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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

#821

Post by DonHopkins »

dependenttypes wrote: post #798
DonHopkins wrote: post #787

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common. Obviously you're referring to Brendan Eich. But you're wrong: Eich was not fired, and he was not forced to resign. In fact just the opposite: the board tried to get him to stay. This should not be news to you: it was in the FAQ on CEO resignat…

> the board tried to get him to stay What about https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/28/5559284/half-of-mozillas-... then?

What about it?

>Update 2: A Mozilla spokesperson says "the three board members ended their terms last week for a variety of reasons," adding "two had been planning to leave for some time, one since January and one explicitly at the end of the CEO search, regardless of the person selected."

Do you have any evidence that the official Mozilla FAQ about the matter is lying, and that they actually fired him, or did not ask him to stay? Has Eich himself ever made the claim that he was fired, or forced out, or denied the board tried to get him to stay? Or are you just spreading conspiracy theories that contradict the known facts?

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

#822

Post by mathattack »

alex_young wrote: post #796

Mozilla, with revenue of $27M last year, is mainly responsible for Firefox and a few related applications [0]. Apache meanwhile, has revenue of less than $1M, and has over 350 projects with huge adoption like Cassandra and Kafka and Lucene and Maven and that eponymous HTTP server [1]. In 2017 Mozilla paid their CEO $2.3M and their treasurer (who only worked 6 months) $1.2M [2]. Mozilla is a foundation which owns a fo…

Putting yourself in front of a search engine and charging money is valuable. And Google likes having a non-threatening competitor around.

They still have a thousand mouths to feed.

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

#823

Post by OneLeggedCat »

dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…

I'm still pissed about the Mr. Robot thing.

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

#824

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

jiggawatts wrote: post #662
anonymousab wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the feeling of getting kicked in the shins by a diva designer every-other update has risen dramatically in the past few years, as has the prominence of (at least the feeling of) 'closed wontfix dontagree' issues for common and longstanding gripes on the bug tracker and GitHub. The unfortunate nature of a bad feeling is that it will outweigh a positive feeling from another change of equal consequence. I would…

The 'closed wontfix dontagree' attitude, or letting important requests sit there open for over a decade -- some with tens of thousands of comments -- is what killed Firefox more than anything. In the enterprise world, Firefox lacked a few, small, but critical features: 1) MSI Installers 2) Group Policy Administrative Templates 3) Proxy configuration from Windows 4) Enterprise PKI integration Some of these are support…

There is now, and has been for some time, an advocate of Firefox in the enterprise and last I checked that is almost entirely what he worked on. His name is Mike Kaply.

But you’re right: too little, too late.

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

#825

Post by ori_b »

jacquesm wrote: post #95

Mozilla management has me puzzled. They have a position that is incredibly strong, lots of dedicated users that would rather quit the web than switch to Chrome or Edge. "But we know we also need to go beyond the browser to give people new products and technologies that both excite them and represent their interests" Is exactly what they should stay away from. Work on the bloody browser, forget about the rest. There a…

Web standards are hideously complicated to implement, and browsers are hideously difficult to charge for. That doesn't make for a viable business.

Unless they become a volunteer based effort -- which is unlikely, given the hideous complexity of implementing web standards -- they don't have a way to fund things.

This is why I've repeatedly spoken against the unapproachable complexity of web standards. They effectively turn the web into a corporate walled garden for megacorporations, because they're too complicated to implement affordably.

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

#826

Post by stock_toaster »

stonogo wrote: post #715
dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…

It's not withering away because of minor mistakes; it's withering away because of major mistakes. Those mistakes are largely in corporate governance -- this is the reason so many are furious about the $2.5MM salary for a CEO at the helm of a market-share death spiral. Every single product line except Firefox is an also-ran from a revenue standpoint. How does Baker respond? Fire the Servo team, and tell an interviewer…

Best comment of the thread. Well done. I strongly agree.

Aside: That linked salary reduction comment is also pretty damned tone deaf. oof. I imagine having to find a new job because of major systemic mismanagement is also a burden!

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

#827

Post by KerryJones »

vages wrote: post #627
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly don't think the corporate doublespeak is reason to switch to Chrome, but I do think the corporate doublespeak in this announcement is just awful. When you're doing a layoff, just announce the layoff, show compassion to the affected employees, and if you want to announce other changes, do it in a separate announcement. Putting stuff about the fight against systemic racism in the opening paragraph of a layo…

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

It was also common for leaders to own slaves. What is common does != what is right, meaningful, or that it should be used as a guide.

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

#828

Post by spicyramen »

While we are focusing in technology, once need to look into their Finance team and how they push leadership on terms of income/cash flow. Recently one ex-Google guy joined as COO not after a very successful gig in Cloud, hope he helps leadership this time.

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

#829

Post by FeepingCreature »

DonHopkins wrote: post #787
will4274 wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't hold Mozilla to higher standards. I regard Mozilla as being deeply sick, even by the standards of a non-profit. The Mozilla Corporation has three plagues. First, the plague of Debian and the logjam breakers. Mozilla, like Debian, has many technical users with loud opinions and struggles to reach consensus. Debian suffers from this problem because it comes to consensus oh so very slowly - multiple competing pa…

>Google also doesn't fire executives because of their political views or previous donations, when held privately, particularly when those political views are relatively common. Obviously you're referring to Brendan Eich. But you're wrong: Eich was not fired, and he was not forced to resign. In fact just the opposite: the board tried to get him to stay. This should not be news to you: it was in the FAQ on CEO resignat…

I think people are so used to corporate "oh he was resigned" doublespeak that they can no longer take any such assertion seriously, regardless of facts.

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

#830

Post by KingOfCoders »

dblohm7 wrote: post #258

[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.] One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards. OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at…

Straw man attacks.

People have only one standard: Build a good browser. Writing this from Firefox it is still a CPU and memory hog when you have 50+ tabs open.

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