John Lilly, CEO of Mozilla, and Mitchell Baker, Chair of Mozilla, co-wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal on October 29, 2009 called “Net Neutrality: Spur to Entrepreneurship”.
In the article, John and Mitchell publicly voice their support for the FCC’s recent “net neutrality” proposal. They say that since 1995, open Internet standards have spawned a generation of entrepreneurs who went on to create great companies like Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Salesforce.com, Expedia, Monster, and Netflix. These companies alone represent nearly $300 billion of market capitalization. They say that users have also downloaded more than 1.6 billion Firefox add-ons created by a vibrant ecosystem of developers, from hobbyists to Fortune 100 companies, and that Mozilla has been able to compete on its own merits with the dominant browser, Internet Explorer.
Wow! Talk about validation for the small but growing add-on developer community out there. You have the CEO and Chair of Mozilla talking about how add-ons are a key part of the strategy in their competition head-to-head with Microsoft.
And John and Mitchell are right. Firefox does do a better job handling add-ons than Internet Explorer. It is commonly understood by add-on developers that Firefox is an easier browser to create add-ons for. One other supporting piece of evidence for this position is that the Firefox add-on gallery (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/) is over twice as popular as the Internet Explorer add-on gallery (http://www.ieaddons.com/).
Nice work, Mozilla, on the article and on your add-on strategy.
Here’s to net neutrality continuing into the future so another generation of entrepreneurs can build the next wave of great companies.
Interesting to hear that John Lilly stepped down as Mozilla CEO- http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/11/mozilla-ceo-john-lilly-stepping-down-to-join-greylock-partners/