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Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

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Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#221

Post by gwd »

jameslk wrote: post #96
Jonnax wrote: post #13

There's a quote from the CEO saying that they looked at the market and felt like they were being underpaid. And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. Firefox has a problem. It gets most of its revenue from Google. They need a different revenue stream but their ideas haven't worked. Their executives are clearly failures. But with such high pay, they're cashing out. Buying themsel…

While I understand the frustration, it's unclear to me what the expected solution is for Mozilla. Pay the CEO less until the company does better? Ok but the CEO will presumably just find a higher paying job elsewhere. Then what? Find a cheaper CEO? How does that help fix the slipping market share for Firefox?

> Find a cheaper CEO?

Find a CEO whose motivation is more "make the world a better place" than "make millions of dollars a year". $500k is a large enough salary to live well just about anywhere. After that it's just "victory points" in the game of careerism.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#222

Post by austhrow743 »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #204
stale2002 wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law. Well, this person already existed. It was Brendan Eich.

Yeah but he wasn't woke enough so they got rid of a capable CEO. "Get woke go broke" Mozilla. Sorry if I sound bitter, but I love Firefox and hate to see it loosing users.

Dude resigned.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#223

Post by bawolff »

edude03 wrote: post #209
bawolff wrote: post #163

Another way to look at it: mozilla is a sinking ship. Being a CEO of a shinking ship looks bad on the resume and is high risk for the ceo (reputation wise). High risk jobs should get higher compensation than low risk jobs. I'd certainly argue that for a normal company. For mozilla though, there is a question of why do you even need a CEO? Does Linux have a CEO? I suspect at least some of mozilla's problems is trying…

> High risk jobs should get higher compensation than low risk jobs. I agree with you, but isn't the problem more that they're sinking the ship? To take it to the extreme, if I joined a fortune 50 company as the CEO, and started losing billions a year with my decisions, should the board pay me more because I've created a risk to my reputation?

People aren't paid what they "deserve" but what value they provide to the company. If the situation exists (whether created by the CEO or not) that makes it more expensive to replace the CEO, then unless they plan on firing the ceo, the ceo's value to the company increases because they are expensive to replace.

Or to put another way, life isn't fair and outcomes dont neccesarily align with what people deserve in a moral sense.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#224

Post by rvz »

IshKebab wrote: post #73
londons_explore wrote: post #22

The main difference here is a US tech Vs UK corporate culture. Mozilla's approach is "spend lots of cash and grow fast like a VC backed company". The guardian is a "let's try and have a stable user base and keep the company alive for another 100 years". In this case, Mozilla's approach has failed badly. I think it's unlikely they'll turn it around without the help of another big tech company making a strategic purcha…

Not sure The Guardian is the best example of economic success.

Exactly. Asking for donations isn't good enough for the likes of Mozilla.

From the post:

> Mozilla should probably just ask their users for money. For many years the Guardian newspaper (a similarly sized organisation to Mozilla in terms of staff) was a financial basket case. The Guardian started asking their readers for money a few years ago and seems to be on firmer financial footing since.

This comparison doesn't make sense. First of all, nearly all these publishers are moving towards subscriptions. This clearly works for them to give readers other incentives like say remove ads and paywalled content, weekly hard copies, etc. Asking users to donate to a free browser when the alternatives are also completely free to use isn't sustainable for Mozilla.

Given that the closest equivalent replacement is Chromium or ungoogled-chromium which is completely free to use and the latter addresses privacy by removing Google on everything, how can 'donations' work for Mozilla if there are other browsers that exist that users can be used for free?

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#225

Post by agumonkey »

RobertoG wrote: post #65
londons_explore wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox OS never made sense unless Mozilla was prepared to pay the backroom bribes and incentives to get it preinstalled on hundreds of millions of phones. And they weren't.

They had Telefónica on board. I think with better planning and execution it could be made to work.

It was also a big undertaking in very early days.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#226

Post by fiblye »

jacquesm wrote: post #100

> And they can't reduce their salary now because it'd be unfair on their families. That must be a real comfort to all the people they laid off. This CEO needs to go, needs to be replaced by someone who is well versed in technology instead of in law.

It wasn't long ago that comments were shouting that this was the absolute most qualified person to lead Mozilla when others were questioning having a lawyer lead a tech company. Someone with at least a little hands-on experience in building a product really should be something companies look for in leadership.

I mean, sure, Baker's done plenty for Mozilla, but Mozilla has been absolutely lost as to what they're trying to be this past year. It's not a clear cut software company anymore and that's a problem.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#227

Post by codethief »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #183
kwanbix wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not that they get most of their revenue from Google. The problem is that they have 5% share of the web now.

5% of a few billion users is not nothing. Mostly the decline of Mozilla has little to do with the browser functionality or marketing but with the fact that there are several competing browsers out there that have caught up. E.g. MS ditched IE in favor of Edge. Apple has continued investing in Safari which they also force the usage of exclusively on IOS. And of course Google has similar control point in the form of Ch…

> Hell, the rent for that alone could keep a development team going for a very long time.

This. So much this. Besides, if they moved their HQ outside the Valley, they could probably also hire new people for much less…

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#228

Post by thomasahle »

scoutt wrote: post #103
martin_a wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you even spend around 2.5 million A YEAR (okay, before taxes, whatever) if you're not BURNING the cash? I don't get it.

Let's says it's the half after taxes: 1.25M. Spending 3424 a day for 365 days should get you there. You have to realize it's our fault to not understand these poor people.

> Let's says it's the half after taxes

If you make that much money, you're not paying more than 25% taxes. Or you are not using the right lawyers.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#229

Post by londons_explore »

RobertoG wrote: post #166
Certhas wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe maybe not. But it's also good to keep in mind who else failed in that space from many different angles. MS, Nokia, Blackberry, etc... If MS with infinite cash on hand could not get into that market then it is likely that chances of success were always very low. And it still might have been the right thing to try despite the chance being low.

You are right that it was a very difficult endeavor. I think the main bottleneck is not the installation by the vendors, but the apps available. I believe, what is missing is an abstraction layer between the apps and the OS. If it was possible to create apps for Android and Apple in a generic way and, it was easy to add a third OS, so all the apps could be made available to the new system, a new OS would be not so li…

PWA's are what you're thinking of. They are platform agnostic apps.

The thing holding them back is apples deliberate crippling of them to make them hard to install, slow, buggy, and not having basic platform features.

I believe Apple is deliberately doing that because if they supported PWA's properly, they'd loose all vendor lock in.

Re: Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up

#230

Post by bawolff »

fierarul wrote: post #180
bawolff wrote: post #163

Another way to look at it: mozilla is a sinking ship. Being a CEO of a shinking ship looks bad on the resume and is high risk for the ceo (reputation wise). High risk jobs should get higher compensation than low risk jobs. I'd certainly argue that for a normal company. For mozilla though, there is a question of why do you even need a CEO? Does Linux have a CEO? I suspect at least some of mozilla's problems is trying…

Why wouldn't you need a CEO? Manage $1B by committee?

Endowments are usually managed by comittee, so yes.

However, if it becomes a more volunteer based organization, you tend to pay people in conferences and other infrastructure. Which is a very different type of thing. You still probably need someone to manage that, but its very different from being a CEO

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