January 8th, 2008
A clean hand-off at Mozilla
As in a relay race, the key to a successful enterprise is often the hand-off, a change in leadership at the top.
When it’s messy the whole company can suffer. It can die or be taken over.
When it’s done right the chief operating officer slides into the chief executive’s chair, the old CEO waves buh-bye, and there’s not much to see.
It’s good to note this seems to be the case with Mozilla, which moved John Lilly up and Mitchell Baker into the role of chairman this week.
Both discussed the transition on their blogs, and while it should be noted that Mozilla Corp. is the for-profit arm of the Mozilla Foundation, there are no plans for an IPO.
“Keeping the Internet open and participatory — is the most important thing for us to pursue, full stop,” wrote Lilly. He and Baker are on the same page. Nothing to see here.
This should be good news for Firefox fans, who flood the boards here whenever Paula reports on a new beta being released. That’s an important part of the process, because the more people download a beta, and report bugs, the better the finished version gets.
Mozilla has one big hit in Firefox and one less-successful unit in the Thunderbird e-mail client. Lilly will try to turn that around, but he has his work cut out for him, given the spam problems which POP3 systems have so much trouble with.
Beyond that it’s just a question of corporate maturity, and Lilly’s being better able to handle that than the start-up phase Baker headed, again according to her blog.
Besides, Lilly has such great executive style hair. We think it will turn silver! Maybe when that IPO happens.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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