Mitchell Baker Quotes & Sayings

Money tends to make people suspicious, if there's any money floating around. — Mitchell Baker

The web as a platform is the most powerful platform we have ever seen. — Mitchell Baker

We have a very active testing community which people don't often think about when you have open source. — Mitchell Baker

When Chrome launched, it was not a high point for Firefox. There's no secret about that. — Mitchell Baker

But most of us who aren't models aren't models, right? And so, you just have to get used to that and sort of read right past it. So. On the sex symbol piece, I don't get that piece. On the personality piece, that people are excited to meet a leader from Mozilla - maybe there's more about meeting me personally than I give credit for, but I find that people are excited about what Mozilla is, more than 'Oh my god, there's Mitchell, look, her hair,' whatever. — Mitchell Baker

We should probably figure out a new word for this. For us, "open" means transparent, as in "open source" - you're not locked in to what the original creator did. And in our case "open" also means distributed decision making. — Mitchell Baker

I grew up as an only child. I think it might just be that my dad really didn't care that I was a girl. "You're gonna do certain things 'cause I want you to, and that's the way it is." — Mitchell Baker

I've learned that for many people, change is uncomfortable. Maybe they want to go through it, and they can see the benefit of it, but at a gut level, change is uncomfortable. — Mitchell Baker

Of course, it's hard to support full-time programmers, so we do get funds from a set of companies that are interested in the health of the Mozilla project and so are willing to support the people working for the Foundation as well. — Mitchell Baker

The sex symbol thing's a little bit different for me. Usually, like whenever there's a picture of me, there's always this set of things that comes out like, 'Oh my god, she's so ugly.' — Mitchell Baker

Especially if you don't have a job that's providing fulfillment in your technical expertise, there is a lot of reward to working on a very smart and demanding community that will respect you and will give you leadership and authority based on what you do. — Mitchell Baker

There's the classic charitable contribution, which we receive thousands, and we're extremely grateful and they often come with notes from people, which are very heartwarming, about how much difference our products have made in their life on the Internet. — Mitchell Baker

If you're a Firefox user, you get accustomed to your history and the URL bar and finding things. That should be available on your mobile phone as well. — Mitchell Baker

We're also looking a lot at graphics and video. We've done a lot on a deep technical level to make sure that the next version of Firefox will have all sorts of new graphics capabilities. And the move from audio to video is just exploding. So those areas in particular, mobile and graphics and video, are really important to making the Web today and tomorrow as open as it can be. — Mitchell Baker

I guess my other advice is that it's really good to be comfortable among groups of men! It's just a very common work setting and I don't actually think about it too much, but there must be some comfort level that I've developed over the years. — Mitchell Baker

I mean, who wants to live waking up ... at least I don't want to live waking up everyday about revenge. — Mitchell Baker

Mobile devices are kind of at the opposite end of PCs, in that PCs are pretty open and you can do a fair amount with them, but many mobile devices aren't. — Mitchell Baker

The question of trademark is pretty unsettled in the open source world. The trademark is important in a consumer product, but there are a few groups who feel it's a restriction they can't live with. — Mitchell Baker

We don't spend our days thinking about Microsoft or trying to get revenge on Microsoft. That's a really negative and backward way, and that's not how I want to live. — Mitchell Baker

I think HTML5 is one area where Mozilla has done very poorly at actually communicating what we have done. — Mitchell Baker

But I think it's always difficult when a product that you're using and accustomed to changes. — Mitchell Baker

The Mozilla Foundation is an independent, nonprofit organization. — Mitchell Baker

Some period of time later you look up and say, "That concern was right on the mark; it happened exactly as I thought it would." So that's been really helpful to recognize. — Mitchell Baker

Saving the Internet requires a greater sense of shared ownership and fewer bystanders accepting whatever today's Internet has to offer. — Mitchell Baker

We've broken the code base into logical chunks, called modules, and the foundation staff delegate authority for the modules to people with the most expertise. — Mitchell Baker

We will not build a society that reflects who we are and that has opportunities for equality or justice if we don't make progress for all participants. — Mitchell Baker

People notice it and they help you participate and see your work included in this project and when we ship our browser, you and millions of other people get to see the fruits of your efforts. — Mitchell Baker

IE6 was a bad experience for consumers, but it was a terrible for developers. Not only it was technically bad, but it was closed, and you couldn't do much with it. — Mitchell Baker

I grew up as an only child. — Mitchell Baker

So many commercial orgs have software where you can come and modify it, but they still control everything. And what's controlled is very clearly what's good for their business, or if they're more progressive, their view of what's good for the Internet. — Mitchell Baker

We carry around computers in our pockets. Many people barely use them as phones. We use them as computers. If you think about the future, when you're traveling around, it's great to have a lightweight, small form factor. — Mitchell Baker

We actually have a real community of people doing useful things. — Mitchell Baker

People are more naturally protective of what they create than of what they consume. — Mitchell Baker

Mozilla has one foot in the Valley, Silicon Valley product technology, and partly one foot in the social enterprise space. — Mitchell Baker

When we got ready to ship out Firefox 1.0, the last set of things we did was to make it appealing to a consumer, to add the polish of a world-class product to it. — Mitchell Baker

WorldGate offers interactive set-top-box applications. Its customers want to interact with the Web as an adjunct to other things they can do, and WorldGate allows that through the layout engine in Mozilla, called Gecko. — Mitchell Baker

We worked very hard to make extensions very simple. — Mitchell Baker

Humanity is smart. Sometime in the technology world we think we are smarter, but we are not smarter than you. — Mitchell Baker

The name Firefox is not part of the open source licence, and that's why it's important to us. — Mitchell Baker

Our sense of "open" is that the authority to make decisions about that gets distributed based on merit and understanding and participation and leadership, not solely on employment or a title or a business plan. Technical colleagues will define "open" as "open standards," "interoperable" - you can find it, search it, cut and paste it, view source, mix and match - all those things that we associate with text on the Web, that you can continue to do that with audio and video and whatever's next. — Mitchell Baker

The Mozilla project is big in terms of lines of code and complexity. — Mitchell Baker

Flash is one of those very useful, very closed, very proprietary non-weblike things that has great tools and serves a need very well. But in the long run, we see video as part of the web, and it should be handled just the way other html elements are. — Mitchell Baker

The good news is, being a digital citizen comes naturally to many of us once we get the opportunity - human beings have been taking things apart and putting them back together throughout history. — Mitchell Baker

Some people are really drawn to technology and I liken them to artists. — Mitchell Baker

We invest heavily on Firefox on the desktop. We have a user base we want to keep happy. — Mitchell Baker

Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks. — Mitchell Baker

There's something about being a woman in a technology space, unless you happen to be model beautiful, where there's always, always talk about what you look like. — Mitchell Baker

When people think of Mozilla, they generally think of the browser, but Mozilla is really much more than that. Mozilla is of interest to people who want an end-user application like our browser that's not tied directly into the Windows platform. — Mitchell Baker

What's been most helpful to me is realizing that those times when all the heads in the room turn and look at me as if I was crazy, reinforce my own leadership capability. Because I've been in a number of those settings where I've been right. And I've been right often enough that now when it happens I don't automatically think, "Oh, my, what's wrong with me?" or "Ohhh, I must not be ready for this role," or "They know so much more than I do." — Mitchell Baker

I'm a good communicator, and I'm a good translator. I can talk to engineers; I can talk to people for whom technology is not remotely interesting or even maybe scary - things like that. — Mitchell Baker

I'm excited about mobile; clearly that's important. Mobile devices are kind of at the opposite end of PCs, in that PCs are pretty open and you can do a fair amount with them, but many mobile devices aren't. We're excited at the idea that we can make the same kind of contribution in the mobile space. So that's one thing coming down the pike. — Mitchell Baker

Ther average consumer does not know the difference between the browser, the internet, and the search box. — Mitchell Baker

Tech, in the sense of ... putting things together, that goes back beyond memory for me. — Mitchell Baker

We do care about control and privacy. It's one of the reasons we are so focused on having our systems be open source, so you or someone technically savvy you know can verify what the software is doing. — Mitchell Baker

We've always been the development project that lived in a time pressured setting and always where commercial entities were relying heavily on releases in a certain time frame. — Mitchell Baker

Usually, you know, you're at a table and you're the only woman, you've got this idea, you finally speak up - I mean, I've been in some settings where every head turns toward me and then they all turn away as if I've never spoken. Which I think happens when whatever I said was so out of the blue, or so awkward, that they just didn't know how to respond. — Mitchell Baker

You can get anything from Mozilla Firefox-based themes to nature themes to your own photographs. — Mitchell Baker

Just to have the confidence to say, "Which end of that spectrum am I usually on?" That's been very helpful to me. Because it's a really awkward setting. — Mitchell Baker

We have a version of Firefox for mobile devices, codenamed Fennec. That's a type of fox - South American, I think, with giant ears. — Mitchell Baker

The organization is a way for people to find us and deal with us and know how we operate. — Mitchell Baker

I have a personal life and a professional life, and there's no way to separate them; for a while I tried, but no one could find me. — Mitchell Baker

The Internet offers untold potential for humanity. To make the most of it, we need to think of the Internet as 'ours.' — Mitchell Baker

I like to see photographs: I like to see my family. To me, when I open a basic browser, and it's that very elegant silver simple user interface, I am unhappy. I don't need elegant and silver and simple! — Mitchell Baker