President and founder of the Mozilla Foundation 2003 onwards, and also previously CEO of the Mozilla Corporation 2005-2008. Also she wrote the Mozilla Public License before that. I suspect she knows a little bit more than Word and Excel.
Seriously - go criticize her for her salary, or failure to execute, or for-profit vision, or something. There's lots of criticisms that can be actually substantiated. The hypothesis that she doesn't understand what Mozilla is requires significant evidence. It's entirely possible a Mozillian could show up and say that actually she's been a clueless and politically savvy leader, but outsiders speculating that she can't possibly be qualified need to provide more than speculation.
> Seriously - go criticize her for her salary, or failure to execute ...
I am well aware of her tenure and good work at Mozilla (from public sources). The argument I was making was that the failure to execute is correlated with not understanding technology well enough. Certainly not claiming that's the only factor, but it might play a part in it.
How will you make expensive long-term bets otherwise? The proof is in the execution, or the mis-execution.
1. Mozilla retired Firefox OS in 2016/17. And in a couple of years, a fork of it (KaiOS, which shares 95% of the same code) gets pre-installed on upwards of 80 million (probably more) units. It could have been a lot more if the OS was better; it really had a shot at low-end phones and TVs.
2. If the team says they need to commit tens of millions of dollars and half a decade or more to create a new, safe programming language for browsers and a prototype - will the CEO approve? And if yes, wouldn't it have been entirely based on advise from others in the room?
3. The world needs an efficient browser engine for multi-core devices coming with bundled GPUs. Requires nearly a decade to get right - how does one commit to that unless the complexity (and not just the rewards) are fully understood?
4. The failure to sell the Servo vision (safety, multi-core) to device manufacturers ultimately rests on the CEO. Instead, the Servo team got axed.
Every technology company needs a CEO who deeply understands the technology.
So unless I’m missing something he does not have a CS background or software engineering experience, and, presumably, was yet able to acquire at least some understanding of computing.
> The fact that MDN, Servo and Dev Tools team got the guillotine instead of execs and marketing speaks for itself.
That's my point. Let it speak for itself. It's entirely possible for someone to be an adequately qualified CEO and also just be bad at the job, that's an argument you can make.
For example in my tech related company, the HR folks know little beyond Word and Excel despite some having worked for years there.
What were her roles up to now?