I work for the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation (not to be confused with the Mozilla Corporation, the Foundation's subsidiary responsible for the Firefox web browser and Thunderbird email client). For more about me and what I'm doing, see the “Personal” section of this page and my weblog entries below.

Firefox and innovation

In a previous post I discussed Clayton Christensen's "disruptive innovation" theory (as popularized in The Innovator's Dilemma and other books) and how it applied to the rise and fall of Netscape. In this post I turn to more recent events, and attempt to answer at least some of the five questions with which I ended previously:

• Is Firefox more of a sustaining innovation or a disruptive innovation?

• In what sense is the Mozilla project pursuing (or could pursue) disruptive strategies, whether based on low cost or competing against nonconsumption?

• What might "competing against nonconsumption" entail in the context of Firefox and the Mozilla project?

• What is the value network for Firefox and the Mozilla project, and how does it overlap with the value network for IE and Microsoft?

• Are the Mozilla project and Firefox potentially vulnerable to a co-optation strategy by Microsoft, as Netscape was? ...

mozilla/firefox-and-innovation

2005-06-14