John Lilly stepped up to become chief executive of Mozilla, moving up from his role as chief operating officer, in January. Lilly’s been with the company that created the browser that is fast becoming a rival to Internet Explorer – Firefox, since 2005. The year Firefox 1.5 was released to the masses.
Mozilla now caters for 20 percent of web user’s browsing the internet – not bad for an open source project that has fewer than 200 employees.
News reporter Pete Carey who writes for the San Hose Mercury recently interviewed Lilly, asking him how a company like Mozilla works, as well as his feelings about Google’s new Chrome browser.
Carey started by asking the Mozilla chief exec, how exactly he makes a company like Mozilla work. Lilly replied that Mozilla is an “amazing” company. He said that when the company started it had 15 staff and over 20 million users, but not its more like 180 staff and around 200 million users. He said, “About 40 percent of code was not written by people at Mozilla”, rather people around the world, working late nights and weekends.
The journalist reminded Lilly of the time he said Mozilla was a “chaordic” organisation, and asked him to explain what he meant by that. Lilly said that the idea is to “take responsibility and authority and decision-making and push it as far to the edges as possible”. He says that lots of systems use this method, and although it may be “unpredictable at some level”, the system is “very tolerant of people coming and going and contributing”. This he said can result in “unexpected innovation”.
Carey asked Lilly whether Mozilla could be described as a democracy, but Lilly said the company does have a structure, with people who are “empowered to make decisions without consensus or votes”. He mentions that it is “very hard for me to override a product decision”, as it is “not the way we work”.
Carey moves on to the subject of Google’s latest effort to take over the internet – Chrome. He asks, how exactly will that affect Mozilla, noting that the Firefox browser is funded by licensing payments Google. Lilly says he doesn’t know how it will pan-out, but believes they have a “good relationship” with the search giant. He notes that some of the components of the Chrome browser are shared with some of Firefox’s components. Lilly doesn’t fell that his company is “competing” with Google, because both companies are helping to make the web more accessible.
Carey asks if Mozilla ever dreams of an empire. Lilly defends the company’s morals, “no, no, no.” he says that the company talks about their mission every day, which is to keep the web “open and participatory”. Lilly said that when Mozilla started in 2003, it felt that 96 percent of the internet being controlled by Microsoft “wasn’t good for anyone”, adding that Mozilla’s “open source nature is significant”.
The reporter asked Lilly what would happen if someone ever came up with a better open source browser than Firefox, and Mozilla disappeared, would you class that as a success or failure for the company. Lilly said that while that isn’t exactly “plan A”, Mozilla’s mission is to keep the web “open”. He added that Mozilla are aware that they’ve set the bar pretty high, and must continually perform to high standards with future versions of Firefox, and its mobile browsers.
Posted in browser by admin on October 10th, 2008 
