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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#371

Post by seppel »

kvark wrote: post #190
stingraycharles wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they cannot succeed in making Firefox better, the problem is bigger than I thought. So basically, they’ll try to gain income from other sources, because they have given up on increasing the Firefox market share, and anticipate losing the revenue that comes with it?

> If they cannot succeed in making Firefox better They can make Firefox better, and have been doing that a lot. The problem is - it doesn't make the users to come. Google, Apple, Microsoft - all own platforms that people use, and they heavily push the users towards their own browsers.

> They can make Firefox better, and have been doing that a lot. The problem is - it doesn't make the users to come. Google, Apple, Microsoft - all own platforms that people use, and they heavily push the users towards their own browsers.

So what? History has shown that users happily switch to a different browser if it is better. The Mozilla Corporation should know this, as they were the ones making people switch from IE to FF a decade ago. And they were competing against a preinstalled browser!

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#372

Post by prophesi »

solarkraft wrote: post #363
prophesi wrote: post #361

It really stinks that 250 people lost their jobs, I don't want to downplay that. But I think overall this is a good move for Mozilla. For them to be product-oriented will allow them to uphold their own privacy advocacy ideals. Most notably, they may eventually be able to remove Google as Firefox's default search engine.

> they may eventually be able to remove Google as Firefox's default search engine IIRC the financial woes are precisely because the contract with Google is running out. Aren't they?

That's news to me. Their contract has been consistently renewed for years, and I'd imagine that would give Google some pretty bad PR if they didn't.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#373

Post by ngokevin »

wanderr wrote: post #370

'The coronavirus pandemic “significantly impacted our revenue,”' - Most of their revenue comes from search engines paying to be the default. Are there any details on why the pandemic would have a significant impact on that?

It's odd also because those search engines have long-term contracts to the tune of like $350-$500M a year, and Google seems to be doing okay.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#374

Post by wlesieutre »

sbahr001 wrote: post #335

I find this sad, Mozilla is really an advocate for the open web and web standards. Since web browsers are free, they can't make much. They might be able to sell something like Thunderbird; if they improve it and make it more into a service, like Hey! for example. They could also try the sponsorship model that a lot of open source projects are doing. They already have sponsors, but maybe sponsors for their open source…

If downsizing the organization and bringing some revenue in from a VPN service helps them be less financially beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive.

I don't know that they would need to sell Thunderbird as a whole bundled product/service like Hey; they could launch a paid email service (in the "it's not Gmail" market occupied by Proton, FastMail, Posteo, etc.) and use that money for work on Thunderbird.

Not so different from having a VPN service and using it to bring in money for Firefox.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#375

Post by TylerE »

echelon wrote: post #352

They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share. Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking. Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.

Chrome didn’t destroy Firefox. Firefox destroyed Firefox. Chrome was SO MUCH better it could't help but win.

Turns out people do actually care about performance and responsiveness.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#376

Post by zobzu »

Mozilla 2010: "join us, don't work for the man, work for mankind!" (this was their actual slogan)

Mozilla 2020: "well actually, work for the man" (or woman in this case)

Sadly, even with Mozilla Foundation getting 40M in donations they need the Corporation to pay the bills (including Mitchell Baker's 2.5M/y salary)

The fact that this makes it less likely Firefox continues to be competition for Chrome is bad news for the web ...

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#377

Post by shajznnckfke »

kvark wrote: post #2

That's the last call for anybody who thinks "it's good that Mozilla exists, and its mission is important, but I'm still using Chrome and derivatives". Mozilla can't exist solely because people think it has a good mission: it needs products that can pay the bills, or at least a large population of active users.

Is it actually true that Mozilla’s core business (develop Firefox, funded by search bar traffic) loses money? Or is the crises that this core business doesn’t generate enough surplus to fund the overhead of other activities that Mozilla engages in?

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#378

Post by echelon »

TylerE wrote: post #375
echelon wrote: post #352

They were doing fine until Chrome ate up all the market share. Google shouldn't have been allowed to do that. It's very anti-competitive for them to have a browser that defaults to Google search and disables plugins that support adblocking. Google is destroying Mozilla. Their monopoly is making the web worse.

Chrome didn’t destroy Firefox. Firefox destroyed Firefox. Chrome was SO MUCH better it could't help but win. Turns out people do actually care about performance and responsiveness.

Chrome isn't better than Firefox, and both browsers have varied in terms of their performance.

Google had the advantage of plastering Chrome all over google.com when people performed searches. That's how it got installed everywhere.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#379

Post by goldenManatee »

I’ve always thought of Mozilla as a “force for good and change”, never as a money machine. This has maintained some balance for allowing Google to go largely unchecked. If Mozilla moves in a direction more focused on profit and more products, there’s no balance and the overdue regulating has to kick in fast.

Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

#380

Post by fwn »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #232
sciurus wrote: post #7

250 people, roughly 25% of the company, were laid off today. This is on top of the 70 laid off in January (discussion of that at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22057737 )

I feel like this should go down as one of the worst layoff announcements in history. The whole post seems to be an attempt to smooth over the layoffs with glorious language about the battle against systemic racism, internet freedom, etc. If I worked there, or was laid off, this would just make me more cynical.

Mozilla PR is famous for their absolutely meaningless and elusive corporate communication. I'm not sure how they ended up that way but it's a reoccurring theme.
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