Mozilla has announced a new CEO, Gary Kovacs, former senior vice president at Sybase, who will take charge on November 8. Kovacs will be responsible for “leading the overall direction of the organization and its products, including the Firefox Web browser,” Mozilla said in a blog post announcing the appointment.
Besides working for Sybase, Kovacs remained General Manager and Vice President of mobile and devices at Adobe Systems. He also worked as a Vice President of product marketing at Macromedia. Kovacs worked for 10 years at IBM working for global software division.
Previously we have seen Chairman Mozilla Mitchell Baker announcing that the CEO John Lilly would be stepping down this year. After that the company was searching for a better replacement. John Lilly is a blog post said that Mozilla’s new CEO has a “deep background in the battlefields that will define the future open Web: mobile and rich media.”
Mitchel Baker wrote a welcome post saying:
“When we entered into sensitive areas I found it possible to raise potentially contentious issues, find some common ground, get to the heart of the matter and push some hard topics around until we both felt we’d reached a good place. I found Gary to have a great understanding of the different perspectives of the situation, an ability to be clear where we already had agreement, and a give-and-take process when we had disagreements that I think is fundamental for someone to be effective at Mozilla. Actually, I found Gary to focus a bit more on areas of agreement before diving to the heart of potential differences than is common at Mozilla — a trait I hope to learn from”.
Kovacs will be responsible to maintain and increase Mozilla’s Firefox browser market share. The competitors that Kovacs have to face includes Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Google’s Chrome. Internet Explorer is getting less popular with the passage of time but still it holds almost 50 percent of the browser usage share. On the other hand we have Google Chrome that holds only 8 percent of the usage but it is gaining popularity at a rapid speed. Mozilla Firefox has almost 23 percent of the total usage share. Let us see how the company’s new CEO is going to compete with Internet Explorer and Chrome.
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