Heading back from China
31 May 2007Tuesday Li Gong and I spent most of the day catching up on Mozilla and brainstorming about the future of Mozilla China. Li’s clearly great and we are rather fortunate to have him at Mozilla. Afterwards I made it to Tiananmen Square just in time to see the flag lowering ceremony during sunset. Also got to ride the subway during rush hour – which was an experience all its own. Lots of folks texting and playing games on their cell phones and not a single smart-phone in sight.
Wednesday Johnny joined me and we spent the day working with the Sun China folks. Many thanks to Alfred Peng for organizing the day. It was great to see the enthusiasm for Mozilla and the Mozilla + dtrace demos were quite impressive. We’ll have some Sun folks over to MV to demo to a wider audience. Sun has been doing some great things with Bug and Test days in China – and they thanked Tim, Tomcat, Tracy, and Jay for their help. Hopefully we’ll be able to do more here in the future. Finally, Johnny gave everyone some insights and history about the Mozilla platform. We’ll have to get him on video for everyone to see. Alfred, Brian, and Emily then took us out for some great food including our own numbered Peaking Duck. It was really a pleasure to meet the Sun team – I look forward to working with them in the future.
Thursday was the Google developer day. It was packed and honestly I haven’t seen an audience that excited, engaged, and full of questions at any event I’ve been at in recent memory. Nearly the entire room had heard of Firefox and Mozilla. Almost all of those used the en-US version. Lots of great questions about how someone can get started in open source. We did two rounds of press briefings with about 6 reporters each. The questions ranged from “what products does Mozilla build” to “what’s our plan in China” to “how big is the office space.” There were also many many questions about web compatibility problems and a few on memory usage. IE only sites and web compatibility is definitely an area we’ll have to focus on to be successful here.
It is quite humbling to realize how little we, or more specifically I, understand about China. However, the energy of the people here coupled with the horrible state of affairs in web standards makes it obvious to me that with plenty of local help we can really make a difference. No pressure Li 
2 Responses to “Heading back from China”
June 1st, 2007 at 9:53 am
what does this mean: “not a single smart-phone in sight”
June 1st, 2007 at 1:06 pm
Just peering over the shoulders of people – didn’t see any Windows powered devices and no full keyboards. Lots of small flip-phones.