Mozilla boss raps "out-of-date" Steve Jobs

 

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Posted on 15 Jun 2007 at 14:28

Steve Jobs is guilty of "out-of-date, corporate-controlled, duopoly-oriented, not-the-web thinking". That's the view of John Lilly, chief operating officer for Mozilla.

Lilly was talking about the Apple CEO's keynote to his company's developers this week, specifically the part where he made the surprise announcement that Apple's Safari Web browser would henceforth be available on Windows.

Jobs' sin? To "Imagine a world of...wait for it...access to the web controlled by two companies - and why not just go with the two dominant operating system vendors in the world."

Mozilla's Firefox is currently the second most-used browser on the net with at least 15% "market-share" (estimates vary quite considerably), well-ahead of third-placed Safari. Lilly argues that its success, together with the success of other open projects such as Wikipedia, Creative Commons and Linux, demonstrates that "today's connected world is no longer constrained by the monopolies and duopolies and cartels of yesterday's distribution - of the publishers, studios, and OS vendors".

And that is not how it should be.

"Even if we could somehow put that movement back in the bottle - that a world of just Starbucks and Peets, just Wal-mart and Target, just Ford and GM - that a world of tight control from a few companies is good, it's the wrong thing to do," he wrote. "It destroys participation, it destroys engagement, it destroys self-determination. And, ultimately, it wrecks the quality of the end-user experience, too."

Lilly insists that he welcomes the competition and choice that Apple's Windows Safari provides, but not the thinking the he believes is behind it.

"Steve asserted Monday that Safari on Windows will overturn history, attract 100M new users, and revert the world to a two browser state. That remains to be seen, of course," he said.

"But don't bet on it."

Author: Simon Aughton