Mozilla Foundation (and by extension the Mozilla project) might undertake in support of its overall mission and the principles of the Mozilla Manifesto. This post is an experiment in thinking about an area the Mozilla Foundation (and Mozilla in general) might consider getting involved in, one possibility out of the many that have been discussed in the various posts referenced, and one of a number of themes that might inspire particular elements of an overall strategy. As usual, these are my personal opinions only.

Educating a constituency for the open web

The particular focus of this post is education, and in particular online education. Why education? Not (just) because it’s a big important issue—there are lots of important issues in the world, and education is only one of them. There are also many nonprofit organizations, private sector entrepreneurs, and government agencies working on a host of education-related initiatives. Why should Mozilla get involved as well?

The answer is that education is evolving (or could easily evolve) in ways that are potentially very compatible with the goals of Mozilla, and there are ways in which we could get involved in education-related initiatives that are consistent with the Mozilla DNA. In effect we have an opportunity to help build a constituency for the open web and the general principles of the Mozilla Manifesto, not through traditional advocacy efforts but by helping to educate (and, in doing so, create) a new generation of web users and participants for whom such principles are second nature.

The disruptive potential of customized online education

Many people project and advocate for a future dominated by openness, a world of participation, decentralized and virtual organizations, and individual empowerment—in essence taking the principles and practices of the free software and open source movements and applying them to all aspects of society. Education is no exception, and thus there is an “open education” movement as well. The Cape Town Open Education Declaration is a good summary of the goals of the movement, not least because it addresses not just open access to educational content (e.g., as provided by the MIT OpenCourseWare project), apparently the primary initial focus of most open education proponents, but also the broader range of open and collaborative technologies that might be applied in an educational context. This is wonderful work, with lots of exciting projects under way.

However I think we also need some guidance on how, where, and when open education initiatives might be most successful, guidance that will enable us to decide how, where, and when it might make sense for Mozilla to get involved in them. My preferred framework for thinking about these sort of questions is the theory of disruptive innovation created and popularized by Clayton Christensen. Coincidentally, Christensen and his co-authors have recently provided an analysis of how disruptive innovation might occur in the context of education, in the book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns.

Before going on, I’ll note that (having read all of Christensen’s books) I don’t think Disrupting Class is his finest work. It is very US-centric, relies a bit overmuch on ideas such as Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences that are unproven at best, and takes some major detours, particularly after chapter 5. I recommend just reading the first five chapters, and supplementing it with Christensen’s discussion of post-secondary professional education in chapter 5 of Seeing What’s Next. (Or you can just read the condensed version of Christensen’s and his co-authors’ thesis in the article “How Do We Transform Our Schools.”)

Nevertheless I think the core of the book is sound in applying Christensen’s theories to the topic of primary and secondary education. The key points of the book are as follows:

The problem with primary and secondary education is not lack of innovation per se, rather it’s that the primary innovation attempted is sustaining innovation within the existing system. It is primarily directed at incremental improvements in test scores and related measures important to politicians and their constituents, and occurs within a “commercial system” (including not only school systems but also textbook publishers and other creators of educational material) that is geared to providing a monolithic standardized “one size fits all” product

Disruptive innovation within the educational system will occur only at the margins, where there are needs to be filled and problems to be solved that (for whatever reason) are not being addressed by the existing system. Examples include providing a wide variety of advanced courses within school districts that cannot afford to offer such courses in the traditional way, serving student populations scattered across wide geographic areas, and serving home-schoolers and others who have opted out of the conventional educational system.

This disruptive innovation will take the form of customized instruction that is enabled by computer and networking technology but also incorporates a significant human element (for example, distance learning classes that include teacher-led instructional sessions, computer-based drill and practice, student-teacher interaction via email, student collaborative projects, and so on). Over time suppliers of customized online educational offerings will better learn what works and what doesn’t, and will use the experience gained in relatively marginal markets to develop new skills that will eventually allow them to move into more mainstream markets. (Incumbents typically don’t develop these skills because their dominance of existing markets leads them to ignore marginal and less profitable opportunities in new markets; thus Christensen refers to new market entrants as wielding the “sword of asymmetric skills” and the “shield of asymmetric motivation.”)

As a result, customized online education will show slow but steady growth in the coming years. Since it’s starting from a very small base, its overall market share will remain relatively insignificant for the next few years. However eventually the effects of continued compounded growth will cause customized online education offerings to become widespread and even dominant. Based on the data available Christensen and his co-authors estimate that although online education offerings account for only 1% of courses at present, they could grow to 25% of all courses by 2014, 50% by 2019, and 80% by 2024. (Note that they include in this total both fully online courses and courses that have a significant online component.)

A role for Mozilla?

This is all very interesting, but how does this relate to the goals of Mozilla, and to promoting the open web? The answer lies in Christensen’s ideas regarding how the commercial system around online education will evolve, based on experiences with disruptive innovations in other industries. More on that topic in part 2.

Ian Lynch - 2008-07-25 08:29

“Disruptive innovation within the educational system will occur only at the margins” Not necessarily. In the UK the exam system is a 1.5 billion dollar industry. We have a plan based on Christensen’s principles and applied to that industry starting with qualifications in Open Systems and functional skills in ICT. It can be scaled to any subject and has the potential to globalise school qualifications. If we are successful, that will not be a marginal effect because qualifications have always driven the mainstream despite what education purists will say.

hecker - 2008-07-25 11:00

@Ian Lynch: As I noted, Disrupting Class is weak on trends outside the US, and I am not familiar enough with the field to make up that lack. Thanks for the info. I agree with the point about qualifications. Where the end result is more important than the means by which it is achieved, opportunity exists to innovate with respect to the means. (This is a theme in chapter 5 of Seeing What’s Next, where Christensen discusses for-profit adult professional education.)

Prototyping the open ed revolution « commonspace - 2008-08-29 20:21

[…] the open ed revolution Posted by msurman under Uncategorized   Frank Hecker has a series of posts up today on ‘Mozilla and the Future of Education’. It’s a bit of a thought […]

Learning 2.0黃頁 » Mozilla and the future of education - 2008-09-30 01:05

[…] /2008/07/25/mozilla-and-the-future-of-education-part-1/ […]

As I see it, the value network for Firefox consists of the groups described below. For each group I try to assess the degree of overlap with Microsoft’s value network (and others’ in some cases). For downstream customers I also discuss why they might use (or not use) Firefox, in accordance with the “jobs-to-be-done” theory that Christensen highlights as a better alternative to trying to segment markets by demographics or other characteristics: “When consumers buy a product, they are really hiring the product to get a job done for themselves. . . . Companies are successful when they make it easier for customers to get done something they historically cared about.” (Seeing What’s Next, p. 281)

• Downstream customers. These include two major groups:

  • Intermediate to advanced individual Internet users, often with a “prosumer” or “DIY” orientation, who are either on non-Windows platforms (e.g., are Linux or Mac users) or are Windows users but are willing to use non-Microsoft alternatives to Microsoft products. The “job” they “hire” Firefox to do is to support more productive use of their time on the web, both by minimizing unwanted distractions (complicated UIs, pop-up ads, security concerns) and by providing “power tools” such as tabbed browsing and a wide variety of custom extensions to cope with more information and provide more capabilities when using various web sites and web applications.

  • Web developers who “hire” Firefox to do the “job” of providing a robust standards-compliant browser on which to test and debug web pages and web applications prior to porting them to IE and other browsers; note that these developers use a number of Firefox features specifically intended for developers (as opposed to end users), including the Venkman JavaScript debugger and the DOM inspector.

• Downstream retailers and distributors. The primary members of this group are companies and organizations creating Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Novell/SuSE, Debian, etc., with some additional distributors for other non-Microsoft platforms (e.g., Sun for Solaris and IBM for OS/2). For Windows and Mac OS X the primary Firefox distribution channel is direct downloads over the Internet; Firefox does not depend on Microsoft’s or Apple’s distribution channels.

• Upstream suppliers. The primary members of this group are the creators of the OS and related platform technologies that Firefox relies on; in particular this group includes creators of graphic libraries (GTK+, Cairo, etc.) and other system software—basically anything not in the Mozilla source tree that is needed to build and/or run Firefox, or that is brought into the Mozilla source tree from somewhere else. This group also includes creators of relevant standards that Firefox relies on (HTML, CSS, HTTP, etc.). Given Firefox’s cross-platform nature there’s not much overlap with the Microsoft value network in this group.

• Partners: The most important members of this category are corporate supporters of the Mozilla project (Red Hat, IBM, Sun, Google, Oracle, etc.). There is minimal overlap with the Microsoft value network, as most if not all Mozilla corporate contributors are competitors of Microsoft in one way or another.

• Ancillary industry players: This is arguably the most important group, at least in terms of Firefox’s disruptive potential. It includes Firefox extension developers, Greasemonkey script writers, web developers with “Firefox-friendly” sites (typically directed to the consumer market in general and to intermediate/advanced users in particular), SpreadFirefox volunteers, and open source advocates—basically anyone who adds value to Firefox and/or promotes its success in one way or another.

The following are for the most part not part of the Firefox value network, at least at present (this may change in the future); many if not most are key participants in Microsoft’s value network:

• “Typical” PC users. As evidenced by market share figures, the vast majority of PC users are still using IE in its various flavors as the default browser provided on their systems; many of these users are likely casual Internet users who are not motivated to consider evaluating use of another browser.

• PC vendors. These are Microsoft’s most important downstream customers, as they provide the main Windows distribution channel (especially for the consumer market), and Microsoft has considerable influence over PC vendors given that almost all PC buyers expect to be using Windows. It remains to be seen whether PC vendors will be interested in bundling Firefox or promoting Firefox as an alternative to IE; however it is a plus for Firefox that it can be positioned as an add-on to Windows, as opposed to requiring that vendors ship an entire non-Windows system (as with “desktop Linux”).

• Medium-to-large enterprises and their IT organizations. These are downstream Microsoft customers for Windows, Office, and related products for the desktop and (in many enterprises) servers as well. The most important things to most enterprise IT shops are control, stability, and standardization; hence many if not most enterprises are likely to remain comfortable with an all-Windows/IE environment, assuming that Microsoft can adequately address Windows/IE-related security problems. Also, product decisions in enterprise IT shops tend to be made based on the union of product requirements from various parts of the enterprise, and hence favor feature-rich products from large vendors like Microsoft who can “check the boxes” on a large requirements checklist.

  Note that government agencies (national, regional, or local) are a special case: On the one hand they may act like other medium-to-large enterprises in their focus on control, stability, and standardization; on the other they can act as what Christensen calls “nonmarket forces” pursuing other goals and (at least in some cases) significantly influencing the nature and amount of innovation that occurs. In particular, many government agencies, especially outside the US, have adopted (or are considering adopting) policies encouraging the use of open source products, including Firefox. To the extent that they do so they will form yet another component in the Firefox value network.

• Windows-centric independent software vendors. ISVs of business-related software are motivated to cater to the needs and desires of Microsoft-oriented enterprise IT shops, and hence will tend to favor Windows and IE. ISVs creating consumer software are motivated to support the standard Windows environment; supporting (or even just promoting) Firefox as an alternative to IE makes their job more complicated, and hence they will likely not do it unless/until Firefox adoption reaches a critical mass.

• Systems integrators and value-added resellers serving small to large businesses. Systems integrators and VARs make up another major Microsoft distribution channel. Like ISVs selling business software, the worldview of most systems integrators and VARs reflects that of enterprise IT shops, and hence they will likely favor Windows and IE except in those cases when they sell to businesses with a significant non-Windows installed base.

• Providers of web-based applications to business (e.g., WebEx, Salesforce.com, etc.). Given Microsoft’s dominance in the enterprise desktop market they have had little motivation to support non-IE browsers (especially on non-Windows platforms), although this is changing somewhat as Firefox has gained market share.

• Major industry analysts. Analysts typically reflect the worldview of one of the two main segments of their customer base, enterprise IT shops, and also typically count Microsoft as one of the most important customers in the other main segment of their customer base, enterprise software and hardware vendors (who hire them to develop white papers, TCO studies, and the like). Their view of Firefox is likely to range from active discouragement of Firefox use to (at best) grudging acceptance of the need to consider supporting Firefox for a minority user base.

• Mainstream IT and technical media. IT and tech media look to Microsoft as one of the main sources of news, and also depend on Microsoft as a major advertiser. Their interest in and treatment of Firefox is typically in accordance with a Microsoft-centric “master narrative” that provides the underlying context for their stories; in the case of Firefox (as with Netscape in the past and Linux and open source in general at present) the master narrative is “Microsoft faces threat, Microsoft responds to threat, Microsoft (typically) overcomes threat.” In practice that means that most media attention will likely be on the “browser wars” aspect of Firefox (“How much will Firefox eat into IE’s market share?” “Will IE7 reverse Firefox’s gains?”), with little attention paid to potential long-term disruptive effects associated with Firefox.

• Operators of mainstream consumer web sites. As with providers of web applications to businesses, commcercial web site operators have been comfortable living in a world where IE was dominant, and in many cases (especially with banks and other finanical institutions) have been slow to officially support Firefox.

• Providers of mobile devices (e.g., PDAs, cell phones, etc.) and mobile data network access (i.e., as an add-on to cellular voice service). Members of this group, most notably telcos and other communications providers, share the interest of enterprise IT shops in control, stability, and standardization; they also have stringent requirements for low memory footprint and optimal use of limited display areas. Firefox (and Mozilla in general) has traditionally not been able to match the performance of other browsers (e.g., Opera) in this space (although this may change in the future as a result of Minimo and related work).

• ISPs. In the early days of the web ISPs were key players in distributing and promoting Netscape Navigator. I’m not that familar with what is currently going on in the ISP world, but at first glance it seems to me that more recently most ISPs have been content to assume IE as a given; whether this will change in the future is an open question. (Of course the largest US ISP, AOL, supported Mozilla development for many years, although they ultimately decided to base their strategy on IE for the most part.)

This concludes my discussion of the Firefox value network. As with my prior posts, this is a “first cut” at applying disruptive innovation theory to Firefox; please feel free to email me with comments and proposed corrections. In the future as I have time I’ll look at the “asymmetric competition” between Firefox and IE, and give my thoughts on what strategies the Mozilla project should follow with respect to Firefox.

UPDATE: I’ve updated this post slightly to reflect my own evolving thinking as well as comments from others; in particular I’m indebted to Georg Lechner for pointing out the role of government agencies as nonmarket forces promoting the use of open source in general and Firefox in particular, and for reminding me that I had forgotten to include ISPs in my discussion.

• Is Firefox more of a sustaining innovation or a disruptive innovation?

• In what sense is the Mozilla project pursuing (or could pursue) disruptive strategies, whether based on low cost or competing against nonconsumption?

• What might “competing against nonconsumption” entail in the context of Firefox and the Mozilla project?

• What is the value network for Firefox and the Mozilla project, and how does it overlap with the value network for IE and Microsoft?

• Are the Mozilla project and Firefox potentially vulnerable to a co-optation strategy by Microsoft, as Netscape was?

Firefox: sustaining or disruptive innovation?

Let’s start with the question of whether Firefox itself is a disruptive innovation or a sustaining innovation. Before trying to answer this question, note the following points:

• Given that “disruptive” innovation plays the starring role in Christensen’s theory, it’s tempting to see disruptive innovation even where it’s not present. We need to resist this temptation; Christensen uses the term “disruptive innovation” in a very specific sense, and we need to apply his definition very carefully if we are to use his theory to draw any reasonable conclusions.

• Although we usually think of vendors as the key actors (the “disruptors” and “disruptees”) in the final analysis to determine whether an innovation is disruptive or sustaining we need to look at it from the perspective of the users, not from the perspective of vendors. More specifically:

• If an innovation gives existing users better ways to do the same things they’re already doing then it’s a sustaining innovation.

• If an innovation gives existing users cheaper ways to do the same thing they’re already doing then it’s a low-cost disruptive innovation.

• If an innovation allows new users to do things they previously were not able to do, and/or allows existing users to do the same things but in different contexts, then it’s a new-market disruptive innovation.

• Finally, Christensen’s theory of innovations (as he has evolved it) is concerned with innovations broadly defined to include not just technology innovations (e.g, Intel microprocessors or the Windows operating system) but also business innovations (e.g., Dell’s “build-to-order” direct sales model and the business processes supporting it).

Given the final point above, we have to consider both what Firefox is (i.e., as a software product) and how it is created, marketed, and used as a platform for other things.

Following on from the second point above, Firefox viewed simply as a browser (and nothing else) is best thought of as a sustaining innovation in the browser market, providing higher performance along dimensions viewed as important by demanding Internet users: simplicity, better ease of use (including polished UI design), increased power (including features like tabbed browsing), better security, and enhanced customizability.

More specifically we can characterize Firefox the browser as a “displacement,” Christensen’s term for a sustaining innovation that “[occurs] at a point of modularity” and “[targets] a specific piece of an industry’s value chain” (Appendix, Seeing What’s Next). Firefox takes advantage of the fact that well-defined interfaces exist between a web client and a web server (e.g., HTTP, HTML and XML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.), as well as between a client application and the client operating system (e.g., the OS APIs for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X). This then allows Firefox to be used as a “drop-in” replacement for browsers such as Internet Explorer and Safari that are distributed as part of the base OS.

Disruptive strategies for Firefox and Mozilla

Are there aspects of Firefox that constitute a disruptive innovation? Again, looking at it as a browser product Firefox does not appear to be a low-cost disruptive innovation in the traditional sense. The “cost” in “low-cost” is cost to the user; this includes price in the monetary sense but other things as well, including for software ease of downloading and installation. In this sense Internet Explorer (at least for Windows) is and will always be the lowest-cost product, since in addition to being “free as in beer” it will either just be there to begin with or will be auto-added and -upgraded as a side effect of turning on Windows auto-update.

However while not necessarily a low-cost disruptive innovation itself, Firefox is closely linked with and made possible by the low-cost disruptive innovation represented by the open source development model. In the case of Firefox the open source development model does not make the product cheaper than competitive products (as, for example, MySQL is cheaper than Oracle); however it does enable Firefox to be developed and maintained on a relative shoestring compared to traditional proprietary products in its space (for example, Netscape Navigator and Communicator).

(Note that the open source development model doesn’t really reduce the amount of development work necessary to build a product like Firefox; rather it enables that work to be spread across multiple organizations and groups of individuals, as opposed to being concentrated in a single vendor, and also allows development to be cumulative over time, since the source code and associated developer expertise is less likely to be lost due to the vicissitudes of that single vendor.)

The Firefox team has also leveraged another major disruptive innovation, namely blogging, to support grassroots product marketing and evangelism, for example with the SpreadFirefox effort. Just as blogging in general has provided people a way to self-publish their thoughts and comments independently of traditional media outlets, the blogosphere has provided a medium by which Firefox has been publicized at relatively low cost and without depending on the “mainstream” IT/computing media. This campaign has been so successful that—at least in the context of the Internet—Firefox now has very high brand recognition and loyalty, achieved at minimal expense compared to traditional approaches to marketing.

Are there ways in which Firefox “competes against nonconsumption” (i.e., constitutes a new-market disruption)? Again, Firefox as browser doesn’t really fit this description, given that almost everyone using Firefox was already browsing the web using some other product.

However just as it leveraged the low-cost disruptive innovation that is the open source development model, Firefox has also leveraged the new-market disruptive innovation represented by web-based application development as an alternative to traditional client-server application development. More specifically, Firefox’s strong support for web standards has made it popular as a development platform for web developers (who then port their applications to older browsers such as IE 5 and 6), while its support for the bundle of technologies newly termed “AJAX” puts it in the forefront of current trends in advanced web applications.

In addition, the Firefox extension mechanism extends this story by enabling web developers to take their knowledge of web technologies (HTML/XML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, etc.) and apply that knowledge to customization and extension of Firefox itself, a task that in the past required knowledge of C++ and Mozilla internals.

The Firefox extension mechanism and the applications built using it are in my opinion where the most possibilities lie for Firefox evolving into a true new market disruptive innovation. To take perhaps the most interesting example, the Greasemonkey extension enables individuals to customize their own views of their favorite web sites (e.g., to rearrange or remove page elements, add additional content and functions, etc.), either by writing Greasemonkey “user scripts” (again using the tools in the standard web developer’s toolkit) or by downloading scripts written by others.

The Platypus extension takes this a step further by trying to provide an easy way for people to simply specify the changes they want made to a web site (using an interface within the browser itself) and then automatically generate a Greasemonkey user script implementing those changes. This works better in theory than in practice, at least for me (I couldn’t quite get it to work in my first attempt), but that’s not necessarily a problem.

As Christensen notes, at their inception disruptive innovations are almost always sub-optimal in one or more aspects; however users accept these blemishes because the disruptive innovations allow them to do something that they previously could not do, or could do only at great expense. If the disruptive innovation is truly worthwhile then over time it will be improved (through sustaining innovations) to remove the blemishes and provide a much improved experience for users.

In summary, although not necessarily in and of itself a disruptive innovation considered simply as a browser, Firefox considered as a project leverages three of the most important disruptive innovations of the past few years—the open source development model, web application technologies, and the blogging phenomenon—and Firefox considered as a platform supports true new market disruptive innovations.

These various disruptive innovations are in turn synergistic, and the combination of them in a single context in my opinion accounts for much of the impact of Firefox. In contrast, consider the cases of Internet Explorer and Thunderbird:

IE also offers support for the key AJAX technologies, and in fact pioneered the key XMLHttpRequest feature several years ago, well before it was included in Firefox. IE also introduced the idea of browser extensions and browser-based desktop applications (HTML Applications or HTAs) developed using HTML, JavaScript, etc., again several years before the advent of Firefox.

Why then is Firefox getting credit instead of IE for what some might claim as IE’s innovations? Part of the reason may be limitations in IE’s implementations of extensions, HTAs, etc., and/or Microsoft’s failure to more agressively promote innovative uses of IE technologies (a failure perhaps prompted by web-based applications posing a threat to traditional Windows-based applications). However I’d argue that Firefox has succeeded (where IE did not) in large part because it leverages both a vibrant open source development community and an effective blog-enabled volunteer evangelist community, neither of which IE has had.

(Microsoft of course has traditionally done an excellent job of attracting developers, but in the case of IE—as with other Microsoft products—this community seems to have been mainly focused on intranet applications and/or proprietary commercial applications. As for evangelism, the last versions of IE predate the blogging explosion; for IE7 Microsoft appears to be trying to put together a team of non-Microsoft bloggers to promote the product, a more top-down approach as opposed to leveraging true grassroots enthusiasm.)

IE was thus able to leverage the disruptive innovation of web-based applications but not the disruptive innovations of the open source development model and the blogosphere. Thunderbird in my opinion has the opposite problem: It can leverage the open source development model, and perhaps someday may have a “SpreadThunderbird” in emulation of SpreadFirefox; however unlike Firefox (and even with a similar extension mechanism to Firefox) Thunderird cannot fully leverage the disruptive innovation of web-based applications—at the end of the day Thunderbird is “just” a desktop email client (no matter how good), at a time when the very idea of a desktop email client, especially for the consumer market, has been under sustained attack by web-based email applications beginning with Hotmail and culminating (at least thus far) in Gmail.

That concludes my attempt to answer the first three questions I posed above. When I next have time to post I’ll try to address the final two questions: What is Firefox’s value network (especially as compared to Microsoft’s), and how might the competition between Firefox and IE play out?

Update: I’ve revised the article to reflect comments from Daniel Glazman, who believes I didn’t emphasize enough the disruptive nature of Firefox’s extensibility. I’ve tried to correct this lack; however I still believe that for the vast majority of its users Firefox is mainly relevant as a sustaining innovation, given that the use of Firefox extensions (and especially truly disruptive extensions like Greasemonkey and Platypus) still seems to be confined to a relatively small subset of Firefox users.

UPDATE: Subsequent posts in this series discuss the value network for Firefox and potential “asymmetric competition” between the Mozilla project and Microsoft.

In particular, JWZ’s comments are a textbook application of the “disruptive innovation” theory formulated by Clayton Christensen and his various collaborators and popularized in the books The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution, and Seeing What’s Next.

According to Christensen et.al., companies can try to seek market share, growth, and profits in two general ways:

• develop and introduce “sustaining” innovations directed to demanding customers in an existing market, typically going up against established companies already in the market; or

• develop and introduce “disruptive” innovations directed to

  • less demanding and more price-sensitive customers in an existing market (“low-cost disruption”) or

  • new customers or new uses by existing customers (“new market disruption”).

From Christensen’s point of view disruptive strategies are better—more potential upside in terms of long-term growth and attractive profits, less chance of getting crushed by Godzilla.

Applying this to Netscape, Netscape Navigator 1.0 was a disruptive innovation appealing to “non consumers”—people who wanted to access the resources of the Internet but who previously couldn’t due to their lack of skill. For business users Netscape Navigator 1.0 in conjunction with web server software was also a low-cost disruptive innovation, providing a “good enough” alternative to expensive publishing and document management systems; similarly for many business users the email capabilities of Netscape Navigator 2.0 were a low-cost “good enough” alternative to more full-featured proprietary email systems.

Incidentally, despite a widespread myth to the contrary, note that Netscape Navigator was not a free (as in “free beer”) product, at least as far as businesses were concerned. Although it was freely downloadable by anyone, and consumers could essentially use the product without charge under a very liberal trial license, businesses were required to pay a per-user license fee, typically from $10 to $50 per user depending on the number of users licensed.

This is an important point: As Christensen notes, a low-cost disruptive innovation requires an accompanying low-cost business model in order to support profit margins equivalent to (or even better than) companies selling to the higher end of the market. In Netscape’s case this low-cost business model was quite simple:

1. Netscape offered up Netscape Navigator for download over the Internet (near-zero cost of distribution).

2. Employees of businesses downloaded and installed Netscape Navigator after hearing about it from co-workers or friends or reading about it in the press (near-zero cost of marketing).

3. Netscape salespeople (many of them lower-paid telesales workers) then simply (and typically successfully) called on businesses to ask them to buy a site license so that they could legally use the software that all their employees were already happily using (very low cost of sales).

The result: Rapid growth and healthy profits. However Microsoft killed the low-cost part of the strategy by “cutting off the air supply” (i.e., making Internet Explorer a true zero-cost product distributed with the operating system) and ruining Netscape’s previously-profitable business model, and Netscape itself killed the “compete against nonconsumption” part of the strategy by trying to compete head to head in the corporate groupware space against well-entrenched competition from Microsoft and others.

In essence Microsoft co-opted the disruptive innovation represented by the browser, instead turning it into a sustaining innovation for the Microsoft Windows operating system. According to Christensen this is a standard response strategy for incumbent vendors faced with new entrants employing a disruptive strategy; for example, the incumbent telephone companies (e.g., Verizon, BellSouth, and SBC) co-opted the disruptive innovation represented by cellular telephony, converting it into a incremental business opportunity supplementing their existing landline revenue.

As Christensen also points out, co-optation is made easier when the disruptive firm and the incumbent firms have overlapping “value networks,” defined to include “[a firm’s] upstream suppliers; its downstream customers, retailers, and distributors; and its partners and ancillary industry players.” This was very much the case with Netscape vs. Microsoft in the enterprise market: Netscape was selling to the same customers as Microsoft and trying to leverage distribution channels and ancillary providers already working with Microsoft, including PC vendors, VARs, systems integrators, and enterprise application developers.

Contrast this with a company like Google, which employed (and continues to employ) a disruptive strategy based on competing against nonconsumption in three senses: First, Google provided ordinary users a simple and easy way to search for exactly the information they were looking for, something that previously had required the assistance of “search specialists” (e.g., reference librarians, commercial search services such as Nexis, and so on). Second, Google provided small and medium-size businesses an easy and simple way to do precisely-targeted national and even international advertising, without having to hire expensive ad agencies or direct marketing firms. Finally, Google also enabled small specialty publishers, including individuals, to become sellers of advertising space, competing against major newspapers, magazines, and television networks.

For the most part Google’s value network doesn’t intersect with Microsoft’s: Google doesn’t sell to IT managers and depend on VARs and systems integrators, it sells to ad buyers (and their representatives) and those with advertising space to sell. The only major point of intersection is that (like everyone else) Google depends on access to users’ desktops, a “choke point” (as Christensen puts it) that is predominantly (though not completely) controlled by Microsoft.

Now let’s go back to JWZ’s post and translate his recommendations into Christensen’s terms:

• “Build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.” Christensen describes this as looking at the “jobs” that people “hire” products to do, as opposed to thinking in terms of selling a predefined type of product (“groupware”) to a predefined market segment (“medium to large enterprises”).(Incidentally, in this connection Christensen thinks that conventional market research—including doing focus group studies, making estimates of market sizes, soliciting the opinions of industry analysts, and so on—is basically a waste of time and money when it comes to creating disruptive innovations.)

• “Narrow the focus. Your ‘use case’ should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?” In Christensen’s terms this is “competing against nonconsumption”: unlike corporate users, for the most part college students and others outside the corporate world are “nonconsumers” of calendar capabilities and other functions associated with traditional groupware systems.Christensen also notes that a major benefit of competing against nonconsumption is that such customers will gladly use a product that is less feature-rich, high-performance, industrial-strength, and so on, because it’s better than what they had before, namely nothing. On the other hand an existing firm will typically be more focused on improving its products’ functionality, performance, reliability, etc., to meet the needs and desires of its existing customers, lessening the firm’s motivation and ability to seek out new customers unlike its current ones.

• “‘Groupware’ is all about things like ‘workflow.’ . . . Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you’d want to talk to, anyway.” From Christensen’s point of view a firm pursuing a disruptive strategy has a greater chance of success if it can build a value network distinct from those of existing firms, not only in terms of who the customers are (which I think was mainly JWZ’s point) but also in terms of distribution channels and suppliers of related goods and services.A good example of this is the way that Linux-based operating systems and open source applications infiltrated the enterprise market: With Linux and open source the perceived customers were different (developers and system administrators as opposed to IT managers), the distribution channel was different (direct download off the Internet as opposed to direct and indirect sales organizations going through the corporate procurement folks), and the ancillary providers were different (e.g., free support via Internet-based volunteer communities as opposed to for-fee support from ISVs and third-parties). The net result was that Microsoft had limited leverage over the Linux/open source value network.

What does all this have to do with Mozilla? I hope to blog more about this in the future, but for now I’ll just conclude with the following interesting questions, focusing on Firefox:

• Is Firefox more of a sustaining innovation or a disruptive innovation?

• In what sense is the Mozilla project pursuing (or could pursue) disruptive strategies, whether based on low cost or competing against nonconsumption?

• What might “competing against nonconsumption” entail in the context of Firefox and the Mozilla project?

• What is the value network for Firefox and the Mozilla project, and how does it overlap with the value network for IE and Microsoft?

• Are the Mozilla project and Firefox potentially vulnerable to a co-optation strategy by Microsoft, as Netscape was?

More on all this in the coming weeks as I have time.

UPDATE: Subsequent posts in this series discuss whether Firefox is a disruptive innovation in the sense Christensen uses, the value network for Firefox, and potential “asymmetric competition” between the Mozilla project and Microsoft.