Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products • Hacker News Board

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

#831

Post by rrdharan » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

barrkel wrote: post #325

gfodor wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common refrain, but is anything but obvious. Focusing on the browser could be a losing strategy. I'd argue it probably is. The trajectory is terrible: the tech is being commoditized (WebKit, Chromium) and the market share picture is bleak. The opportunity cost is huge: maintaining a web engine, one which basically just tries to keep up with the others put out by Google et al, takes armies of people that could perha…

Counterpoint: Apple when Jobs came back. Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly. It's very hard to do psychologically, though. IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be pr…

Chrome (still) does uBlock.

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

#832

Post by rrdharan » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 4:36 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #347

barrkel wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Apple when Jobs came back. Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly. It's very hard to do psychologically, though. IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be pr…

> And at the end of the day, that's mostly Tree Style Tabs, uBlock and a menu bar. Amen. And not send each and every keystroke to Google.

Firefox does that too, by that exact same definition (which I think is a silly one):

https://smallbusiness.chron.com/turn-autosuggestion-off-mozi...

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

#833

Post by AnonHP » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 4:40 AM UTC

The internal message to employees says:

> Investing in New Products We are organizing a new product organization outside of Firefox that will both ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams. Our initial investments will be Pocket, Hubs, VPN, Web Assembly and security and privacy products.

This is very much welcome, and I look forward to more products with paid tiers. Mozilla Corporation must have ways to get revenues from end users through different means, and combining that with Mozilla’s vision is a good thing. If there’s one thing missing for me in this list, it’s an email service that combines the best of other paid email providers.

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

#834

Post by asdff » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 4:41 AM UTC

KerryJones wrote: post #827

vages wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bit of hyperbole there. This is a press release that their PR head pumped out in 5 minutes, using whatever techniques they teach PR heads at communications schools. Insert any company that can lay off 250 employees and keep ticking, and you will probably get about the same exact document from a similarly schooled PR head.

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

#835

Post by rsj_hn » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 4:47 AM UTC

DonHopkins wrote: post #780

war1025 wrote: post #683

> I'm just disappointed about what Mozilla has become over the years. I think that train started rolling when they forced Eich out as CEO. Ever since then, Mozilla seems to be less about best-in-class technology, and more about virtue signalling.

Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite: the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you spreading that misinformation. https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat... Q: Was Brendan Eic…

Then the financial settlement was just for kicks?

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

#836

Post by asdff » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

criddell wrote: post #630

Hackbraten wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firefox is the leading browser right now. Chrome isn't even close In what sense? Feature set, user experience, security, stability, performance, developer experience? Genuinely curious. I switched from Chrome last year and have yet to find a single aspect in which I’d say Firefox would lead, with the exception of privacy.

As a user it feels like all of the major browsers have been good enough for quite a while now. Is there anything other than bug fixes and performance improvements happening in that space these days?

Well we are seeing major browsers limit control in recent updates, so that's the new major browser race it seems. Safari and Chrome are locking down what you can do with extensions, which limits what you can do to protect your privacy online.

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

#837

Post by rorykoehler » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 4:55 AM UTC

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 switched from Chrome back to Firefox last year after a decade away and I am loving it. I dunno much about the internal politics at Mozilla (which seems to be a lot based on the little I do know) but I can say that Firefox is light years ahead of Chrome in terms of UX.

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

#838

Post by bronson » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 5:09 AM UTC

kibwen wrote: post #507

renewiltord wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favic…

> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them. Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users…

When have they marketed to power users? Can you point to a campaign? Everything I’ve seen from them has been trying to convince everyday people that privacy is necessary or some fun Mr Robot thing.

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

#839

Post by Rapzid » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 5:13 AM UTC

news12klm wrote: post #489

segphault wrote: post #432

Over the past decade, Mozilla has capitulated over and over again on critical issues. They failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME. They also ended up following rather than leading on key privacy issues like third-party cookie behavior. In every case, they defended these decisions by saying that they couldn't risk losing users, arguing that these issues weren't h…

They may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?

FireFox and Chrome can't even stream Netflix or Amazon at 1080p. It's like they capitulated and still lost. I watch Netflix in their own app on Windows because even though Edge will technically stream 1080p, it seems to be rate limit capped with noticeable quality reduction :|

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

#840

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Wed, Aug 12, 2020, 5:16 AM UTC

Can someone tell me how COVID situation explicitly affected Mozilla's revenue to such an extant? If anything, Internet companies were the least affected or in-fact has been benefited from COVID situation.