Lenny
Mendonca and I interviewed “Chief Lizard Wrangler” Mitchell Baker of the
Mozilla Foundation a couple months back. It was just published online in the
McKinsey Quarterly. You can read it here;
registration is free. Mitchell describes how she led an open-source project
inside Netscape, and “spun it out” to start Mozilla –- now best known for the
Firefox browser, which has over 150 million users. Mitchell also writes a
fantastic blog.
I
have talked to Mitchell quite a few times in the past, and am consistently
impressed with her persistence and ability to articulate bold ideas and her
vision. I attended their annual company-wide meeting, and she suggested
that Mozilla’s primary mission was encouraging decentralized participation on
the web, and the company’s software (especially the ways it is developed and
spread) is an embodiment of that overarching goal. Mitchell was CEO of
Mozilla from its founding and just recently became Chair and the new CEO is
John Lilly (a leader with astounding skill and an old friend). Also, John
writes a great blog too.
Mozilla
is a fascinating case study of how innovation doesn’t need to result from a
command and control system, that it can be distributed and open source, and
still produce products that are among the best in the world, in this case
giving Microsoft Explorer a run for its money.
Bob - there's an very good Charlie Rose interview w/Mitchell just as she was segueing into this job from Netscape. Don't have the URL handy but it's easy to find with the searchable archives he's put up (speaking of Web 3.0).
Recommended to you and your readers.
Posted by: dblwyo | February 12, 2008 at 01:52 PM