This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube talk titled "John Lilly: Best Accident of My Career" (created 2013-02-14) featuring John Lilly speaking about his career pivot to Mozilla. In the excerpt Lilly recounts joining Mozilla around the Firefox launch, discusses browser market dynamics (Microsoft/Internet Explorer dominance, the rise of Firefox and Chrome, Safari/Opera, and the impact of mobile), critiques Microsoft's Silverlight decision, and describes Mozilla's nonprofit mission to promote a competitive, consumer-friendly web.
Chapters
And then the best accident of my career is that I joined Mozilla. So in 2005, I was going through this period where I was trying to figure out what to do and I thought I was going to do venture and I just couldn't find the right venture firm for me then. And I accidentally, because of Mitch, I accidentally got sort of involved with the Mozilla people. And Mozilla at the time had just launched Firefox about 3 or 4 months earlier. They had just signed a deal with Google that made it economically viable. It was an open source nonprofit, which is not exactly what you're looking for when you're doing a job search. But I couldn't escape it. I felt this incredibly strong gravitational pull to go work on the browser because the web felt so important and so under pressure at the time. And again, you won't remember this, but I'll show you why that's important. So this is what it looked like just before I got there. And again, you're not going to remember this. So Microsoft was dominant, dominant, dominant. 96% of the computers in the world I mean, all I see out here is Macs. That wasn't the case in 2004. 96% of the computers in the world that people used were Windows and all of them, all of them used Internet Explorer. So that was a bad— this was such a finished chapter that Microsoft took their Internet Explorer team and they said, you guys are not working on Internet Explorer anymore, mission accomplished, and they put them all on Silverlight. Which is, as you know, is going to be huge. This is a mistake that Microsoft made that took them years and years and years to come back from. And I would argue that it really opened the door for a quick downfall for Microsoft. 4 years later in 2008, we were about a quarter of market share. 9% is Opera and Safari and some other stuff. And then now this is— This is IE, about 55% depending on how you count. This is Chrome and this is Firefox, again depending on how you count, and this is some other stuff, Safari and Opera. And if you include mobile, the world changes quite dramatically and I'll show that in just a second. But from Mozilla's point of view, this is what we wanted. We didn't want the same as this but orange. We wanted robust. We probably could have We probably could be happier with the blue slightly smaller, but this is what we wanted. We wanted a robust, competitive market where you had people innovating and trying to be good for consumers because we felt like that was our mission of a nonprofit. And I feel like in large part we made that happen.
