Kamla: This is Kamla Bhatt. We bring you part 2 of our conversation with Mitchell Baker, Chairperson of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation. In part 2, she talks about Mozilla’s relationship with Google and the success of Firefox. Here is Mitchell.
Kamla: Tell us about your relationship with Google. You have a revenue sharing relationship with Google and you recently renewed an agreement that goes on till 2010?
Mitchell: 2011.
Kamla: 2011. Now this will ensure income stability for you but what about Google’s Chrome and what impact will it have on the relationship because there is a sense among certain people in the community that the folks that’ll switch to chrome will come from the Firefox group.
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Mitchell:. That’s a set of related questions.. The first one is what impact does the revenue relationship have on the product or what impact does Chrome have on the revenue relationship. You know, I’ve said for many years that we keep the revenue relationship with Google separate from our product. And it sounds naïve I think people don’t actually believe me that the revenue relationship is unrelated to our product and we don’t talk about the development of Firefox with Google and there’s no feature or product review or vetting because we have this revenue relationship. They are quite separate. So that remains true.
So as to Firefox, the revenue relationship is irrelevant to what the product is or becomes. We’ll develop Firefox as best we can; as we think best.
Firefox has a large share of the early adopters among its users and so I think we all expect that many of those early adopters will go look at Chrome. We expect most of them will come back. And there’s a bunch of reasons for those but clearly some will stay. We expect Chrome to have some market share; we don’t actually expect it to like be a giant or take-off or any of those things but it will certainly have some market share.
And it is quite possible that the early- the first few shares, the first few points of market share come from Firefox. I’m not sure that’s any body’s particular goal and we intent to win back, or we we get those users. But you know that’s quite likely.
You know, we expect that some of thse people may stay with Chrome for-I don’t know; release, two releases, whatever and come back. So we’re not actually particularly worried about losing many of our users.
But as you point out, we do recognize that there is this very early adopter curve that may bounce around and certainly look at Chrome. And I think that we’re seeing already that there is a sort of jump in Chrome market share and looks lower already so we think we’re seeing some of that pattern already.