WordCamp San Francisco 2009: John Lilly and Lessons from Mozilla
by Patrick Havens
John Lilly
John Lilly is the CEO of Mozilla Corporation. He joined Mozilla Corporation in 2005 as Vice President of Business Development and also served as COO and a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to this, Lilly was the founder, CEO, CTO and VP of products for Reactivity, a software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007. Previously, he held staff positions at Apple, Sun Microsystems and Trilogy Software. Lilly has been an active participant in open source projects, serving on the boards of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Participatory Culture Foundation. As CEO, John focuses on the product, technology and execution of the Mozilla Corporation.
John Lilly is introduced.
Lessons from Mozilla
7 insights, 2 problems
And some thoughts for 2009
And not the same for every project.
Slides flashing by too fast, EMBEDED BELOW.
Make products that don’t suck.
Push decisions as far out as possible.
1. High agreement on core values
2. Desicions rests with module owner
3.
They use a lot of conversation.
They have get togethers but loves the idea of camps all over the world.
Going over the makeup of the organization.
RC1 is coming out next week in 73 languages.
Making it easy is a huge priority.
But no matter how many people complain remember they might have some good points.
A couple points that stuck with me:
- Didn’t care what browser a person used. As long as they thought about their choice before using it. Hated the type of people who used ie, JUST BECAUSE IT WAS THERE, and didn’t think about it.
- Wasn’t worried about mobile space fully. Phone where just getting up to snuff recently. itunes App Store locked down too much. wireless providers way too locked down and not getting it. Nokia seems to possibly getting it. And Google (Android) may work once they work out all the problems. No real comment on Blackberry. (And how about Windows Mobile Smartphones?)
Doesn’t follow slides all the time and a bit fast but VERY good speaker.

John Lilly is the CEO of Mozilla Corporation. He joined Mozilla Corporation in 2005 as Vice President of Business Development and also served as COO and a member of the Board of Directors. Prior to this, Lilly was the founder, CEO, CTO and VP of products for Reactivity, a software company acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007. Previously, he held staff positions at Apple, Sun Microsystems and Trilogy Software. Lilly has been an active participant in open source projects, serving on the boards of the Open Source Applications Foundation and Participatory Culture Foundation. As CEO, John focuses on the product, technology and execution of the Mozilla Corporation.


June 1st, 2009 at 11:20 pm
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