On the other hand, there are some fundamentals that favour Firefox. It's a great product, small, fast and more secure. You don't see anybody disputing that. The next question is how much mileage there is to get out of it, ultimately. Certainly, it has already caused Microsoft to improve IE.
Why is that? Why should it take something like Firefox to improve IE?
Microsoft does not respond and improve products otherwise. The Mozilla Foundation does not have financial goals, so it can take credit for whatever improvements happen in the browser, whether they're in Firefox or not. By the standards of the project itself, to the extent that the net result is that IE's fundamental security problems get addressed, that, too, is a victory. As for the analysts who look at this, I doubt that's their criteria for success.
The other thing is that enterprises are not, in many cases, very satisfied with a single Microsoft alternative. This is a known and longstanding problem. They have been held back by a lack of alternatives that are comparable and satisfying in all the ways important to enterprises.
With Firefox, which begins to pass the threshold for enterprise acceptance, the question is, How will they respond? It's not a question of the economics of it, but will it help them to manage their computing infrastructure better? As for whether Firefox is overhyped, we'll have to see how this plays out.
What exactly is your role at the Mozilla Foundation?
I am the board chair. It's like being on the board of any for-profit or nonprofit -- I'm not at all involved in day-to-day operations but rather with overall governance and consulting on strategic directions. So I meet regularly with (Mozilla Foundation president) Mitchell Baker.
I've been covering Mozilla almost since the beginning, I've spoken with Mitchell Baker many times, and I've still never gotten a good sense of her.
I have to say that I have often found that people underestimate her. I know that when the project was inside Netscape/AOL, she did not receive the regard from the AOL executives that I thought was really due to her. Mozilla is a really interesting and complex project and organisation.
I think it was like the Harry Potter of open source. You know how all the movies open with him living with his aunt and uncle, who give him no respect and lock him up? People had written off Mozilla on multiple occasions. I felt like and continue to feel like she does a remarkable job in a low-key way in shepherding that project through unique and difficult circumstances. I think the renaissance with Firefox and Thunderbird -- without her this would not have happened.
I respect her leadership, which is very low-key and not charismatic -- the opposite of the Larry Ellison style. She has been effective in the face of real challenges. I got involved at the point when we extracted it from AOL.
How did that come about, anyway?
There was a recognition that it didn't make sense for that project to be inside AOL, but it was sort of stuck in the birth canal. It turned out that I was able to act as an intermediary or midwife because I know Mitchell, who has worked at the Open Source Applications Foundation, and I also know the vice chairman of AOL, Ted Leonsis, who, at the time, was running the AOL service. And he was one of the top handful of executives at the whole thing.
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