

Corporate users we don't care about you - Says Mozilla - girishmony
http://www.browsomatic.com/2011/06/mozillas-reaction-to-corporate-users.html

======
bane
Corporate users need to seriously rethink their glacial technology adoption
cycle. In the BigCos I've worked at in the past, we're usually told it's due
to security, yet we're almost always stuck on versions with glaring security
holes that were solved years ago.

The problem indicated in the blog post (and the comments) is that the software
ecosystem, add-ons, various vendor web sites, etc., take too long to bring up
to speed. I can also attest to this, I worked at one organization that was
stuck on IE 6 because the bloated and ridiculous expense reporting system
wouldn't work on anything newer. They finally had to upgrade to some newer
version because a major customer site simply refused to work with IE6 and we
couldn't turn in our work. The weeping and whining from the corp IT department
over having to upgrade the enterprise lasted for a year at least. It was
actually a major contributor to me leaving the company I found it so absurd
and annoying.

Strange that the vast vast majority of web sites on the open web don't seem to
have a problem with this. Could it be because they write to standards? I
always wondered what bizarre things were going on in that old expense system
that just _broke_ on new browsers.

~~~
dexen
_> Strange that the vast vast majority of web sites on the open web don't seem
to have a problem with this. Could it be because they write to standards?_

I believe ther's a better answer: the owners/operators of the websites are
incentivized to update them to current popular browsers. Let's face it,
writing to standards helps, but does not guarantee good cross-browser
compatibility if the website is somewhat complex.

Also the owners/operator usually are themselves -- or have on hand -- the
people that can modify the site's code right away. May have something to do
with popular sites being either very simple, or being developed all the time.

To contrast, the corporate IT is the embodiment of ``don't touch it if itsn't
broken'' and ``fill in those three forms before you check any new code in''
mindset. Os just outright procurement of huge systems from external vendors
with no contractual provisions for updates to match current software.

(which was one of the ills of my previous workplace, _sigh_ )

~~~
bane
_To contrast, the corporate IT is the embodiment of ``don't touch it if itsn't
broken'' and ``fill in those three forms before you check any new code in''
mindset._

I agree 100% with this and I think that _this_ is the mindset that needs to
change.

Back in college I took a course in Enterprise Architecture where this mindset
was ingrained as good practice. I finished the class thinking that this was
all terribly terribly wrong headed.

------
twymer
The concern is coming because Mozilla announced that they will soon stop
supporting Firefox 4 and the enterprise has a problem with this.

Personally, I'm fully supportive of this. I feel that as the browser world is
rapidly changing along with HTML5/CSS3, there's not much room to continue
supporting (and thus encouraging continued use of) old browser versions.

If gaining support of the corporate world (which Mozilla has never had much
luck getting into) means leaving developers, support and security resources
working on old products this really isn't surprising.

~~~
girishmony
As I said in the blog post, there may be solid reasons behind Asa's comment.
But its not the way to express it. Am I correct?

~~~
rauljara
If mozilla genuinely does not consider enterprise a priority, would you really
prefer them to give you some bullshit where they pretended it was?

I think the explicit honesty would be pretty helpful for a sysadmin who needs
to make decisions about which technology to use. Yeah, it's blunt, but the
bluntness does a pretty good job of not encouraging false hope. Obviously the
sysadmin would prefer support, but mozilla just gave a very clear and
understandable reason why that shouldn't be their priority.

------
fmw
It is open source; they are corporate users. Why don't they collectively hire
someone to backport security patches? Sounds like a businessmodel to me. You
can't really expect support and consideration for your minority use-case for
free, if you aren't paying for the software in the first place.

~~~
cmars
This is a good idea. Like an OS-independent RedHat, focusing on the apps.

------
kalleboo
Reading the comments on Mike Kaply's post, this is my favorite quote:

«Alienate the corporate users and you’ll alienate home users.»

It appears these corporate IT types honestly don't understand why Apple are
doing so well.

~~~
jvandenbroeck
How is Apple alienating corporate users?

------
sdm
There are really two problems here

* enterprise app development that assumes that there will be no need to maintain an application once developed

* corporate IT people needing to justify their existence.

Web applications benefit from being easier to install and can be run from a
central location; but, as a result of that you can't just toss the running of
an app over to IT. You need a small core to maintain it. For most applications
this makes the most business sense as the trade off of having one or two
people still on the project is less expensive than having IT manage the
installs of native applications. The result of moving the enterprise to web
apps should have been a massive shrinking of corporate IT head counts and a
small increase in dev head counts. Instead we see them defending their budgets
by inserting themselves between the user and the browser and performing these
massive test cycles. It's simply an inefficient use of resources cause by
enterprise empire builders don't want to see a shrinking of their power.

------
hammerdr
Am I the only one that is skeptical of the quote in Mike's post [1]? "Managing
500,000 corporate users" seems a bit outlandish to me considering that only
one corporation in the world seems to have more than half a million employees
period. I am not so sure that Wal-Mart has 500,000 corporate users who are
affected by browser upgrades.

[1] Linked in the article but [http://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-
the-corporate...](http://mike.kaply.com/2011/06/23/understanding-the-
corporate-impact/)

~~~
kalleboo
I don't know which John Walicki the quote is from, but the top result on
LinkedIn works for IBM, so it's a possibility that they as a service provider
support users of many different corporations on a single product.

------
__rkaup__
How is this even a problem to corporate users? If they write standards
compliant internal web-apps, they should certainly work even better in newer
versions of Firefox.

~~~
sp332
_should_ doesn't mean _does_ , and breaking things for thousands of corporate
users is not a good way to discover a regression.

~~~
stock_toaster
Those web startups I keep hearing about that somehow manage to target a large
swath of browsers/versions must have tons of people working on the problem!

Snark aside, I think the problem is most large corporations view internal
development and network/systems administration as cost centers, and treat it
accordingly. Then grouse and complain when things dont work, are fragile, or
require additional expenditures to keep apace with more current technologies.
Go figure.

------
cmars
I would rather see Mozilla focus on the individual end user experience than
cater to what some IT dept wants.

Every BigCo I've worked at, IE was the official supported browser. Firefox was
the defacto used browser by employees who probably didn't need a corporate IT
managed desktop to get their work done.

------
binxbolling
Just curious, but how does Mozilla know that corporate users make up such a
small minority?

~~~
dexen
It's not that all corporate users lumped _together_ are small minority. I'ts
about the 500.000 number quoted by one of admins as their corporate user
count.

Comparing single corporation with all the other users is a valid argument,
since every corporation defines its needs differently. The non-corporate users
are quite homogenous and can be lumped together.

The core problem is the corporate users demand extra support to spare them
some costs. They want browser vendors to ensure bug-for-bug compatibility with
all their internal systems -- rather than invest in updating the systems.
Moreover, corporate users expect browsers to adapt to _their particular_ set
of systems, while still going forward on othre fields. I'd call it a
minefield, and one without any grattitude to be won. It's pretty damn hard to
innovate and develop a browser for such market.

Contrast that with consumer market, where content providers, ISPs etc.
consider it natural part of business to update their customer-facing WWW once
in a while. The browser is free to go forward, and chances are the new, cool
features will soon be put to good use. Way more breathing space for
innovation.

------
blumentopf
Previous submission on same topic:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2692205>

------
drdaeman
Yeah, they don't care about corporate users to extend they disabled websockets
because of some broken corporate proxies.

------
rch
Such a quick jump in major version usually indicates a deep code quality
problem. Are we asking the right questions here?

~~~
Sayter
The quick jump in major version is because Mozilla is moving to a rapid
release cycle, a la Google Chrome. Firefox 6 and Firefox 7 are expected by the
end of the year. Here is one of the relevant blog posts:

[http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/04/13/new-channels-for-
fir...](http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/04/13/new-channels-for-firefox-
rapid-releases/)

~~~
rch
That blog post is almost entirely devoid of content.

And ticking though version numbers that quickly is a bad idea. There are
better ways for Mozilla to go about this...

~~~
Sayter
The major benchmark for browsers has been Internet Explorer, which has had 9
versions in 16 years. Compare that to Google Chrome, which is already on
14.0.803.0 (dev) / 13.0.782.32 (beta) / 12.0.742.100 (stable) after existing
for less than three years. Mozilla is moving away from Microsoft's release
model and towards Google's release model. While the current timeline for
Firefox is a major release every three months, the target timeline is for a
major release every six weeks.

Technology gets faster. Version numbers are arbitrary. Mozilla will be fine.

