Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox

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Released in November of 2004, Firefox Version 1.0 hit the million-download mark in four days and the 10 million mark in 30 days. A few thousand volunteer marketers had joined the campaign. Two months later, about 30,000 people were helping. Then a volunteer made a suggestion: What if the community could get, say, 10,000 people to each throw in $30 to buy a New York Times ad for Firefox that would list the names of all the contributors? Within 10 days of opening up the offer, the list was close to 10,000, and in December the Times carried a two-page ad. Over the next year, the number of marketing volunteers climbed to more than 100,000 and Firefox was being downloaded at an average rate of 250,000 times per day.

Mozilla's headquarters are next to Google's (NASDAQ:GOOG) in Mountain View, California. But where the latter company's imposing office complexes twist through acre after acre like a 21st-century industrial version of a topiary maze, Mozilla's digs are buried in a corner of a small village of modest wood-sided structures vaguely reminiscent of ski lodges or barracks. The parking lot is full of aging Honda Civics and Toyota Corollas. At the front office, there's no receptionist. A piece of paper suggests you come on up and knock.

Computer workstations abound, but so do toys and stuffed animals, and a cozy canteen offers a neatly arranged cornucopia of berries, nuts, and cereals, as well as an electric massage chair and a cappuccino machine. There's a lot of energy coursing through these offices, and a chunk of it comes from the nine student interns currently in residence. One of them is John Carey, who was a Missouri State University student when Mozilla plucked him out of the Midwest and set him up with a free apartment nearby, along with the assignment to make a video of the behind-the-scenes work to prepare the next major version of Firefox. He readily agreed, but also professed an interest in arranging for a crop circle in the shape of the Firefox logo. "We thought he was kidding," says Dotzler. In August, the 40,000-square-foot logo was pressed into an oat field near Salem, Oregon, with the help of a crew of college students, making it one of the largest, not to mention more offbeat, advertisements ever created.

The offices are also home to Mozilla's management. But many of the company's 70 full-time employees are based in Toronto, Tokyo, and Paris. It's not unusual for a firm to have to wrestle with problems presented by a geographically scattered work force, but in Mozilla's case the challenge is extreme. That's because what drives Mozilla isn't the 70 employees but the nearly 200,000 volunteers who do most of the product development and marketing.

Open-source software organizations such as those that developed the Linux PC operating system and the Apache Web server program have long wrestled with ways to keep lines of communication open and to distribute decision making among vast communities of mostly software-developer volunteers. But Mozilla can't fall back on these precedents, either. Unlike other open-source ventures, which tend to be niche products embraced by techies who become fiercely loyal to and dependent on the software, Firefox is a mass-market, consumer-oriented product that can easily be replaced should it fail to offer distinct advantages over the competition. That means Mozilla has to move faster and be more innovative and marketing-oriented than its open-source cousins.

But the way Mozilla really strains the conventional open-source model is that it makes money--pretty good money. Baker won't reveal the details, but the company is said to have pulled in revenue of around $70 million last year, most of it from a deal with Google in which the search engine giant kicks back a commission on ad revenue obtained when a Firefox user enlists the browser's Google search bar and ends up clicking on a sponsored link. Mozilla has struck a similar deal with Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO). In spite of some grumbling about how money would "contaminate" Mozilla's noble mission, the Firefox community has seemed to approve of the opportunity to bring in revenue. But the community was not intimately involved in the decision-making process. How could it have been? Negotiating a big deal with a large commercial partner requires speed, decisiveness, and, most ticklishly, confidentiality. Managers at high-tech giants these days won't even discuss sports until a nondisclosure agreement has been signed.

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