Posted on Thursday, May 10 2007 @ 1:41 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
APC Mag had an interview with Mitchell Baker, the CEO of Mozilla. They talk about the creation of Firefox, how the free browser makes $55 million a year, the future of Firefox, the competition, Firefox 3.0 and other Firefox-related subjects.
Dan Warne (APC): Firefox seems to have been a stunning success, but it can be hard to get a true idea of just how small it was to begin with, and how big it has become.
Mitchell Baker: Yes -- the Mozilla project started in 1998 and was originally housed inside Netscape - a virtual organisation. We had thought about having an independent organisation for a long time and finally in 2003 it was decided it was time to give us some seed money, some critical assets and the Mozilla name.
But in the short‑term even the development machines we had were pretty critical, as there was no known financial sustainability path at the time.
So the foundation started with ten or eleven employees and we grew by maybe two or three employees in the next 15 months. So when we shipped Firefox we had maybe 15 employees, it was very slim.
Click
here for the interview.
