How to Hear Without Listening by Blake Ross

Interviewers are asking my opinion of Internet Explorer 7. This, of course, is a softball. They tee it up anticipating a home run account of how Firefox trounces IE.

But I’ve been answering truthfully: IE7 is a solid product. It vastly improves upon IE6 with useful features like anti-phishing that Firefox 2 will replicate.

I have nothing to gain from gratuitously denigrating IE. Firefox is and always has been about serving users, not crushing competition. It is scary to think what life would be like if I woke up each day thirsting for the fall of another company. If Microsoft hadn’t abandoned IE, there would have been no gap to fill — no user frustrations to tackle — and we probably would not have started Firefox.

But they did abandon it. For four years, and in the face of rampant pop-up ads, viruses and spyware, Microsoft left for dead a browser that hundreds of millions of people rely on. They’ve admitted it, and at the Webstock conference, Program Manager Tony Chor apologized for it. I’ve met Tony personally. I believe his apology.

Then I see the IE7 homepage proclaiming that “we heard you” and I just get furious, because I know that “you” isn’t really you, grandpa, Meredith, Jamie, Fletcher, Matt, Mike, Phil, it can’t be, because you complained for years and nobody heard you. It’s not you; it’s us. It’s Firefox, Safari, Opera, Flock, Maxthon. Only the drip drip of leaky marketshare echoes in Redmond.

I know this is just the game, know that the IE marketing team wrote that sales pitch. The pitch I’m writing now isn’t to them but to the developers. You are working at a company that finds positive impact a mere side effect of competitive destruction.(1) In thirty years, do you want to look back and think “I did that” or “I stopped that company from doing that”?

I urge you to find a company that truly listens to them, not us. It is much more rewarding.

(1) Spare me the capitalist manifesto and Dodge v. Ford; a company can maximize shareholder value and still be socially responsible. When Microsoft abandoned IE, it abandoned 700 million people and set the Web back many years. Meanwhile, billions of dollars flowed to R&D projects that will never see daylight.