The Financial Times Deutschland (Germany, FTD) has an article today about the Mozilla Foundation & Corp. and the free web browser Mozilla Firefox. In an interview with Mitchell Baker, Mozilla CEO, they talked about the future of Mozilla Firefox, the market share they are targeting and why they have to go there. Mitchell wants no other “Browser War” like the one 10 years ago. The Mozilla team wants to fight for open standards and against priorities. To reach their goal, they want to reach a world wide market share of 25 to 30 percent up from 16 percent now. It is clear that they have to take that market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and I think this won’t be easy.
“We are not in for any number, but that is the critical mass that we need for an open, innovative and interoperable Internet” said Mozilla Chief Mitchell Baker to FTD. “If we need to have 25 or 30 percent market share, then we just need so much.”
Another part of the article is about pre-installing the Firefox browser on new computers. Mitchell says the manufactures want 2 to 3 dollars per installed base. Sounds crazy. The same manufacturers have to pay Microsoft so they can sell their computers with Microsoft Windows (which already has a web browser). But Mozilla sees light at the end of the tunnel: One big computer maker wants to pre-install Firefox on their systems – for free! The article doesn’t disclose which one it is, so it is your turn to speculate 😉
A Google translated version can be found here. But the translation is bad.
maybe dell…
http://www.ideastorm.com/article/show/62245