Market Domination Strategy (most recent thinking)

[Kris]

A Web Software Platform For the Common Man
==========================================

Since we are taking the more difficult road of platform building I
think it pays to look at the successes and failures that other
organizations have had in building a platform.

Microsoft
---------
First there is Microsoft. They were able to leverage a deal they had
made with IBM to build an operating system for the IBM PC, gaining a
quick foothold in the market. But, they also made it easy for anyone
with half a brain to develop applications for it. They also
prioritized user value, the very reason people buy something, even
more important than technical wizardry (gasp!). Software engineers
constantly gripe about a technically inferior product becoming the
dominant operating system, but Microsoft knew what they were doing.

The power that Microsoft was able to weild using their operating
system becomes evident in our second example, Mozilla. Mozilla rose
from the ashes of Netscape after Microsoft "cut off their air supply"
by introducing the Internet Explorer browser and packaging it with
Windows itself. If somebody with more than half a brain built a
really great application for Windows (like the Netscape web browser,
Word Perfect, or Powerpoint) Microsoft could threaten to package a
similar application with Windows, essentially killing their business,
if they did not agree to sell the business to Microsoft outright. The
proprietary nature of the way Microsoft chose to do business worked
well for them for a long time, but now the resentment in the
technology industry towards Microsoft has risen to new levels and
recent technological advances are threatening to leave the software
giant behind to pick up the crumbs.

Mozilla
-------
It goes without saying that the anti-Microsoft ideal of what a
software platform should be can be found in Mozilla. The Mozilla
application platform was built by a core group of people from what was
left of Netscape. They made it open source, they engaged the
community, they made it free, and they designed it to work on all
popular operating systems including Windows, Mac, and Linux. Mozilla
has found success with the "killer" app they chose to build on their
platform, a web browser called Firefox. However, success came slowly
and the full potential of the Mozilla platform has never been
realized, and I don't know if it ever will. This is for two reasons.
First, Mozilla failed to get developers excited about the platform and
a major reason for that is the terrible documentation for programmers
who want to build applications using the Mozilla platform. There are
only three books about building applications on the Mozilla platform,
and besides being outdated, they were never any very good in the first
place. Contrast this with Microsoft application development, which is
taught in all the technical colleges and has a huge ecosystem of books
in the computer section of the bookstore. The second reason that the
Mozilla platform has never taken a foothold is that Mozilla never
considered how users were going to get the platform, or why they would
want to get it in the first place. Microsoft knew how to make the
deals with manufacturers and software firms as well as how to create
the user value, a whole package of integrated software, that would get
their operating system onto a computer in every household, and they
did it.

Google
------
Perhaps the most currently successful platform builder is Google.
They have a profound understanding that the web is the real platform,
and if you can control the gateway to the web, you can leverage it as
your own application platform. Google created that gateway with their
technologically superior approach to building a search index. There
is a saying in the software industry that a product must be 9 times
better than the alternative to get users to switch from their existing
software. Well, users switched to Google from Yahoo, Excite, AOL, and
dozens of others in droves. Google also understands the mistakes of
Microsoft, Netscape, and Mozilla. They took the initiative to make as
much of their code base open source as they can for the sake of the
developers that they need building the apps that billions of users
will use online, driving billions of advertising click-through
dollars. Google has done OK by developers through their "do no evil"
mantra, the antithesis of Microsoft, but has not reached the level of
Apple.

### Apple Developer Ecosystem ###
Apple makes it easy for developers to build apps not only for the
iPhone, but for Macs as well. This is half of the reason why these
device platforms are so successful, because developers love to build
apps for them. Apple does what it can to make sure that those apps are
up to their standards, keeping the ecosystem healthy and popular. But,
the other half of Apple's success is providing a solid value
proposition to users. Products from Apple are hip, easy to use,
aesthetically pleasing, and technically proficient.

### Where Google Shines ###
On the other hand, Google is struggling with things like Gears and the
Android phone. (Most Googlers carry an iPhone). Developers are not
thrilled with them and the public has no idea what they are good for.
These platforms will never reach the kind of success that Apple or
Microsoft has been able to achieve without a better value proposition
for developers and users together.

However, Google has found plenty of success in creating a great value
proposition for the rest of their web based platform like Adsense,
Adwords, GMail, Google Docs, Blogger, and Google Groups in addition to
their dominant search engine. The technical capabilities and foresight
of the engineers at Google cannot be underestimated. Yet, beyond their
search and online advertising capabilities, the value proposition of
Google is weak compared to Apple or Microsoft (in its hayday).

Go Where They Won't Go
----------------------
At The Fireworks Project we need to look at Apple, Google, and
Microsoft not as giants to run away from, but as the creators of
opportunity. Microsoft seems doomed to succumb to their own greed and
get left out of the next computing renaissance all together. Their
business model will never allow for the adoption of open source code,
and developing Windows applications is getting less and less sexy all
the time with the advent of Ruby On Rails, iPhone, Facebook,
Salesforce, and all the other web enabled platforms for application
building.

Google seems to just throw everything at the wall to see what will
stick, but their main focus is driving of online add sales, and their
dream world is one in which everyone has a high speed connection
24/7. Google also seems unable to capitalize on some of their better
ideas in the marketplace like Gears.

Apple is inherently tied to their hardware devices and proprietary
systems like Microsoft. However, for the reasons stated above Apple
will continue to dominate in these areas. There will be no iPhone
killer, there will be no iTunes killer, and the tablet looks like it
will take a rightful place on the same throne.

The opportunity for The Fireworks Project comes not by imitating or
competing with these giants, but by looking for the places where they
won't go. Google will not divulge itself in any kind of customer
service other than the automated kind, and while they are a
technically sound organization, their marketing is missing the point
of several important features. Microsoft has a strangle hold on the
software market for small businesses but they distribute software the
old fashioned way, through distributors. A typical Microsoft Gold
Certified distributor comes from a 2 or 4 year technical school where
they learned Microsoft administration but not computing. Despite the
huge market share, software from Microsoft maintains poor usability,
poor support, and poor security, on an overpriced system. But,
Microsoft will not support open source software or recognize the open
web as the next computing platform. For Apple's part, they understand
that their bread and butter is assembling proprietary parts into a
whole ecosystem. Apple understands that the importance of the open
web, but they also will be happy to just carve out a few proprietary
corners of it every now and again.

Where The Fireworks Project is Going
------------------------------------
At the Fireworks Project, we recognize that the open web is the next
platform and it is here now as we speak. However, we are in a time
period much like that just before the Ford Motor Company was formed.
Everyone knows there is something big around the corner, but nobody
has figured out how to distribute it to the common man. Sure we have
Salesforce, Google Apps, Microsoft Azure, 37Signals, and many others,
but I think the industry knows there is something really big on the
horizon. There were cars before the Model T, but they were not
something that the common man had much interest in. There were
personal computers before the Apple ][, but none that the common man
could find very useful. The World Wide Web existed before the Mosaic
web browser, but only scientists found interest in it.

Even if we do everything right, we cannot expect our platform to be a
success. Microsoft needed a historic blunder by IBM to create a
winning platform. Google had the brilliant minds of two young men at
Stanford who came along in the right place at the right time. We
don't have these things, so we need to do it the way Henry Ford did,
by finding a way to sell cars to a market that all the others are
avoiding for one reason or another.

Our Focus
---------
Our primary focus from the start needs to be on 2 fronts. First, to
build customized, web enabled software systems for small organizations
and offer them as a service rather than as a proprietary software
package. These organizations don't care about our platform, they just
want something that works better than what they already have at a
price they can afford, and they don't really care how we do it. We
need to swallow our pride in our technical work and be the one single
obvious choice for web enabled and integrated enterprise software
systems for small organizations with modest requirements. Second, we
need to create an ecosystem of application developers that understand
the potential of our platform and who are eager to exploit it to
create software that we can't even imagine today. To keep them happy
our platform and development tools need to be free, open sourced, and
very well documented in addition to providing a very simple value
proposition just for them: Make it easy to build useful and cool apps
that they could not build without it, while demonstrating that we have
a plan to achieve significant market penetration within the mainstream
to give their apps a solid distribution channel.

The enterprise application development arm kills two birds with one
stone. First, by offering the applications as a service, it provides
us with a substantial and consistent revenue base right out of the
gate. Second, as users become familiar with our software at work, they
will begin to understand the platform and its capabilities, even if it
is subconsciously. As our distribution grows in the workplace, it only
follows that it will invade other consumer space markets as well,
simply by osmosis. When you think about it, it was DOS and Windows in
the workplace that paved the road to put a Windows computer in every
home.

Developer recognition also serves two important purposes. First it
establishes The Fireworks Project as a technically competent
organization that provides them with a distribution channel to earn
notoriety and make money. Second, their applications help
tremendously to push our platform into the the early adopter market
place, from which it is much easier to gain a significant share of the
mainstream market.

D-Day
-----
We're using the developer community to make a landing on the beaches
of Normandy, while using enterprise application development to drop
paratroopers behind the enemy lines. The hope is that they can each
meet up some where in the middle of the mainstream market.

The Common Man
--------------
It's also important to note that we are intentionally avoiding
competition with anyone bigger or more technically competent. For
example, while Google Gears serves close to the same purpose as Kixx,
we are actually using parts of Gears to integrate with the Chrome web
browser to offer a more streamlined and relevent application
programming interface to developers. The Mozilla platform is also
capable of the same things that Kixx is, but we are using large
portions of it to integrate with the Firefox web browser to offer the
same streamlined and unified application programming interface that we
are creating for Chrome. Microsoft offers Silverlight, and Adobe
offers Air, both of which are capable of the same things as Kixx, but
developers need to buy expensive software and thick books to be able
to use them. iPhone apps and widgets for OSX offer the same
functionality as Kixx, but Apple needs to keep them proprietary like
Silverlight and Air, keeping them in a compartment separate from the
open web. In each of these cases we are attempting to go where these
companies will not. Google, Mozilla, Apple, and Microsoft all offer
similar ideas, but they are like the early makers of automobiles
before the Model T, they are not yet interested in the common man.

Market to 1 of 2: Developers or Small Organizations
---------------------------------------------------
So, in light of all this, all of our marketing efforts need to target
1 of 2 groups: Developers or small organizations. The target
characterization of each bit of public exposure we have needs to be
focused on one of these two characters. The manager in a small
organization is pragmatic and does not care how technology works, only
that it exceeds the promises that were made about it. When a developer
looks at a new tool to asses its worthiness, he is thinking to himself
"What can I build with this thing and is it more work than it is
worth?". We need to keep these characters in mind for everything thing
we do. Who are we speaking to? Are they an audience that we really
want to spend our time on? Is our message relevant to them?