Mozilla China (谋智网络) has set up its Beijing team for several months. Introduced by my friend Gen of Mozilla Asia, I paid a visit to Mozilla China’s new office in Beijing and also joined a roundtable discussion with a few Firefox fans.
It’s only a 6-man team right now. Jack, General Manager of Mozilla China said they planned to get 10 more soon. I am not surprised at all because it is really a spacious and nice office for a 20+ people and for a market like China which is massive and is still more or less a virgin place for open-source software, you do need a well-organized team.
The roundtable discussion was quite open. You can find students, business person, site administrators, editors etc. They talked about their experience of using Firefox, what they like and what they don’t like, along with some very constructive suggestion. I was impressed by their passion.
Maxthon claims it now has 30% of Chinese browser market, Mozilla’s mission seems very challenging from beginning. So how to promote Firefox? Wendy, Marketing Manager of Mozilla China told me that the universities would be the focus where they plan to build strong user and developer communities. I also heard that they will release some special editions with their Chinese partners, which is a very interesting strategy.
I asked Jack if there would be local development team to serve Chinese users, he told me a Yes. That’s the Key really, the product has to make Chinese happy.
I forgot to ask one question: will Mozilla China team drive the mobile version of Firefox too? Mobile market might be an easier entry, at least I have not heard anything about the mobile Maxthon. 😉
Speaking of mobile browsers, it seems that Opera Mini has recently fallen foul of the GFW – starting about a week ago, I’ve been getting connection errors every time I tried to use it, both with Opera Mini 3.1 and 4. I can’t say it came as a surprise, because the way it worked depended on a proxy so I could read BBC News et al with no problems, but it’s still a damn nuisance.
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