YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Surman

lines on the record: 84
first: 2020-02-07
most recent: 2020-02-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, most of what Chrome did was eat up Microsoft. Right. I mean, the first thing that Chrome did was eat up Microsoft. And so, you know, you see the Internet Explorer market share go down and you see the Chrome one go up. We've gotten beaten.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think in web pages and in browsers, the desktop still matters, and people don't use the thing they, the browser mobile is just a way to open a link from Twitter. But The thing for us has never been to be the biggest in market share, it's to be able to influence how the industry works. So for a period we had that influence. We don't obviously now, because the browser is not the influential tool. So a lot of our question now is what do we do now that stands up for people's value?”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right? I mean, that's the real thing that the programming languages used to write everyday things people used on the internet became one. Right? That was the difference. And that's what unlocked a lot for developers, whether you're Zuckerberg in your Harvard dorm room or somebody trying to do some crazy wacko art project. Everybody had one computing environment.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so Right. All right. So go through what has to come through that when it opens it up because it does open it up. And people don't realize there was, you could only use certain things for certain things. Like it was so nothing was interoperable. It's sort of like A-Track and BetaMax.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that ushers in really the era of cloud apps that we have kind of taken for granted between whenever that is 2003, 2004 and the smartphone. And so that's a pretty significant transformation in terms of anybody being able to set up any business really, really quickly. I mean, most of the people we think of as the giants now start then, right? Like start in the early 2000s. And it's that era of the web that teased them up.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then you got to do it And so that was, so to go back to what happened, it was a set of people who we found an entry point. And it was a set of people who wanted at a time where tech felt crappy to make it better. And so the things that happened after the kind of chink in the armor, you've got Mozilla, you've got Firefox with whatever 5, 10, 20 million users growing really quick. And the nerdy thing that happens is then web developers start developing for the web again instead of developing for Internet Explorer. You used to get all these pop-ups. This site only works with Internet Explorer. So that was the unlocking of the cross-platform Ajax age of computing, right? Where you got Gmail and you got Facebook and you got YouTube without, like remember, a web page was a web page. It wasn't an app.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, He's the kind of stuff I like to say The next decade is going to get better. I just was feeling good. You know why? Here's why, because I'm so sick of these stupid internet people saying I hate the internet or I hate tech. I don't hate tech. I hate what it's become”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's interesting to talk about early browser history. So maybe I'll talk about that when we can come back to this. I read your New Year's Five Predictions. Oh, yeah, I like that. And, well, it's the kind of stuff I like to say, but there's not a lot of other people who say optimistically the next decade is going to get better.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're here with Mark Sermon. He is the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. We're talking a little bit about early browser history. Sorry to walk you through it, but it's really important to remember it. It was a lot. And there was a lot of drive. I wrote so much about it. I don't remember a thing I wrote about it, but I wrote about all of it when I was at the Washington Post and then later the Wall Street Journal. Talk a little bit about what happened then. So you guys were their competitor. You were it. I think it's interesting to put it Chrome.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right. And they're still a dominant player, but we'll talk about that when we get back. We're here with Mark Sermon. He's the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. For those who don't know,”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The internet would have been sucked into Windows, right? We wouldn't have had JavaScript, we wouldn't have had Ajax. You wouldn't have had Facebook. You wouldn't have had YouTube. All this stuff was because we moved out of Microsoft trying to take. All of the technology, the internet, which was a public standard, and suck it back into Windows Active Access.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what happened was the search bar was there, and we just put in, I think, the affiliate code because Google wanted traffic from anyone, right? Bloggers could make money sharing, you know, providing search to Google. And it just took off so fast that Google came back and said, we got to negotiate a different deal. So the chink in Microsoft's armor came before the money. And then the money has been the thing that has allowed us to stay in the game, almost all of it goes to just keeping Firefox competitive.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A non profit with 2 million bucks to take on Microsoft. There wasn't any idea that there would be Google Revenue. Like the search bar maybe was in there, but I mean, Google's early, right? Nobody thinks this is going to be a big business. It's impossible to imagine that now. So really that first. Two years, it really runs as a nonprofit for no money. And a bunch of internal drama and kind of changing the product, and Firefox emerges, and there's that big New York Times ad, which for people who don't remember or who are too young took over a two-page New York Times ad that people donated for. And the copy of the ad, the logo, was made up with the names of all the people who donated, was a big, big participatory nonprofit project.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is we had no money as a nonprofit. So, what happened was Netscape is basically declined to nothing that nobody's using it anymore. AOL had bought it. They're just going to kill it. And somebody, I don't know actually really who did this. A rumor was maybe Mitch Gabor went and negotiated that the IP and $2 million would go from AOL as a kind of a part investigated.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The order of operations are important, right? Because that's a 15 year history. So it wasn't like all of a sudden we had all this money and then we went after Microsoft. In fact, it's the other way around.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not for me because AOL did it to Prodigy and Netscape, someone did it, oh Yahoo did it to Netscape and then Google did it to Yahoo, which was a similar kind of thing. But you guys had all this money to go around. And so talk about what, you know, you still were up against Microsoft as a browser.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, because Google ran everything, but at the time they were small when you started, but you gave them a leg up just the way, by the way, Yahoo gave Google, people don't realize that the way Google got big was by being the search service on Yahoo! Which was the most popular site.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really busy. I have 10 jobs. So that's how people can reach you. No, they can't. I don't know why I was doing email. I never do email anymore. But so you did that. And the concept at the time was that you guys were so, you did take off with a Google, with Google really brought in real revenues for you. Yeah.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Somebody kind of passed me off a blog post from Mitchell that said they'd been looking for a while for an executive director of the foundation. And of course, these are my heroes, right? I mean, I'd watch Mozilla from the early days, is 2008. So I'd watch them for five years rise, and I was one of the kind of army, one of the fans. And so I did this thing where if you want to reach somebody busy, Find their personal email and write to them on Sunday. And I spent a week before that Sunday perfectly composing an introduction about why I was the right person to. And two hours later I got an email back from her.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a sad era. So I did that. I did open source projects like helping people, like building early content management systems to help activists do websites and publish stuff. Just always something on the kind of tech and social change side of things. And then one day...”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You dialed it up. You plugged it into your phone and that exactly. And, you know, at the time, you charge like $6 an hour to be sitting on the internet. It was like, we used to call it CompuServe for communists. That was our kind of internet provider that we were. CompuServe was a service.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, big three quarter inch perfect. But it was that old broadcast tape of the time. And so it did really just reinforce all the punk rock records. I listened to were true. The man is going to shut us down. And I would say most of my career has been about that. Fight the power. And yeah, so I say most of my career comes from that kind of spirit, right? We need to make sure that there is a public people's option for communication. All right, so here you are. Why not follow into the internet?”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which town is not particularly popular to be a progressive activist. And I play it, it plays during the A team or MacGyver or whatever. I see it at home. My friends play it. And I come in one day to pull the tape out and pull all the tapes for the evening and it's gone. And I go to the station manager. I'm like, where's the tape? I said, well, the station owner said we have a policy of no local public service announcements, which of course was just made up. So very, very shut.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually, another key piece in this little town I lived in Canada, the local commercial television equivalent or affiliate, equivalent of like an NBC, was run by this panty ante guy who only would pay minimum wage for people to work there. So I had a job in TV. I started a peace group and I was this punk rock kid at 17 in this little town. Team of one. A team of one. Well, there was a guy from the rail union who was the other part of my team. Cool. And much older guy. And so I got to, because I was at this TV station, pick.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had moved from this lovely, then there's Stanford Brigade, but we won't get into it. We're not going to talk about them yet. Yeah. I moved from this lovely little liberal college town. I'd already found politics. I was in grade nine. And my dad got ordained as a minister. And we got sent up to this pulp and paper mill town. So imagine it's like moving from some lovely college town into the movie Fargo. And I show up in my combat booths. I'm like the only kid. And it's the height of the Reagan Cold War nuclear arms race, all this stuff.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a neat job. It's a job I love to be the head of this foundation that then owns this big tech company. And people often ask me, you know, how did you get there? And the true and short version of the answer is punk rock and the peace movement. That makes sense. Mozilla, it makes sense. I guess it makes sense. Well, it's amazing the number of people who kind of come from a punk rock background that you find in lots of different parts of this era of tech. Oh, absolutely. Not the younger, younger people, not the old, old people, but a lot of punks. The whole earth catalog gang. Well, that's the hippie one. And then the punk one came later. Okay. I think that's the different eras. And so it was...”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As well. Because we weren't going to just do it through volunteerism. So fast forward to today, we've got this history of a successful browser, although it's gotten beat up and we can come back and talk about that. And we're at a different time in history, though, where a browser isn't, just like we talked about, the thing that shapes how does the world work. I mean, why it mattered then, it shaped how the world work. And we are in the business of making sure the internet works for people. So where we are today is both and get a browser that's regained its feet, but looking at how in, say, the era of AI, do we really get people power back into their hands like we did with Firefox? We're talking about how people compute or use the internet because it's changed, obviously, for sure. And I don't know if a browser's a browser, even though people are using browsers. They don't think of it that way. They think of it as Google or an Amazon page or”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And as people wanted it, it made money and it made money off Google search and ads. And so it grew from this 10-person nonprofit. We'll explain how it was paid as Google search was the search in the corner of the browser. There's always a search thing and Microsoft had its search Well, there wasn't even always a search. What's interesting is that was one of Firefox's innovation, you had to install these janky search bars or whatever. So we embedded search for the first time. Google was a baby. We just had a regular referral agreement like a blogger would to take a piece of the ad revenue that we sent them for putting in the search box. And it just took off. It took off overnight.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they came up with an alternative browser based on the old Netscape code, and they had no idea they could do that other than through volunteers and donations. And so they started out. Turns out people wanted it.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mainframe, essentially, was the way desktop. I forgot what it's called because I haven't used it in 100 years, but the browser on a larger screen that did not move around like a mobile device was how you did it. It's crazy to think you have to go back and describe it, but it's true. But yeah, if you go back in time, we had a phone that was plugged into the wall. Imagine there was one company who controlled all the ways you could see the internet, and that was Microsoft. And it was originally started off by Netscape, which was a very an idea. And then Microsoft copied it egregiously. Yeah, yeah, it was actually gotten into trouble. Originally, Andrason started off as a public project in University of Illinois. And it wasn't a business. Nobody thought this was going to become a business. Now it's our whole economy. Right. And so the idea that we wanted choice was a set of people who had been early internet pioneers. They didn't want Microsoft to just suck and vacuum the internet into their way of working into Windows.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it had been the original browser. It was started by Mark Andreessen and others at Netscape. Exactly. And so here were these set of people by then. Microsoft had gone from thinking the web was completely unimportant to having 98% market share in browsers. And nobody could do anything. And they were trying to fold the internet, the web, back into Windows. And so there were these crazy people who said, well, we need an alternative. Because search was the primary. The browser on the laptop was the primary or on the computer.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, we were set up well before I was there with the idea that we need a public option on the internet, that it shouldn't all just be commercial. We believe things should be commercial. We're kind of a hybrid company nonprofit. And that was started out because, I guess actually for some very pragmatic reasons, in that there was a tiny band of people who wanted to take on Microsoft. They had this thing called open source and they had the old Netscape code. And they thought there was no way to win. Like, I mean, if I gave you... $2 million is just what they had to start this nonprofit in the beginning and said beat Facebook. That was what they were up against. So they started. Microsoft had the Explorer. Microsoft had Explorer. And this band of crazy Netscape had gone.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The for profit part of it explain how it's set up, the Mozilla Corporation. Up well, it's interesting anytime I give a talk, I sort of ask people to raise their hand how many people have used Firefox and, you know, everybody knows it. And then how many people know Mozilla is a nonprofit? You get two or three hands depending on the audience.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my spare time, I'm just a reporter, and you're listening to Recon. A podcast about power change and the people you need to know around tech and beyond were part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today in the red chair is Mark Sermon, the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. It's a nonprofit focused on advocacy research and the, quote, internet health movement, but Owns Corporation, which makes the popular web browser Firefox, Mark, welcome to Rico Decode.”
2020-02-07 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Mark Surman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT