Former MSN exec joins Mozilla China
Li Gong, the former top executive for MSN in China, has joined Mozilla's Chinese subsidiary, Mozilla Online, as its chairman and CEO.
Gong officially assumed his current position in April. Prior to that, Gong was the co-chair of the nonprofit Mozilla China organization started in March 2005 to promote and develop Mozilla products in China.
Li Gong
"The new company shares the same vision of the Mozilla Foundation and the Mozilla Corp., with its goals being increasing adoption of the Firefox browser in China, building local communities, developing local partnerships, and participating in and helping to advance the state of art of open source software in China," Gong said in an e-mail.
Gong left his position with Microsoft in January, saying at the time that he planned to return home to Beijing, but declining to elaborate any further. Prior to that, Gong was the chief architect of Java security at Sun Microsystems and the general manager of Sun's software organization in China.
Gong is now back in Beijing and beginning to hire new people for the Mozilla Online offices, which happen to be located in the Tsinghua Science Park. According to Gong, that is the same complex that houses his former MSN office, as well as offices for Google, Sun and Adobe.
In a software-driven world, it's easy to forget about the nuts and bolts. Whether it's cars, robots, personal gadgetry or industrial machines, Candace Lombardi examines the moving parts that keep our world rotating. A journalist who divides her time between the United States and the United Kingdom, Lombardi has written about technology for the sites of The New York Times, CNET, USA Today, MSN, ZDNet, Silicon.com, and GameSpot. E-mail her at candacelombardi@gmail.com. She is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET. 
