Mozilla’s Crowdsourcing Mystique

CASE STUDY 3:

MOZILLA’S CROWDSOURCING MYSTIQUE

Bryan Baronia

MGT590: Business Strategy

Professor Joseph Siegmund

November 18, 2016

MOZILLA’S CROWDSOURCING MYSTIQUE

        Mozilla is a free-software community which develops and creates products for Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email, Firefox OS and among others. Mozilla becomes a leader in their industry in terms of their strategy, Crowdsourcing.

        Mozilla has a large number of contributors and volunteers who devote their time and efforts to help develop and program new technologies. Other leaders in the market such as Google and LinkedIn tried to copy their strategy but failed to do so.

Mozilla’s “Crowdsourcing” Model

Crowdsourcing is a system of getting the needed services and ideas by soliciting contributions and efforts from a large group of people instead from the company’s employees or suppliers.

Mozilla is a good example of crowdsourcing model in which they have a large army of volunteers who contributes about 40% of the company’s work. Mozilla welcomes contributors and volunteers to innovate and explore their freedom to create what they want. At the same time, the contributors and volunteers are very eager to donate their time and efforts to Mozilla because it aligns with their interests, they can earn recognition and they can meet other people in the same field and interests.

LinkedIn and Google face in emulating Mozilla’s volunteer model

Following the success of Mozilla’s crowdsourcing model, LinkedIn and Google would like to get unpaid contributors for their sites as well. Unfortunately, both LinkedIn and Google faced negative criticism on their efforts to persuade people to work for them.

LinkedIn placed a poll with their 12000 users to find out what would motivate them to translate the site’s content into other languages. From the poll, LinkedIn learned that 18% of their users would like to do it for fun, while half of their respondents says they want recognition. The American Translators Association send their dismay with LinkedIn as this poll is misguided and troubling.

On the other hand, Google invites artists to donate their artworks as decorative skins for their websites and in return, artists can gain recognition. This move from Google put them in bad light since they don’t want to pay the artists for their artworks.

Mozilla’s Unique Approach to Innovation

Mozilla’s crowdsourcing model is very unique approach that become the company’s competitive advantage.

Crowdsourcing model work in Mozilla

Crowdsourcing works for an IT based company like Mozilla because technology is a very huge platform where the possibilities are limitless and endless. Any solicited ideas are welcome and group of contributors whose thinking alike can help one another.