Group IV, The Ten Largest, No. 7, Adulthood (1907) by Hilma af Klint, Guggenheim Museum, New York City

WE HAD BEEN WORKING for almost two years on a new browser and it was nearly ready. This browser had tabs at a time when tabbed browsers did not exist, and it sported an email client, stock portfolio manager, and a calendar. The new session start page, the one which Morton had asked me about during my interview two years earlier, was also ready for the 20 million eyeballs that viewed it daily. The challenge we had was to upgrade the browser experience and the technology behind the service, without making the kinds of changes that would cause existing users to switch. There were plenty of other browsers and services like ours out there, and people could switch to a new one at any time.

A MORTGAGE PAYMENT, A PLANE CRASH

At about this time, on 10 September 2001, I paid my first ever mortgage payment. I pushed the button on my bank’s bill payment system, and set it to pay automatically … for 30 years. It was a lot of money to me at the time, and 30 years was a long time to pay it. The very next morning I listened to the news on KUT, the NPR station in Austin. A plane had struck the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV and saw smoke coming out of a hole in a tower. I was surprised to see how big the plane must have been. When I first heard the news I had imagined a two-seater in the fog, losing its way. But this was a cloudless day, and the hole was huge.

I got in my car and drove to work with the news playing. I heard the announcer say: a tower had fallen. I pulled over. I had a close friend from college who had worked in one of those towers, and currently worked in an adjacent building. Was he still alive? I turned the radio up. Listened. Then the second tower collapsed. It was clear that this not an accident. At some point, the pentagon was struck.

Air traffic was shutdown. Amtrak trains stopped honking their horns. The stock market tanked. Companies started to layoff. I began to wonder, like the sales people from that company where I helped pitch a new ecommerce site, if I get laid off, how am I going to pay my mortgage? 

The new browser and all its apps had just barely been completed—through heroic efforts, and no small amount of personal sacrifice (read about the 24-hour shifts and EMS visit here) but for some reason we had not yet started to pre-install the browser on Microsoft desktops. It turns out there was a reason for the delay, but we didn’t all know about it at the time.

RETURN TO YOUR DESKS

At an unexpected all-hands meeting, the CEO took a meandering path through sunlit copses of trees, across streams and rivers, he talked about the challenges we overcame, the great sacrifices employees made to get the browser completed on time, and then as the sun set he paused in the gloaming and flatly announced: We recently agreed in principle to be acquired by Hyper-Scale company. We received word that no regulatory agency would attempt to block this acquisition, and the deal closed yesterday.

“In order to streamline our operations and increase shareholder value, we have had to make some difficult decisions. We have decided we will lay off most of the company today, and then we will layoff the remainder of employees at a future date, perhaps in a few months. So, whether you are laid off today or later, everyone will be losing their jobs, it’s just a matter of when.”

I heard someone curse the COO by name. I heard gasps. I heard the wolves start howling.

“Go back to your desks now. If you have a manila envelope, please return to this room to be outprocessed by HR. If you have no envelope, then continue working. If you have questions, please see your HR representative.”

I went back to my desk and looked for the envelope. I looked on the desk, on the seat, on the floor. Nothing. I walked around to other desks, everyone was gathering photos, books, papers, and exchanging phone numbers. They all had envelopes.

1 YEAR OF SOLITUDE

I was one of a small number of people not laid off. I dutifully returned to work each day, sat alone at my desk in a sea of 200 empty cubicles. I checked my email. I cleaned my keyboard and screen. I wandered the now empty floors of that Class A office space overlooking the hills. I’d take a break and walk on a trail behind the building, looking in the mesquite trees for information about when I’d be laid off. I was stuck in corporate limbo. I had a job, but nothing to do at work. And how long could that last?

A colleague and I started to teach ourselves Java. At a fish shack, where the fried catfish tasted a little like mud, we’d talk about the differences between growing up in Delhi and Berkeley, California. The months passed. Maybe a year. We still had no work. By that time we had stopped learning Java and had started teaching ourselves some new Web technologies. I installed and configured Apache and set up a new blog and a wiki on my home server.

Then came an email from headquarters: the acquiring company would hire us. There was a huge amount of undecipherable legal paperwork and then I was an employee of the hyper-scale company. The acquiring company already had a deal with a company that owned a browser and they were more interested in the millions of new customers they acquired for a dime on the dollar than they were in spending money on a tabbed browser.

I remember thinking: If they only knew how desirable, efficient, and profitable the new tabbed browser would be, they’d understand its potential. But the people making these decisions were unknown to us, sitting somewhere in the headquarters, looking backwards at spreadsheets, and they had little understanding of browsers and search and how important the two were poised to become. From their point of view a browser was just another IT cost to be minimized, not a profit center. I wonder what they’d say today if you told them that Chrome was recently valued at about $20 billion dollars.

A few years later I was still at Hyper-Scale company working on a new Internet-based video product when Firefox launched. Firefox was way ahead of the competition. It had Firebug, which was far better than any other developer tools, and it had tabs. I told everyone at work to switch to Firefox. I didn’t explain. I just said: within 5 minutes of using Firefox, if you don’t see why it’s way better, come talk to me. Everyone at work, and practically everyone I knew switched to Firefox.

EPILOGUE

I look back on the two years I spent helping to create a new browser, and even though it never launched, it is one of my most memorable work experiences. I learned that big batch, waterfall, big bang approaches are inherently risky. The longer the elapsed time between “good idea” and “in the user’s hands” the more risk your are taking on. The world, technologies, and the economy never stop changing. To reduce risks, you need to work in small, incremental batches, release early and often, learn and adapt, and prototype frequently, involve existing and prospective users to reduce risk. But not all risks are bad. Some are vital. Our decision to go with a tabbed browser was a risk, and a good risk. The browser and the attached service would have been wildly successful, had we launched. I learned that deadlines are important and motivational, but no deadline is ever more important than everyone’s health.

It feels great to work at Mozilla Firefox today, the independent browser that survived the gauntlet to launch and practically take over the browser world with about 35% of marketshare at peak. I’m proud to be working on introducing tab groups to Firefox. Tab groups are the biggest boost to productivity since tabs. I’m also excited to be exploring other productivity boosting features that aim to automate some of the annoying, time consuming, or difficult browser organization and management tasks, several of which involve those newfangled browser tabs.

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NB: Names and details have been changed.