Mozilla's Gary Kovacs to step down as CEO(blog.mozilla.org) |
Mozilla's Gary Kovacs to step down as CEO(blog.mozilla.org) |
Basically, Mozilla, don't change, you're awesome.
Edit: even corporations of tomorrow will not be immune to politics it seems - rereading the post and blog makes it sound much more like a Eich/Baker coup than a well planned transition. It will be very odd to have him stay on the board - two ex-CEOs on your board makes for a lot of looking up not down for the next one
To me, this is less "how companies of tomorrow can run", and more like a bunch of techies who hit the jackpot and so can have fun building whatever technology they want.
(Which is awesome, I'm just saying I think Mozilla has a pretty unique situation.)
I really think we are seeing a shift in organisations - one comparable to that experienced after the in enticing of printing press in 1451. Europe went from a literacy rate of 2% to one of 20+ in a hundred years, and suddenly the trading companies and churches and governments were staffed with people who could read and write - and that changed everything. Literate companies out competed the hell of their illiterate counterparts. And the renanissance saw new forms of company, new trading horizons, enabled in part thanks to, well, letters.
Mozilla is an example of this new company - it is staffed by the code-literate and it is out-competing Nokia, Samsung, Microsoft and holding its own against google/chrome/android who are themselves arguably built of the same DNA
Code literacy throughout the company is important but it then demands other things - remote working is probably the biggest thing - it does enable hiring the best in the world, yes, but it makes transparency of decision making so much more natural that it will most likely become a default.
I think we shall see companies be I ing more open in their working practises, in their internal processes and probably in their balance sheets.
For the best part of a generation at least code literate people are going to be in massive demand as companies like Mozilla show that coding is a massive force multiplier for any company in any industry. And that is not merely going to be higher wages - when the force multiplier is big enough it will simply reshape the corporation around itself.
Mozilla does amusingly also show that the politics of human relations will never go away, but there is a elephant in the room now, and it's not going away till long after we retire - and coping with the impact of that elephant will be the defining characteristic of the next twenty years of organisational and intentstional change.
Software is not eating the world like tigers do - it is eating the world like oceans erode cliffs - re shaping the shoreline and the tides.
Sure the Memshrink project was a great success. It's the reason I have switched from Chrome back to FF on my netbook. However, on my desktops and home Chrome remains default.
Mozilla had their chance with the electrolysis multiprocessing architecture, but killed it off to focus on Firefox OS, the Mobile OS that none wants. So their desktop browser, their bread and butter, is gimped compared to modern multithreaded browsers like IE and Chrome. Everytime I give FF another shot on my desktops, it's always the same result. The UI starts lagging when I view heavy duty JavaScript/HMTL5 pages.
Also in their petty battles with Google, they have refused to implement some great features like WebP. Mozilla gave a list of features missing, and yet when Google addressed them all in the next WebP revision, they still refused to add the patch.
Memshrink kept FF in the game, but in recent years Mozilla has consistently made poor long term strategic decisions.
Anyway, The project has recently been "rebooted", so to speak, and it looks like we can finally make it happen without breaking add-ons, which is great!
[1] - https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/rust-dev/2013-April/00355...
Searching for a new CEO is a huge distraction, particularly at this crucial time when they're trying to prove a major pivot and work out commercial deals with device makers.
I'm sending positive vibes to my former colleagues!
I'm typing this into a laptop running Kubuntu (in my kitchen) which is based on a mainframe operating system (I used to talk to a PDP11 via teletype half a lifetime ago).
Won't mobile phones be running Unix soon as well?
It's a fine relationship for both sides that simply doesn't require love, or even very much like. That being said, there's a lot to like about a relationship that's been such a win-win for Mozilla and Google for nearly a decade. How many other business relationships between major Web players have done so well for so long?
iPhone came out in 2007, one could argue that mobile was growing fast even before the iPhone. By 2010 Android was a huge thing too. So, what took Mozilla 3 years to figure out about mobile exactly? Even Opera seemed to see mobile as a huge deal long before 2010.
We had Minimo, MicroB, etc. before 2010, for all the good it did. Were you paying attention? Did you see any open source smartphone winners back then? I did not.
Android did help flatten and uplift the smartphone space, and make it open. Qualcomm helped too. Kudos to those two!
/be
Yet Moz apparently is looking to become another OS provider? I'm wondering if they might take the FB approach instead.
FB will succeed now with Android, there appears to be no App Store issues. But my bet they'll also force Apple to cry Uncle! relatively soon. Now THAT would be progress
I'm looking forward to seeing how this evolves, and if it truly becomes open. Seems unlikely because hardware has really long release cycles.
Did Mozilla get any promises from vendors on that front?
or is he moving to some other company? opera?
I'm glad to hear the electrolysis project has been rebooted. That plus a working silent update( see bug #711475 ) would go a long way to making Firefox relevant again.
PS: I'm not against this, I'd really love to be able to dock a phone and use it for desktop tasks with a 1080p monitor and proper keyboard. Sort of the Rob Pike approach.
Strategically, the big problem all such approaches face remains, and it may even get worse as Android matures. Google owns that OS and controls its APIs and rules for extensions.
Anyway, Android 4 doesn't even fit on 256M phones single-core phones, where Firefox OS is entering the market. It is priced out of the launch countries.
So taking a high-end-focused Android-only approach of "[do an FB-Home-like launcher] instead" does not make sense tactically or strategically.
"Also" rather than "instead" can help, we're exploring in the context of Firefox for Android and the Web Runtime based on it -- but it's not exclusively & clearly winning such that we would bet Mozilla on it.
/be
Yes.
Arguably the most successful software company (Apple) is a poster child of using open software to its closed advantage.
Software literacy is also highly divisive. It highly rewards the literates but punishes the rest. Because of that it is very important that people use it for ideas that are not just profit.
We really need more models like Mozilla, GNU, or Craigslist.
As for the rest, yes illiteracy does count against the illiterate - I think that is a public policy issue. The company vs the state? Historically speaking the one with the army tends to win. Yes regulation is important to ensure companies deliver social value - we have seen that in finance, but that is not a programming issue - back to public policy
As for being open and doing good - yes laudable aims, and I suspect that like now, companies that are more open, more socially beneficial will have the edge of goodwill - but right now the force multiplier of code literacy trumps all.
Edit: I guess I am saying, the force multiplier is so big, that relying on normal market operations to deliver an optimal social good (ie utopia) is a little foolish - we need enlightened governments with perfect regulatory touch to be in tune globally with all the challenges facing the human race.
We're boned.
added: my reason for asking is that I run FF (release update channel) and I genuinely wonder whether it would be more responsive if it weren't for my slow hard drive. (in particular, I am hypothesizing that every time I visit a new page, its URL gets committed to disk.) was not trying to slam FF; please don't downvote me!
I noticed better memory usage and general performance increases within the last few releases to the beta channel (sorry, I can't pinpoint which one it was). I started to use FF again a few months ago, and found I still needed to restart the browser at least once a day to keep things responsive (and I don't usually have more than a dozen tabs open). Then, after one of the updates, I didn't need to do that, and I didn't notice any performance degradation over the course of several days.
ex: within the range of say, $250MM ~ $350MM
It seems that technical people will prefer the better solution.
Delusional much?