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Product Vision

Where we are, where we're going

I'm coming up on the end of my sixth year of working on Hubs at Mozilla, and find myself in a position to advise the team where to aim, and why.

A little history

The Hubs team started in September 2017 within Mozilla's Emerging Technologies (R&D) department, with a basic direction:

Without a shared set of libraries and APIs, Social MR experiences on the web are often inconsistent, with limited support for identity and avatars, and lack basic tools to allow users to find, share, and experience content together.

To address this, we are investing in areas that we believe will help fill in some of the missing pieces of Social MR experiences on the web. To start, we will be delivering open source components and services [...] for developers to deliver rich and compelling Social MR experiences with a few lines of code. In addition, we will be building experimental Social MR products of our own in order to showcase the technology and to provide motivating examples.

We launched Hubs as a website in April, the following year:

We think creating your first virtual space to spend time in should be as easy as creating your first website.

We are working on ways to reduce the barriers to avatar customization so anyone can create an avatar that embodies how they want to be seen.

We think Mixed Reality communication should *complement, not replace, the existing ways we connect on the web, like chat and voice.

For immersive communication to click, it needs social presence and a shared media context.

Social presence is the feeling that you’re “there” with someone else. It’s low-latency spatial audio. It’s knowing what others are looking at. It’s feeling crowded if they get too close. It’s knowing they’re confused when they tilted their head to the side.

A shared media context roughly translates to, “a multiplayer virtual space”. It’s being able to bring in videos, images, models, and webpages from around the web. It’s the super power you gain in exchange for what you give up from real-world interaction (touch, smell, microexpressions, etc).

Spatial audio is simulating the physics of audio waves traveling through space. It’s what makes something far away sound quiet. It’s why you can tell if someone is talking to your left or right. It’s what allows groups of people meeting in MR to carry on multiple simultaneous conversations like they would in a conference hallway.

Immersive communication will be as common as video calls a few years from now, specifically because it is better than any other medium for groups of people to socialize online.

Video calls require everyone to take turns talking. Be on camera. Body language is broadcasted to the group. One screen is visible at a time.

Games can't stand in for communication tools because games are too niche. They are about themselves. They have opinionated art styles. They have objectives and achievements. They are often platform dependent.

We are deeply social creatures, but the natural behavior we exhibit in groups is fundamentally at odds with the dominant tools for online realtime today.

Why Mozilla?

When software mediates communication between humans – code is law.

Privacy, accessibility, security are not guaranteed. We must not allow the next medium of communication to be weaponized.

To prevent this, we must democratize the tools for creation, decentralize participation, and create profit-neutral governance and interoperability standards.

In April 2020, we launched Hubs Cloud.

“The plan was not to try and create a singular, shared online experience owned entirely by Mozilla.”

So, what was the plan?

The Secret Mozilla Hubs Master Plan articulated a vision for a minimum-viable metaverse.

Importantly, it asked:

What things may not be needed for the metaverse to reach global scale?

In other words, the plan did not just provide a roadmap of features to build. Its guiding principles included what not to build, and why. The vision laid out by this documented is specific, opinionated, and is based on specific hypotheses about the world.

You might expect all strategy documents to these qualities, but as Richard P. Rumelt observed, "Unfortunately, good strategy is the exception, not the rule." He suggests that good strategy comes from an underlying structure he calls the kernel, containing three elements:

A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.

A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. Thsi is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters

Balaji Srinivasan articulates related ideas in Market Research, Wireframing, and Design. Specifically, he outlines a metaphor he calls "The Idea Maze":

A good idea is not just the one sentence which gains you entrance to the maze. It's the collection of smaller tweaks that defines a path through the maze, along with explanations of why this particular combination will work while others nearby have failed. Note that this requires an extremely detailed understanding of your current and potential competitors;

What's in a vision?

Since then, the Hubs team has gone through significant changes.

Covid caused tremendous excitement for technologies that promised to bring people together online. Zoom exploded in popularity. Now that the restrictions have lifted, many companies and institutions are returning to offices and schools and are leaning away from remote gatherings.

We have seen excitement about immersive technologies lessen and enthusiasm for machine learning grow.

Despite this, I still believe the Hubs -- specifically under Mozilla's leadership -- is poised to succeed.

I will try to articulate a path forward as best I can, keeping in mind everything I know about the team, the market, the product, and the problems we can solve.

Unfinished

The following sections are not finished, as I'm still working through the outline or what I think and want to express.

Fundamentals

Concrete actions

Simplification, Continued

But what about [thing]?

What about money?