Mozilla Taps SAP Exec As New Chief
Mozilla Taps SAP Executive as New Chief

    
        
            
                    
                        
			            
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                        | Mozilla Taps SAP Executive as New Chief
                    
                
            
            
            
            
        
        
            
                
                    
                        
                    
                
                
                    
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                                    Mozilla Taps SAP Executive as New Chief
                                    
                                        
				By Miguel Helft			
                                        October 14, 2010 1:00 pm
                                        October 14, 2010 1:00 pm
                                    
                                
                                
                                    
                                         After a search that lasted nearly six months, Mozilla has named Gary Kovacs as its new chief executive.
                                    Mozilla, the maker of the open-source Firefox Web browser, said Thursday that it would appoint Gary Kovacs, a veteran software executive, as its new chief executive. The appointment ends a nearly six-month search that
                                        began after John Lilly, who has been Mozilla’s chief executive for the last three years, announced that he would leave to join Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm.
                                    Mr. Kovacs is currently senior vice president in charge of mobile products at SAP, the German software giant. Before that, he was a senior executive at SAP-owned Sybase. Between 2003 and 2008, he held various senior
                                        executive positions at Macromedia, and later, at Adobe, after those two companies merged.
                                    Mr. Kovacs joins Mozilla at a time when its flagship product, Firefox, faces growing competition from Google’s Chrome, as well as Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. As it turns out,
                                        Google is also the biggest patron of Mozilla, which is owned by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. And that makes for interesting dynamics between Google and Mozilla, which I detailed last year in a lengthy profile of Mozilla.
                                        
                                    
                                    Mozilla’s mission is to “promote openness, innovation, and opportunity on the Web,” and the article outlined many of the challenges facing the organization, whose success has largely been built
                                        around Firefox. The browser was introduced in 2004, when Microsoft’s slow and buggy Internet explorer had a virtual monopoly on Web browsers. Since then, the browser market has become highly competitive and
                                        innovative again, and Firefox deserves much of the credit for that.
                                    But with Google, Apple and Microsoft competing fiercely in browsers — and competition ensuring that the three companies follow open industry standards — some analysts are wondering if Mozilla is necessary
                                        any more. In an interview, Mitchell Baker, the chairwoman of Mozilla and its parent foundation, said there were plenty of reasons — including Web browsers, but not limited to them — for Mozilla to
                                        stay open for business.
                                    “Having an honest broker that is not tied to any company remains important,” she said. “Competition is good, but it doesn’t guarantee a good outcome.”
                                    Ms. Baker, as well as Mr. Kovacs, also said Mozilla would look at other places on the Internet where companies might have “choke points” over the activity of millions of users and consider efforts to guarantee
                                        that users continued to have choice. They mentioned social networking and mobile devices as areas of potential focus. Mozilla is currently developing a mobile version of Firefox, and Ms. Baker said the organization
                                        might also think about ways to ensure that powerful social networks, namely Facebook, don’t lock in their users.
                                    “I don’t think we are going to make an application that competes with Facebook,” she said. But the Mozilla community might decide to build services that help users “keep track of who you
                                        are and who your friends are that will work across applications.”
                                    Mr. Kovacs said his first task would be to help Mozilla ship the next version of Firefox, which is expected to be ready toward the end of the year.
                                    Despite increased competition, the number of Firefox users has continued to grow, and the browser’s market share has held steady at around 23 percent for the last 15 months, according to NetApplications, which
                                        tracks browser usage. Still, competition has hurt. Mr. Lilly admitted that the growth of Chrome, which surged to 8 percent of the market, from less than 2 percent in July of 2009, had come at the expense of Firefox.
                                        “Most of Chrome’s growth is coming out of users who would use Firefox,” he said.
                                    The trend has been especially pronounced among tech-savvy users. Data published this week showed that among readers of the technology news site TechMeme, Chrome had become the most popular browser,
                                        surpassing Firefox.
                                
                                
                            
                            
                        
                    
                    
                    
                
            
        
        
        
    
    
    
    


