Overheard: John Jilly becomes Mozilla CEO - no plans to go public

As in a relay race, the key to a successful enterprise is often the hand-off, a change in leadership at the top.When it’s messy the whole company can suffer. It can die or be taken over. When it’s done right the chief operating officer slides into the chief executive’s chair, the old CEO waves buh-bye, and there’s not much to see. Dana Blankenhorn, A clean hand-off at Mozilla

Dana is right. This does seem to be one of the smoother hand-offs.  John Lilly is now the CEO at Mozilla, the developer of the open-source browser Firefox. The New York Times did a good job covering the politics of the hand-off, although the photo they ran makes him look ridiculously young. The announcement was made on John’s blog.