Indonesia is one of the country where Mozilla Firefox's browser market share is above 50% (some say 70%), without any promotion or even official involvement from Mozilla Foundation. The number is so big, it caught the eyes of Mozilla's top level boys. Funny thing is, they can't seem to figure out the reason behind this phenomenon.
During a dinner with Mozilla's Gen Kanai, i pointed out that Indonesian have many early adopters in terms of technology. These influencers and early adopters started the wave of perception that Mozilla Firefox is way better than Microsoft IE, and common people just bought it without any understanding about the features itself. Don't get me wrong, Mozilla Firefox is an awesome browser and has tons of incredible features but most Indonesian user doesn't know and doesn't care. They use Firefox because their geek friends told them it's better than IE.
And because Indonesia is very popular with its Cyber Cafe (due to slow internet penetration across the country), almost every Cyber Cafe uses Mozilla Firefox as their default browser which increase the word of mouth marketing even more. So these kinds of mouth-to-mouth marketing is proven to be highly effective for Mozilla Firefox.
This theory of mine is quite weird, but it also answers the question of why Indonesia (despite the high user base) have so small group of people involved in Mozilla Firefox's development. And by development i mean submitting bugs, patches, translations, even as small as giving feedbacks.
Well, that's my theory. What's yours?
