Today, Mitchell Baker announced plans to step down as Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) CEO, a role that will be turned over to John Lilly, who has previously served as Mozilla COO. Baker and Lilly have been deftly tag-teaming Mozilla operational responsibilities for many months and will still work closely together going forward. Baker, who will continue to serve as Mozilla chairwoman and plans to focus on new initiatives that will serve Mozilla's long-term interests, believes that Lilly is presently best suited for the CEO position.

"John Lilly is the right person to guide the product and organizational maturity of MoCo. John has been doing more and more of this since he took on the COO role in August of 2006. John understands Mozilla, is astonishingly good at operations and has an innate facility for our products and technologies and the directions in which they should develop," Baker wrote in a blog entry. "Once I allowed myself to think about this I realized that John will be a better CEO for the MoCo going forward than I would be. I'm sure that I was the right person for this role during the first years of MoCo; I'm equally sure that John is the best person for this role in the future."

Following her transition out of the CEO position, Baker intends to serve Mozilla's vision of an open Internet by looking for ways to improve the efficacy of the standards process, make security comprehensible to the general Internet population, increase awareness of Mozilla's collaborative model, give users more control over their own data and content, and encourage adoption of Mozilla's revenue-based public service model.

"I have a vision of the Internet and online life and a positive user experience—and of Mozilla's role in creating these—that is far broader than browsers, e-mail clients and even technology in general," Baker wrote. "I want Mozilla's influence on the industry to go beyond the bits we ship as software. More particularly, I want to use the impact Firefox gives us in the market to get openness, collaboration and user control embedded in other products, services and aspects of online life."

Lilly responded in a blog entry and revealed some of his plans for the future of the Mozilla Corporation. "[I]n a very few circumstances—once or twice in a lifetime if you're lucky—the opportunity you get to make a difference is one that has a very large, even global impact. My new role as CEO of Mozilla Corporation feels like one of those times," Lilly wrote. "It goes without saying that I'm excited by the challenge of my new job. I've thought an awful lot about the role of MoCo (our shorthand for the Corporation) in supporting the Mozilla mission and manifesto, as the coordination point for our work on the platform and on Firefox."

The Mozilla Corporation, says Lilly, should work behind the scenes to provide a solid foundation for community development efforts while remaining as unobtrusive as possible. "I've come to the conclusion that the most successful case for MoCo will be when the corporation itself is sort of invisible," Lilly wrote. "That is, when MoCo can support Mozilla's mission, providing economic sustainability, project coordination, and a connection to real users around the world, while getting out of the way of what our community all around the world is doing."

His top priorities are to deliver a strong Firefox 3 release, help the newly established Mozilla Mail company achieve independence, increase communication about Mozilla's fiscal sustainability, and assist Baker with her new initiatives.

The structure and focus of Mozilla has evolved considerably in the past year, but the fundamental vision—that of user empowerment and an open Internet—remains unchanged. The organization is narrowing its software focus to emphasize the browser while also laying a new foundation for expansive, long-term initiatives that are strategically relevant to the organization's central goals. We see evidence of this in Mozilla's decision to spin off Thunderbird into the Mozilla Mail project and also the organization's increased focus on mobile browsing.

There appears to be a lot of shuffling going on in the Mozilla structural hierarchy as the organization comes to terms with the new requirements and opportunities implied by the explosive growth in the popularity of the Firefox web browser. This might cause some to express concerns about Mozilla's focus, but the fact that Lilly lists a strong Firefox 3 release as his number one priority tells me that Mozilla isn't about to let its new projects distract it from doing what it does best: creating a web browser that kicks ass. I think we can expect to see great things from Lilly and Baker in the coming months.