| Mozilla Taps New CEO |
Jan. 08, 2008
First Red Hat turned to Delta for its new CEO. Now Mozilla has appointed John Lilly its new CEO. While Lilly has some time in at Mozilla, most of his past has been spent in proprietary software companies.
Lilly, who had served as chief operating officer for Mozilla for the last two years, is taking the CEO driver seat immediately. Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's former CEO, is being kicked upstairs to be chairman of the board of directors.
Before coming to Mozilla in 2005 as the new company's vice president of business development, Lilly was the founder of Reactivity, an XML gateway provider. Cisco Systems acquired Reactivity in 2007. Before this, Lilly worked at Apple, Sun Microsystems and Trilogy Software.
In a press statement, Baker said that, "John Lilly is the right person to guide the maturation of Mozilla. John has been instrumental in developing an organization that is both embedded in Mozilla and open-source DNA and that can function at the extremely high degree of effectiveness that our setting requires."
In his blog, Lilly wrote, "Sometimes in life, you find an opportunity to make a difference in something you care about, and it feels like, even though you didn't know it at the time, that the last few years have really just been practice, giving you the background, skills and ability to really help. And in a very few circumstances--once or twice in a lifetime, if you're lucky--the opportunity you get to make a difference is one that has a very large, even global impact."
Moving from idealism to the practical, Lilly wrote that his immediate goals are to get Firefox 3 out of the door, help the commercial Thunderbird e-mail client company launch, and improve Mozilla's "economic sustainability." According to sources close to Mozilla, it's the last item that's the important one.
When Mozilla was spun off from the Mozilla Foundation, the intention was to make a viable business from the Firefox Web browser. While Baker was seen as a great visionary, she wasn't seen as being the business leader needed to turn Mozilla from a million-dollar company to a company that measures its revenue in the tensor better still, hundredsof millions of dollars.
Mitchell, in her own blog post, said the best use of her talents is to take advantage of her "unique attributes within the Mozilla world. I've had a leadership role since the early days and along with Brendan Eich I've been involved in, and often instrumental in, almost every major strategic and organizational decision following the launch of Mozilla. My focus ranges across the Mozilla world, and no one title captures the scope of what I think about and where I try to lead. I have a vision of the Internet and online life and a positive user experience and of Mozilla's role in creating these that is far broader than browsers, e-mail clients and even technology in general."
In short, Mitchell will continue to work on Mozilla's vision, rather than Mozilla's business development. Specifically, she'll be working on standards and Mozilla's hybrid open-source project/business model.
Mitchell said that "Lilly is the right person to guide the product and organizational maturity of MoCo. John has been doing more and more of this since he took on the COO role in August of 2006." Therefore, she "realized that John will be a better CEO for the MoCo going forward than I would be.
Steven J. Vaughan Nichols
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