As in every business, the key for success in the software business is to know people – what they need and desire – to satisfy them the best way possible. To make people choose your product, trust plays a massive role, and to achieve this, making a non-profit organization (Mozilla Foundation) with the only goal to make things better for the people (Firefox, Thunderbird and more), works perfect.

And there is that sense of trust, the most fundamental aspect I think of Firefox
and partly it’s because the product is great, partly it’s because we are a
public benefit organization and we are not trying to maximize our revenue and
we’re not trying to generate massive private wealth for a few people.
The asset is owned by the public.
Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation

Speaking about money

Conventional business processes say you absolutely diversify your revenue
sources, which ideally would be nice to do but not at the cost of product.
Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation

Many of you may wonder where the money comes from, which allows the Mozilla Foundation not to make compromises. Well, Google. OK, not only from Google, but the most significant slice of the income pie comes from the inclusion of Google search functionality in the top corner, next the address bar and on the standard start page. And what amount are we talking about? Around $55 million in a year, it’s based on the commissions Google pays after every search done on this two boxes. Well, yes that’s a lot.

Trust your competition

I have been told by some large business users that when they look at IE7 they
are re‑contemplating a switch to Firefox because the move from IE6 to Firefox
might be easier than the move from IE6 to IE7.
Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation

Thinking a step ahead

Running web apps offline without an internet connection would be incredibly interesting because all of us has faced the situation of being disconnected while sitting on a plane for example.

Apps with the ability to work offline for some period of time – it’s one of those
things that would move the web platform forward. We have actually done a fair
amount of work already, so what’s happened so far is that most or all of the
basic code - the databases and storage work necessary to support offline web
apps – is in the shipping versions of Firefox now.
Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation