dramatic message – “There will be no 1.1″

I’m wondering why people keep naming any news about recent version bump like that.
It’s a shame. We’re just changing version to better reflect product status and every blog/journal/news site tries to scary user that we just resigned from releasing 1.1.
A user who see such title thinks that we have some (major) problems and we’re unable to workaround them so we gave up. Additionally, some news sites (after ZDNet?) keep article in that form – “There will be no long awaited 1.1 version! We will have to wait MUCH longer for 1.5″ and so on.

Once more Mozilla community/foundation/press showed that we are amateurs in term of media handling. We absolutely don’t know HOW to speak to keep journalists repeat what we want to tell them.
I read that “Major reason for users to update from 1.0.4 and 1.0.6 is that 1.0.6 was released in 30 languages at the same time!”. And it’s not that journalists are usually lazy and looking for dramaturgy. It’s also because we don’t know how to play with them to make them write what we want.

Examples? Every news site wrote about this change. There is no official news from Mozilla Foundation. So they’re using ZDNet, Slashdot, Weird or some blog post. It’s a mistake.
Localizations are, as always, underestimated by Mozilla Foundation, so there is no way for many journalists to get any information in their language. And they WONT ask in English mostly because they don’t speak it well. So they will translate (with many mistakes) ZDNet, read some blog, or invent something!
Journalists are looking for informations when they write any press news (those less lazy ones 😉 ).
What will be in Firefox 1.5? When it’ll be released? What with Thunderbird 1.5? What is this SVG? Why we have to wait for 1.5 so long? Will there be Firefox in my language? Who is localizing it? How Mozilla gathers money? Is it Firefox or FireFox? Who is using Firefox? How much market does it have? Why Firefox is cool? (version not for user but for journalist who want to write a sentence “Firefox browser was widely adopted because …”) Is Firefox a Netscape? Is Mozilla a Netscape? Why there’s no link to Netscape 8 on Mozilla.org? There were 6 big security updates in half a year, why someone says it’s secure? I heard that there is more than 300 000 “bugs” in Mozilla! and so on…

And now open www.mozilla.org or www.mozilla-europe.org and try to answer those questions. I can promise you that journalist will have problems to find it. So they’ll invent the answers.

I think that Mozilla is still very young in the “adult world” of market. Webpages, pressnews,policies are focused on creating great tools, creating a fresh brand, promoting it, but we fail to keep promoting it wisely.
We’re often loosing, for example with Opera, because of no plan. We had SVG for years but we will release it after Opera (and possibly after Konqueror/Safari!). We ignore secunia but journalists use it everytime they write about our security. So we still keep some bugs that we threat as not security not fixed in 1.0.x branch. And journalists still see “18% unfixed security bugs in Firefox” – great!
We had a problem with releasing locales (we still have with Thunderbird – can’t we learn from previous mistakes?) and everyone wrote about it. There was no official announcement, so they based on MozillaZine and mostly cited me or marcoos. If MoFo would write “we’re sorry for that, we’re trying to avoid a mess and we’ll give you all new builds in two days” everyone will be happy! And journalists will write that there is some minor issue and MoFo is doing their best to solve it in two days.
There are other examples. Our Visual Identity Team is not working (or I can’t see this) so our webpages around the world doesn’t have one, strong visual identity. We need a few templates and ask people to use it on any firefox.pl, mozillapl.org, getfirefox.de page. There is no Press Team to cover the longterm plan about media handling. Mozilla Localization Project has no real power to control Mozilla communities, ensure quality of local webpages, teach a few people in each country how to promote Mozilla and have our people “inside” the country… Instead MoFo tries to control everything by themselves.

We need to start working around this areas. We made extremely good work to create environment to work on great products. We made a work to release them. Now it’s time to improve those areas which often wastes brilliant work in others.

Beside of this. The situation when coders from the project, affiliates, advocates, localizers, and whole community involved in the project gets the news about version change from some blog whose author tracked some document history is another issue – complete lack of communication which leads to potential disasters and practical irritation of thousands of people who’re working around the project. Pity 🙁