Aims to take 10% share in operating system global market with ecosystem partners – for starters
Mobile World Congress: Mozilla is ready to push into the mid and top tier operating system markets against big boys, Google, Apple and Microsoft, stated president of the open standards organisation, Li Gong.
Speaking to Smart Chimps, Gong said the company is building up to taking 10% marketshare with its operating system, Firefox, to give it the momentum it requires to go even further, with the backing of its ecosystem of partners.
Gong explained: “I’m confident we will take a significant share of the market. We’d be happy with an impactful share, and to have impact we need to have at least 10% of the market; we want to go higher though.” However, Gong added: “The mobile world is so dynamic it’s very hard to forecast when that would happen. It’s no longer just the mobile phone that we are talking about; over the next few years a lot more will be considered mobile,” he commented, referring to the Internet of Things.
Mozilla entered the market with Firefox in 2013 using ultra-affordable smartphones for developing economies as its entry point into the market, yet thanks to a gamut of announcements here in Barcelona about its expanding ecosystem of partners, Gong stated Mozilla now has sufficient support to move up into the mid and potentially top tier segments going forward.
He said: “Our advantage is that we are not alone, trying to replace Android and iOS and fighting Google and Apple; there are lots of us here fighting Google and Apple!” He noted that Google and Apple take a large financial cut of what is made for their operating systems by developers, device manufacturers and others in the industry, unlike Mozilla.
“We are providing ammunition for people being choked by those companies,” continued Gong. “We are an army, a whole band of companies trying to attack those businesses. We are not a single business like Samsung; in India in the space of a few months we worked with five or six companies on our product, from mobile phone operators serving different parts of the country to OEMs behind them bringing our solutions to market. It is actually a whole army fighting.”
However, Gong noted that commercially Mozilla is not pitting itself against the dominant manufacturers and operating systems. Its philosophy is to create choice for the industry and for end users. He explained: “We are not competing from a commercial point of view. Our mission is for free and open web; we are trying to provide people with choice. We’re not like Microsoft, however we do need a strong market position in order to have impact. We don’t want the others [Microsoft, Google, Apple] to fail, but we do want to have sufficient scale in order to have impact.”
Concluding, Gong stated: “It’s very hard because mobile always takes a long time to deliver. For mobile, you need an entire ecosystem and it takes effort to bring a whole ecosystem into existence. However in only two years we’re doing tremendously. We are already in 29 markets, which is phenomenal because if you look back a couple of years there were several companies trying to create momentum for a new operating system; but if you look at us today, we’re the only one that’s here and strong.”
Mozilla has made a string of announcements here at Mobile World Congress. Click here for more.
