Mitchell Baker

Chair of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation

• Born: June 7, 1957
• Place of Birth: Berkeley, California

Primary Company/Organization: Mozilla Corporation

Introduction

Answering to the self-chosen title Chief Lizard Wrangler at the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation, Mitchell Baker remained committed to offering open source tools for Internet development. Baker was so committed to her job that she continued working as a volunteer when parent company AOL downsized Mozilla in 2001. In 2005, Time magazine named Baker on its annual list of 100 Most Influential People. In 2018, she was presented with the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.

Early Life

Winifred Mitchell Baker was born on June 7, 1957, in Berkeley, California. Although few facts about her early life are available, it is known that she grew up in the Berkeley area and attended high school in Oakland, California, where she opted to spend her senior year working at the Oakland Zoo. While attending college at the University of California–Berkeley, Baker spent a year in Communist China studying at Peking University (later Beijing University). Baker completed her bachelor's degree in Asian studies in 1979. In 1987, she received a law degree from Berkeley's Boalt School of Law. Before beginning her first job, Baker returned to Asia for a year and was forced to undergo rabies treatment after being bitten by a dog in Tibet.

Baker spent the years between 1990 and 1993 working with high-profile technology clients at Fenwick and West, a nationally known law firm based in Mountain View, California. She then accepted a position as associate general counsel on Sun Microsystems' legal team, becoming part of the Netscape team in November 1994. At Netscape, Baker's chief responsibility lay in working with intellectual property rights. Pursuing her interest in legal technology, she established the Tech Group as a subgroup within the legal department. Almost immediately following her rise to head the company in 1998, Netscape was purchased by America Online (AOL) for $4.2 billion.

Life's Work

During what became known as the first browser wars, Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) rose to the top of the browser market, garnering the lion's share of users. The computer giant also managed to survive a federal antitrust suit, United States v. Microsoft (filed in 1998 and settled in 2001), in which it was charged with attempting to monopolize the browser market by bundling IE with its Windows operating system. As a result, interest in Netscape's Communicator (a suite of Internet tools that included the Navigator web browser), Microsoft's chief competitor and a motivating force behind the antitrust lawsuit, continued to dwindle. In 1998, the decision was made to make Netscape Communicator's code open source, and Baker was assigned the responsibility for writing the license in language that allowed developers to benefit from the code without claiming proprietary interests in the product. As Netscape disappeared from the scene, a number of employees gravitated to the Mozilla Foundation, which had been created to manage continued development of the open source product.

Thus, Mozilla began life as a start-up with only seventy employees and a host of volunteers. The name is reported to have been derived from the phrase “Mosaic killer,” which pays homage to Mosaic, the first Internet browser. Scorning the corporate image and giving away its browser for free, Mozilla soon rose to the position of Microsoft's chief competitor.

By February 1999, Baker had become known as Chief Lizard Wrangler and general manager of the Mozilla Corporation, where she served as general spokesperson and troubleshooter as well as policy arbitrator. At Mozilla, Baker came into her own, developing a unique management style that has been copied by other technology companies. Baker prefers working with small groups that come up with ideas that are then dispersed to larger groups before being put into practice. Siobhan O'Mahony of Harvard Business School, became an expert on Baker's management style, expressed great admiration for it; she predicted that Baker had established the standard management model for technology companies of the future.

In 1998, AOL purchased Netscape in a stock-for-stock deal. In 2001, the parent company began laying off workers, and Baker's job was eliminated. However, Baker continued to fulfill her duties as a volunteer at Mozilla until 2002, when she was hired by the Open Source Applications Foundation, which agreed to subsidize her work at Mozilla by paying her a portion of her former salary. In April of that year, Blake Ross and David Hyatt developed Mozilla 2.0, which was released as a suite of applications that included a browser, e-mail and chat capabilities, bulletin boards, and website development tools. The browser introduced the concept of tabs as a replacement for opening individual web pages in separate windows. The release of the Phoenix browser subsequently improved the Mozilla browser with the addition of the add-ons that would eventually become one of Mozilla Firefox's biggest draws. Unimpressed with the development, AOL displayed a lack of foresight by negotiating a deal with Microsoft and firing Mozilla's developers.

AOL's actions aroused the interest of other developers, who were convinced that antitrust laws were being violated by Microsoft. Mitchell Kapor, the founder of Lotus, a major Microsoft competitor, invested $300,000. Developers from International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), Sun Microsystems, and Red Hat were assigned to work with Mozilla, and even AOL agreed to invest $2 million to create the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation in 2003 with Baker as president.

The Mozilla browser was officially renamed Firefox in 2004, after briefly being known as Firebird. From the beginning, Firefox was noted for its ability to fend off hackers and viruses more successfully than Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which had become known for its vulnerability to hackers and spammers. Mozilla volunteers flooded blogs and websites, promoting the new browser. They also chipped in $30 each to finance a two-page ad for Firefox in The New York Times. The result of the volunteer efforts was that 10 million copies were downloaded in the first month after its release. Volunteers continued to form the backbone of Mozilla's workforce, and they promoted Firefox by placing the famous logo on everything from their faces to weather balloons and highway overpasses. In 2006, some of them even cosponsored a Firefox crop circle that was 220 feet in diameter, placing it in an oat field in Amity, Oregon.

By the beginning of 2005, Baker was back to working full time at Mozilla, becoming chief executive officer (CEO) of the newly established for-profit Mozilla Corporation, which generates funds to underwrite the work of the foundation, while continuing her work at the Mozilla Foundation. That year, the number of Mozilla volunteers rose to 100,000 (it would swell to 200,000 by 2007), and downloads of Firefox averaged 250,000 per day. Mozilla was also claiming 8 percent of the market, and its share continued to rise. By 2006, the Mozilla Corporation was reporting $70 million in revenue, most of which was generated from links placed on Google and Yahoo! Within a year, Firefox was reporting 120 million users speaking more than fifty languages, and its market share had climbed to 13 percent.

Although Mozilla is headquartered adjacent to Google in Mountain View, California, Mozilla's emphasis on keeping its product free has led the company to continue to eschew a corporate lifestyle. The company's headquarters have been compared to a ski lodge or military barracks. Instead of the expensive automobiles that fill its neighbor's parking lot, the transportation of Mozilla's employees and volunteers reflects their modest lifestyles. Subsidiaries of Mozilla are located in Toronto, Tokyo, and Paris.

In January 2008, as the Mozilla Corporation continued to grow, Baker opted to devote her full attention to the Mozilla Foundation and gave up her position as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation, though she remained chair. That year, Mozilla released Firefox 3.0, including an application designed for use on mobile phones. Within a single day, 10.7 million users had downloaded the browser. By 2019, Firefox was up to version 70.0.

Baker became CEO of Mozilla Corporation again in 2019, when she began serving as interim chief executive, and in 2020 the move was made permanent. However, she had to lay off staff later that year due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. She announced in February 2024 that she was stepping down as CEO of Mozilla Corporation. She said she was returning to the not-for-profit foundation as executive chair.

Personal Life

Dedicated to open source sharing of Internet development tools and the concept of providing quality products that are offered to the public at no charge, Baker was heavily involved in the ongoing antitrust battle against Microsoft. Under her leadership, Mozilla has joined the European Commission and a host of technology companies that strongly object to Microsoft's bundling its Internet Explorer within its Windows software, ensuring its dominance of the Internet browsing market. Baker insists that Microsoft's behavior is both illegal and monopolistic.

Baker's contributions to Internet development have been recognized by a number of organizations. In 2009, she was awarded the Women of Vision Award by the prestigious Anita Borg Institute. The following year, Baker was honored with the Aenne Burda Award for Creative Leadership and Frost and Sullivan's Growth, Innovation, and Leadership Award. In 2012, Baker was named to the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences presented her with the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. Baker is also an active participant in the Innovator Program, run by the Henry Ford Museums. She and her husband, Casey Dunn, have one son.

Bibliography

Andreessen, Marc. “Mitchell Baker.” Time 165.16 (2005): n. pag. Print.

Claburn, Thomas. "Mitchell Baker Logs Off for Good as CEO of Firefox Maker Mozilla." The Register, 9 Feb. 2024, https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/09/mozilla‗ceo‗mitchell‗baker‗departs/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.

Freedman, David H. “Mitchell Baker and the Firefox Paradox.” Inc. 29.2 (2007): 104–11. Print.

Hardy, Quentin. “Web Warrior.” Forbes 180.9 (2007): 60–64. Print.

LaVallee, Andrew. “Questions for Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Chairman.” Wall Street Journal 4 Mar. 2009. Print.

Mellor, Paul. “Mozilla Joins EC in Microsoft Suite.” Computer World 43.7 (2009): n. pag. Print.

Singel, Ryan. “Mozilla's Mitchell Baker on Being the Alternate to Microsoft, Google, and Apple.” Wired 7 May 2012: n. pag. Print.