The Economist on Mitchell Baker

Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a story about a trapeze artist who, in her spare time, is the Chief Lizard Wrangler at a non-profit. You perhaps know her as Mitchell Baker, leader of Firefox." From the article: "Ms Baker gradually found herself the leader of this project. Perhaps this is because she is a somewhat unusual member of the Netscape diaspora. For a start, she is a woman in a community populated, as one (male) colleague puts it, by geeky males with 'spare time and no social life'. Ms Baker herself has never even written code. She studied Chinese at Berkeley, and then became a lawyer--her role at the old Netscape was in software licensing. On all technical matters, she defers to Brendan Eich, her chief geek."

Comments

More about her...

[skochak]

Trained as a lawyer, Baker coordinates business and policy issues and sits on the both Mozilla Foundation Board of Directors and the Mozilla Corporation Board of Directors. In 2005, Time magazine included her in the 2005 Time 100, the magazine's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker

Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[Futurepower(R)]

This is not a troll. And, I agree it is unfortunate. However, I saw Mitchell Baker being interviewed by Charlie Rose. She was amazingly socially unsophisticated. She said she had no technical knowledge, but is a lawyer. She gave the impression that she needs to be replaced by someone more capable.

She gave such a poor account of herself that Charlie Rose was visibly embarrassed. That's the only time I've seen Charlie Rose embarrassed in the many years I've watched his interviews.

Don't think you are being loyal to Mozilla by supporting someone who is so obviously not suited to be a leader.

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[keester]

Socially inept? Maybe that explains why she gets along with so many geeks? Are you a geek? Are you at the wrong website?

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[headkase]

I think she's proven as a decision maker and project manager although.

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[Ckwop]

She gave such a poor account of herself that Charlie Rose was visibly embarrassed.

There's this view in the tech world that in order to be head of a great software development house you have to be a geek. This is rubbish.

Developing what it takes to be a great software company is just the same as being great in any other industry. It take three things from a leader to mak this happen:

• Instill good displine.
• Be aware of knowing what's going on an all aspects of the enterprise.
• And above all else, have people you can trust to handle decisions you're not qualified to make

From the sounds of it, she has all three. Hats off to her, I say

Simon

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[ajnsue]

That is the best thing I have heard in a long time. A person who is not slick or commercial - becoming an effective leader of a succesful project. Makes you think that competency had something to do with her accomplishments rather that self-marketing.
This and the sentencing of Ebbers and other CEO's makes me think that maybe the Earth is slowly being returned to its correct ethical axis

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[smittyoneeach]

In fairness, one data point does not a useful judgement make.
What was the mental/physical context of the interview? How much lead time did the interviewee have? How many on-camera hours had the interviewee logged prior to the debacle in question?
I'm reminded of teh 1992 vice-presidential debates, when now-deceased VADM James Stockdale looked horrible on camera. Yet, all nonsense aside, he was an impeccable of leadership and courage. Say what you will of Perot. ;)
The fact that she's performed as a trapeze artist indicates no small personal courage, if nothing else.

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[qray]

On one hand a good leader doesn't have to be an expert in the field. A good leader just has to know where to go to get the right answers and be able to tell crapola from shinola. Then make the right decisions based on that.

On the other hand good leaders generally don't parade their short comings for all to see. It's unfortunately she doesn't have more confidence in herself.
--
Q

Re:Amazingly socially unsophisticated.

[Hope Thelps]

In fairness, one data point does not a useful judgement make.

I think three data points suggest that FuturePower(R) has more of an interest in this than just having seen an unimpressive interview. It sounds more like a personal grudge.

Socially unsophisticated

OMG she used the word "geek".

Getting the developers to refuse to fix bugs

I don't know what he's got against her but it looks far from neutral.

well...

[know1]

even though she doesn't write any code, they figured having a woman telling the developers what to do would be the best way to get them to obey as they were used to taking orders off their mothers/wives

i kid, i kid, posting this from firefox, keep up the good work guys

Show on which Mitchell Baker appeared

[Futurepower(R)]

Unfortunately, the Charlie Rose show charges $30 for a copy of the show on which Mitchell Baker appeared.

Transcripts are cheaper, but the Charlie Rose show does not guarantee the accuracy of its transcripts.

Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY

[tobiasly]

@ AC and Erebus: please post pictures of your handsome selves for comparison.

who cares?

[versiondub]

OSS's draw is in its lack of a social strata. If geeks had to socialize in order to make great products like firefox, then microsoft would be a much happier company.

Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY

[sammy baby]

Jesus. How many male geeks are there that look like shit. Why you would even bother posting something as insidiously stupid as "God damn she's ugly" is beyond me. You give fire to people who say our industry is sexist. Give the feminazis amunition and they will use it. Moron.

I'm not sure which is sadder: the troll saying that she's ugly, or the rebuke of the troll in which the word "feminazi" is used unironically.

Leadership problem?

[Futurepower(R)]

This seems to be a leadership problem: There is a huge well-known bug in Firefox 1.5, the CPU and memory hogging bug. Developers refuse to fix it, even though anyone can demonstrate the bug easily. Apparently there is some kind of social problem. Maybe no one has the authority to deal with a major bug. It seems to be the kind of problem that can exist when a programming team is led by someone with no technical knowledge.

This bug has been reported to Bugzilla, and is very easy to reproduce (see below), but Firefox developers have marked it invalid because there is not enough specific information! The bug has existed in Firefox for more than 2 years, and several people report that it is worse in Firefox 1.5. Firefox's Bugzilla does not allow direct links from Slashdot, so copy and paste Bugzilla URLs into a new tab. Remove the space:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=131 456
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=222 660

See comments #48 and #49 of bug 222660 for an example of the symptoms under Windows XP. A typical Windows Task Manager screen shot attached to comment #49 shows the "I/O Other Bytes" increasing by 20K/second with no program activity. At that point, the bug was not yet showing the worst symptoms.

The huge memory use, and 94% CPU use or more with no activity, normally occur after opening and closing many Firefox windows and tabs, as happens when researching something on the internet over a period of hours or days. The bug symptoms are worse after putting the computer on standby or after hibernating. My experience has been that the memory and CPU hogging always occur together, so they appear to be the same bug. However, the CPU hogging symptom takes longer to appear. If the computer has perhaps 256 Megabytes of memory, the most obvious symptom at the beginning is hard disk thrashing.

You can demonstrate the memory use problem quickly by loading and closing the following large web page into multiple Firefox tabs a few times:
http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/ libc.html. To see the memory and CPU percentage used in Windows, right-click on the Taskbar and choose Task Manager. Choose the Processes tab.This demonstrates one aspect of the bug, but is not representative of big occuring in normal use, since that web page is huge.

Maybe the only solution is for a developer who knows the code to reproduce the problem and see what causes it. It is not clear to me why they are unwilling to do so. This bug seems especially interesting to me. It is likely that fixing this bug will fix other issues. It is likely that fixing this bug will make it easier to work on the Firefox code.

The bug has often been reported on Slashdot. Here are a few examples:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169676&cid=141 43632
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62501
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 62671
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=168683&cid=140 66613

I posted the bug numbered 222660 in Bugzilla. It is interesting to note that apparently no developer has bothered to read the entire bug report and take the time to understand it. For 2 1/2 years, developers have been saying things like this: 1) Maybe this bug is fixed in the nightly version. 2) Yes, this bug exists, but it isn't important. 3) No one has posted a TalkBack report. (If they read the bug report, they would know that there is never a TalkBack report, because the bug crashes TalkBack, too.) 4) I

Re:GOD DAMN SHE'S UGLY

[spectrokid]

She is not that ugly, look carefully at this: http://www.mozilla.org/press/image-library/people- mitchell-baker.jpg. Her hairdresser however, deserves to get shot without a trial.

Re:Never written any code

[hkmwbz]

"but both have shown that they ultimately care more about marketing than about code quality"

Well duh! Other people are taking care of the coding. And face it, it's the marketing which has given Firefox ten per cent of the browser market.

"And I will tell my story to everyone who's interested in it so they'll be able to see through the marketing and the hype, too, which seems to be all that you are focussing on these days."

Gee. It's because of the marketing that Mozilla can make lots of money from Google searches through the search field, and thereby hire even more competent coders to improve the product.

And this comes from an Opera user.

So many posts, so little thought

[CodeShark]

About what the article actually points out. The fact is that the Firefox browser has been well guided, is a superb open source tool that forced M$ to begin investing in web-related innovation again.

Other main fact is that I have not had one browser based attack succeed on my main computers (work or home), compared to the M$ fiascos that cause a significant amount of our company's IT budget to be consumed in "silly patchwork" fixes, and it doesn't matter to me what Ms. Baker looks like or how much code she has/hasn't written.

What matters is that Firefox and Thunderbird have been well guided, to the extent that there needs to be enough profitibility in a related enterprise to defend both against corporate, copycat, or cracker type attacks.

Sure, Mozilla is our pet lizard, but wouldn't you rather have a good chief lizard wrangler than nobody?

Re:Never written any code

[theodicey]

Thanks for filing Mozilla bugs, but no need to rant. You've made a lot of wrong assumptions and assertions.

David Baron is, in fact, writing enormous amounts of code. He is close to being finished with rewriting the entire reflow system of Gecko (= progressive page loading).

Mozilla Foundation is no longer developing future versions of the (1.7) suite. A different team of developers has taken it over, and renamed it SeaMonkey. So complaining about their inability to fix a Suite-only problem is fairly pointless. If it's a problem with the Core (shared between Firefox and Suite) then reproduce it in firefox and let Mozilla know. Otherwise, get in touch with the Seamonkey developers by email or IRC or whatever, it's not hard.

And if you have a problem with your bug being auto-resolved, just go ahead and reopen it again. The auto-resolver was supposed to clear up rotten bugs that weren't real or were fixed by other code changes, not actual replicable bugs.

Friday is troll day!

[mspohr]

Let's see... The Economist posts a complimentary article on a woman who is heading the Mozilla org saying nice things about what she has done to help revive competition in the browser world.

So far we have...

- she's ugly

- she's socially inept

- she's a lawyer

- she has a bad hair cut

- she's obviously "not a leader"

- she's not a geek (this was posted as a bad thing)

- she doesn't care about the code

- she only cares about marketing

- Mozilla never fixed my pet bug (several times).

- the software crashes on me every day

Back to your basements, little boys, or your mother will spank you.