Kamla: This is Kamla Bhatt. Today my guest is Mitchell Baker, who is Chairperson of Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation. She is a lawyer turned tech evangelist who helped set up Netscape’s legal department in the early 1990s. Netscape launched the internet revolution and was the harbinger of the dot com boom that made those three letters “IPO” world famous.
About ten years ago, Mitchell helped found the Mozilla Foundation; a non-profit organization. In 2004, Mozilla launched its Firefox browser and the rest is history. The Economists described Firefox’s tale as a curious one and we are here to find out more about this curious tale from Mitchell. Welcome to the show.
Mitchell: Thanks. It’s great to be here.
Kamla: What is the curious tale?
Mitchell: The curious tale of Mozilla?
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Mozilla is the tale of something everyone knew could never happen. A few things happened in the early 90s after Netscape’s great success, Microsoft appeared on the scene, Microsoft had its own browser. Eventually, through a series of activities that that browser controlled-something like 97% meaning that 97 out of every 100 people who ever accessed the Internet always did it through one single means.
And so Microsoft had the view that the browser was irrelevant, it was part of the Operating System. It didn’t matter, further development on it didn’t matter. They disbanded their team and the experience got worse and worse. If you think back to the say 2000, 2001 what it was like to use a browser with pop up ads, and spyware and machine slowing down and people being forced to get rid of their old machines and buying new ones to sort of start over. That was a direct effect of the poor quality of the browser.
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