Marilyn A. Bosito                                                                  OOA

SYANAL

Case Study in:

Tickle/ James Currier, Firefox /Blake Ross

Founder, Tickle

James Currier, the founder of Tickle, which was originally first called “Emode”. He was a Harvard student and at first, before there was internet, he was kind of introduced to the digital media earlier. Then suddenly, by that time he entered in many working companies with digital media company.

Back in Harvard, wherein he has this business school and came up with thoughts about famous media companies Broadcast.com, Women.com, and iVillage. Unfortunately, he thought of those companies would be as profitable to the people but for him, it didn’t make any sense at all. As is they were trying to put old media experience online, same as the other media online process. For instance, Spinner.com had implied radio online for they have sold for like $340 million and he thought’s of it like it was as crazy thing. He knew that the internet would come up with its own unique media for its reason that it’s going to be a user-generated and is completely different from what they see on the other mediums.

One night, when he was staying at Harvard, he was taking up Myers-Briggs corporate personality test and it was administrated to Harvard Business School students. After they have gotten their results in manila envelopes, and it became the talk of their community for about two weeks and he have seen that if there’s a media that could be talk for a long time, it would be a very powerful one. He came for a reason that internet can allow you to have media experiences about other people including you, although, it may not be the best asset but it would take many different forms. Also, it would be powerful when the people can talk about loving themselves and about the people that surrounds them or maybe the people that they have known. He came out for a reason that he thought if it as a very good start in the media business field.

Now, he has this idea knowing what a product can actually do and started talking to people about it and getting their ideas. I didn’t know that there’s a balance between your great ideas that you don’t want any people to know it and the need of actually sharing to them and getting their opinions so that early they could make some few mistakes.

He had an idea that is obviously suits for him and could start a very huge media company on the back of this thing. It is pretty obvious that he could make something huge and thoroughly getting paranoid about that and only talked to people that he trusted. Thus, many people that he ask still misunderstands what he was trying to do for many people at that time where amaze on the success of media companies like Broadcast.com and iVillage that if you go against it, they will hate it.

Of many challenges that Currier had gone through, he manages to search and confidently putting people to experience them on the networking program of James Currier. That’s when I’ve learned that in terms of competitors, they can be as furious as they can be, but the funny thing is these people are animals that they don’t know what their competing for, and actually create tests for the people to help themselves by knowing them thoroughly.

Second thing I’ve learned was that all things that can be funny will result to a useless matter or can’t do something great for example, Tickle, James started to give jokes abour it but later people would actually go to his website and site in it.

Lastly is that no matter how thing go wrong, there is always hope and improvement on all this kinds of things even in the media business which became a wonderful change to the world of the Internet business.

Creator, Firefox

Blake Ross and Dave Hyatt, the creators of Mozilla Firefox were outstanding to their project. In 2000, Ross started to open a source wherein everyone can work and progress. Before, he started to work closely with the team Netscape because their work was exactly based on the product Mozilla where he and Hyatt were working on. Back then, he was invited for a summer job in the Netscape which is cool for a first timer jobs. So he decided to take that job and eventually working in Netscape on his first summer job.

After Ross started to work at home and planning to return with Netscape on the next summer, unfortunately, it was a bad time for Ross, because things just gotten worst. When he returned to Netscape, their marketing was as hell as ever, it keeps going down and down until nothing is left. What’s even worst as AOL, forcing for a demand in revenue from the browser. It is for a reason that they wanted their investment to be back. So Ross had really a headache to work at Netscape.

Ross had an idea of creating a solution for their problem. “Phoenix” is the one that helped them to raise or to be reborn in the ashes of Netscape but some people who got involved in this project that phoenix is actually a junction of the Mozilla code base that they controlled. So they’ve closed the access code for they wanted to do the right thing and began to gain more support from Mozilla as they journey to another adventurous times.

After those times of terror, they had to come with a different couple of names to change. They called it first, “Phoenix” to “FireBird”. Their team is always changing because of their base which is Mozilla that has many developers but in the end all people who work in Mozilla now are working on Firefox. They had their turning point when they release their first version in which indicates that Mozilla is now uprooting from its main body and now creating its own normal product. They didn’t have difficulty in getting users but they have difficulty in getting their target audience but it is solve when Mozilla became an independent entity in which the culture shift out and they have to cater more users. They didn’t worry on threats for they measure their success on the users and not on the competitors.

The Phoenix was release in the year 2002 and the Firefox 1.0 which is the first version of Firefox was release by 2004. It was a successful project for it was fast, simple and easy to use. That’s why it dominates among technical users and it cut the overpowering share of internet explorer in the market. By 2005, Ross took a leave in his school to initiate a new startup with Joe Hewitt, who is a co-developer of Firefox, which they named Parakey.

I learned in these startups that if a people are always open to new ideas, it will always lead in creating a new product that is much likely be a better than the old one. Another thing that I learn is that a startup can begin from the remnants of a certain system just as how Firefox had started from the ashes of Netscape.