silicon.com interview with Mitchell Baker

Mitchell Baker Talks to silicon.com About Mozilla in the Enterprise

silicon.com has an interview with Mitchell Baker, which focuses on the limited success of Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird in the enterprise market to date. The Mozilla Corporation President attributes some of the lack of success to a reliance on proprietary technologies within some businesses. She singles out intranets that only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer as a particular problem. However, she claims that the fact that Firefox is open-source does not on its own hold back adoption in large organisations. [complete article]

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I have to say this quote describes the issue very well:

"Enterprises have intranets that only work with IE. We can't fix their intranet" -- Mitchell Baker, CEO Mozilla Corporation

I work for a large organization that is very reliant on IE. Everything from our online manual to our scheduling and main systems as well as the intranet are all IE based. I have limited to access to the company's intranet from home, but I am unable to access directly via Firefox. In order to access the intranet I can still use Firefox but have to activate the IE Tab extension. This allows me to run IE in one tab on Firefox.

I know our techs use Firefox as I saw the familiar Firefox logo on one of our techs' desktop. When the main system (IE based) crashed he had remotely accessed his computer from my computer to check some settings. But I doubt it will ever be widely used especially since everything is design to run (or more commonly crash) on IE. The only way I could see thing changing would only be if the company the platform for our system suddenly decided to switch to Firefox, but that is highly unlikely given our organization's reliance on IE.

The article also briefly (a couple sentences) discussed FF 2.0 (set for release 3rd quarter 2006) as well as, Mozilla giving back profits to the community.