Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox

Its products are free. Its work force is largely volunteer. Its meetings are open to anyone. It's a nonprofit. It may be the hottest tech company in America.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 NEXT

“Woo-hoo."
"Whoever just joined, you're breaking things up. It might help if you muted your phone."

"We got a lot of good stuff done last week."

"Fish got that working; that's pretty cool."

"We need to get serious."

"Whoever is talking right now has great ideas."

"Please send blankets."

Welcome to the weekly meeting at Mozilla Corp. It's a bit hard to say who's in attendance because it's open to everyone. That's "everyone," as in the human race. The phone number and online chat coordinates are publicly posted, as is the date, time, and agenda, for anyone who might feel like having a hand in Mozilla's strategies and operations.

The comments fly, seemingly at random or at cross-purposes. Mentioned almost in passing is word of the completion of the software program that has been released to the public as Firefox 2. Firefox, of course, is the Web browser that has established itself as the one serious competitor to Microsoft's (NASDAQ:MSFT) utterly dominant Internet Explorer. It has been downloaded more than 200 million times, making it one of the hottest high-tech products in history. It is so hot, in fact, that Microsoft has been forced to play catch-up and release its first significantly retooled version of Internet Explorer in five years, which offers some of the features that Firefox has long boasted. One can only imagine how difficult it would have been to get a ticket to the meeting at which Microsoft managers reported its completion.

The Mozilla meeting quickly moves from software progress reports, which don't seem to ignite much interest, to a discussion of what Mozilla can do to create closer ties to the thousands of volunteer programmers around the world who are largely responsible for developing Firefox and Mozilla's other, lesser-known products. This subject generates a lively discussion, and draws several comments, offered in a distinctive verbal style that manages to be laconic, forceful, and a bit playful all at once, from a heretofore mostly silent participant. When someone wonders whether Mozilla should offer an organized program to help train volunteer developers, this voice quickly chimes in: "Maybe we can find a way to have smaller groups that self-organize and then get together." And then, after a moment, the voice suggests essentially the opposite. "Maybe we should hire somebody here to be the focal point."

The voice belongs to Mitchell Baker, who leads Mozilla under the official title of Chief Lizard Wrangler. That Baker is fond of tossing out what seem like contradictory ideas in quick succession is entirely in keeping with a background that includes being a California Caucasian who speaks Mandarin, a political lefty who ended up at a corporate law firm before taking over a fiercely anticorporate organization, and a devoted parent with a passion for performing on the trapeze. Baker even seems to have two different haircuts that face off on opposite sides of her head, unified only partially by a dose of red dye. Finally, in spite of the first name, Baker is a woman, one of the few who have risen to prominence in one of the most male-dominated segments of the high-tech industry.

As a mass of apparent contradictions, Baker, 48, is a good fit for Mozilla--which is, after all, the profit-making arm of a nonprofit organization, a community-run company whose executives cut secret deals with big businesses, a 70-employee start-up that has threatened the ambitions of one of the world's corporate titans, and a well-funded company that depends mostly on unpaid enthusiasts to develop its software and to handle its marketing, customer support, even strategic planning. As whimsical as the title Lizard Wrangler may be, it's probably closer to the mark than "CEO" or any other term the conventional business world has to offer. "Baker and Mozilla are wrestling with new questions about the boundaries between communities and the corporation," says Siobhan O'Mahony, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies new forms of organization. "She's creating a new management model based on engaging a business ecosystem." Baker, and the organization she leads, clearly are not much like what has come before them. But they may be a lot like what entrepreneurs and companies will become in the years ahead.

That Mozilla and Mitchell Baker have been heralded as the vanguard seems highly unlikely, especially considering that both came to prominence amid the excesses and bumbles of the dot-com boom and bust--specifically the browser wars. By 1998, Netscape Communications had seen its Navigator browser, the software that opened up the Web to most of the world, yield its dominance to Microsoft's newer, faster Internet Explorer. In an effort to broaden its impact, Netscape had embedded Navigator in a small suite of e-mail and other programs called Communicator, but the result was bloated and clunky. In a drive to compete against Microsoft and salvage its fading reputation among the tech-savvy, Netscape made Communicator an "open-source" product--that is, it publicly released the programming code so that anyone could tinker with it. In 1999, the company spun off and funded a small project called Mozilla (the name supposedly was derived from "Mosaic killer," Mosaic having been the first browser) to coordinate the tinkering so that there would be an official product, albeit one that wasn't controlled by Netscape.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 NEXT

Try a RISK-FREE Issue of Inc. Today!

Renew | Contact Us | Current Issue

Select Services