Firefox usage is down despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up • Hacker News Board

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

#671

Post by ksec » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

behnamoh wrote: post #646

ksec wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I definitely agree with changing leadership. I dont think she can be described as parasitic leadership. She is incompetent, but I dont think she has the intention to drive Mozilla to the ground. After all she co-founded the Mozilla Project, and was the Chairwoman for a long time, long before she was named the CEO. Why did they not find someone else to be CEO is beyond me though.

Remember Stephen Elop, former CEO of Nokia? He did an awesome job in reducing Nokia's marketshare (and hence, its market capital) to make the company ready to be acquired by his mother company, Microsoft, at a very low price (cheaper than just one app—WhatsApp which was sold to Facebook). Or remember Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer? She also did a great job at making the company ready to be sold out to Verizon at low price.…

Oh no.

While I am absolutely pissed ( to say the least ) that Nokia was sold to Microsoft and Yahoo couldn't turn its ship around. I dont think both CEO were doing in their own interest or another companies interest.

Nokia refused to use Android. ( Which was what really killed Nokia ) That was only two possible outcome, either go full force with Symbian or partner with Microsoft. I mean there are so many wrong with Nokia even before Elop joined nothing much could have been done. It turns out the penalty for completely dismissing iPhone and Smartphone was death for their phone division. ( Currently the Nokia Smartphone are manufactured by a JV formed by former Nokia employees and Foxconn, with the name licensed from Nokia )

Elop did however completely neglect the importance of Carrier / Network Infrastructure segment, although arguably Ericsson wasn't competing much and Huawei didn't show up on their radar. ( Yet )

Marissa was trying very hard to recreate Google within Yahoo. She was absolutely executing it. But it is one of those example where I put the argument against execution eats strategy for breakfast.

It is not one OR the other. You need both. The equation times both together. When you have a strategy which trends towards zero or even negative, it doesn't matter how well you execute it.

In the end she failed. The strategy was wrong from the start. I actually thought the other CEO candidate's vision of turning Yahoo in to an Online Media Companies suits Yahoo better. But Marissa got the job, and the rest is history.

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

#672

Post by indymike » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:16 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #164

patrec wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see any realistic chance of this happening? Generally if a company is captured by a parasitic leadership sucking it dry, that's it, right? Is there anyone on the board whose interests are more aligned with keeping Mozilla alive (probably hard to do at this point) than feasting on it whilst there is still something left to feast on? Presumably you'd need a few such people.

It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account unless the board members that want her out would resign if she does not want to make way. That would be a major statement and would put the remaining board members on notice. The board typically does not get compensated the way the CEO does so they are usually not in a position to 'suck it dry', on top of…

One of the best and hardest things to do for anything with a board of directors is to establish that EVERY BOARD MEETING starts with a vote on one simple question: "Shall the CEO/Executive Director be retained?" Every company, not for profit or even tiny club that makes this the big question performs it's mission well. Those that don't, well, you get a lot more politics.

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

#673

Post by mjow » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:17 PM UTC

boca_honey wrote: post #664

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…

I'm not a native english speaker, and I'm curious. Mozilla's CEO is a woman. Why are you referring to her as they? I know about the gender pronouns debacle... But isn't it OK to call her a woman?

I think he's just bypassing the need to specify one way or another. It's a person holding the CEO office - the gender of the person is not relevant to the point being made or the discussion.

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

#674

Post by indymike » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

zgiber wrote: post #102

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…

I agree to me it seems like they're admitting that the ship is sinking. The CEO is over 60yo, unlikely to take on another gig after this. The simplest explanation is often the correct one, she's lost her way and needs a nice cushion before retirement. Greed is s very human thing.

Mozilla, the ship, does not need to sink. That is the heart of the problem. It appears the ship is being scuttled.

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

#675

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:19 PM UTC

stevehawk wrote: post #604

mywacaday wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link, wasn't aware of the details. While I 100% disagree with him on marriage equality I don't understand why he was driven from his role that has nothing to do with Proposition 8. Why did his freedom to support a cause with his own money result in him having to resign, seems anti-democratic to me.

I'd say the answer to that is the same reason why there was a front page article the other day about which was more important: revenue stream or culture. Comments almost made it feel like people would gladly ride a company to the grave so long as they could feel good about what they haven't accomplished (making money).

I missed that article. Do you have a link? I’d like to read the comments.

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

#676

Post by 0x262d » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:22 PM UTC

drenvuk wrote: post #15

Shit like this pisses me off. I care for Firefox and the team behind it but how do you get rid of these vampires sucking the company dry? You've got executive pay going up, usage going down. Pivotal leaders being ousted, good workers being released, good features being removed and shit features being added. It's like managers and executives somehow dig their bureaucratic teeth into a successful company/project and th…

no money in anything but parasitism.

IMO We desperately need socialism and an end to rent-collection in totality.

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

#677

Post by Tom4hawk » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

Liquix wrote: post #578

hans1729 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What alternatives do we have for non-chromium browsers that have a healthy plugin ecosystem? The obvious answer is: none. It always was Chrome or Firefox, everything else was so niche that 'healthy plugin ecosystem' is out of reach. And this very likely won't change for the better, pretty much everyone I know ditched Firefox in favor of chrome by now. We all want to love firefox, but at this point, staying invested…

You're not wrong, but I also feel it's important we do something (anything) other than give up and use Chrome. Rock & hard place.

The situation is weird. I want to give them some money but there is absolutely no way to support firefox development.

A long time ago firefox(program) started asking for donations. I've donated 5$(I was a poor student in Poland[1]). After the donation, I found out that money will not be used for FF development (why firefox page did not mention that?). Long story short it was my last donation to them.

[1] Now I'm not a student ;)

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

#678

Post by luckylion » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

rattray wrote: post #670

luckylion wrote: post #661

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish as a community our reaction to Mozilla's troubles was "let's all start donating!" instead of "screw those evil pigs". But what would that change? You're not donating to the makers of Firefox, you're donating to the entity that owns the makers of Firefox. They'll spend the money on whatever they find interesting or lucrative or politically wise. Firefox might or might not be among them.

Sure, they could fuck it up. Lots of people fuck obvious things up, and Mozilla hasn't been lucky in several of their recent investments. But if serious money came in through donations, and everyone put "for firefox, keep it simple and good" in their donation box, they'd have to be particularly braindead to put that money elsewhere. That being said, now that I do some math, it'd take 3.7mm people each donating $10/mo…

> That being said, now that I do some math, it'd take 3.7mm people each donating $10/mo to match their 2018 revenue of $450mm/yr. Which does sound difficult to achieve...

For normal users who can hardly tell Chrome and Firefox apart and say "Chrome? Firefox? Sorry, I'm using the internet"? Yeah.

For power users? I'm not convinced. JetBrains makes about $250mm a year only from developers. But their focus is on delivering value to developers, making their lives easier and their work more fun. I'm sure Firefox could deliver a lot of value too, but they're focused on the lowest common denominator of all users, not on targeting e.g. developers or web power users and offering them something that Google does not.

But if there's a good chance that the money ends up in political activism or some hobby project at Mozilla ("why don't we build a new OS?"), donations aren't going to work.

Make Firefox a great Developer tool so you don't need Fiddler & co as a developer and sell that as a commercial version, keep the open source version. I don't know whether it will bring in $450mm, but I'm sure it will bring in lots of money.

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

#679

Post by thebigspacefuck » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

TheArcane wrote: post #567

bambax wrote: post #253

> Mobile browsing numbers are bleak: Firefox barely exists on phones, with a market share of less than half a percent. This is baffling given that mobile Firefox has a rare feature for a mobile browser: it's able to install extensions and so can block ads. This is true, and indeed very strange. I use FF on mobile and it works perfectly. So Mozilla's problems aren't only technical, there's also a question of market aw…

Is there a unique value proposition to use Firefox on iOS, since due to Apple policy, they can't have addons? Even Firefox Focus' content blocker works on Safari and not the main Firefox app

It’s better than Safari and it’s not Chrome. Brave is similar and has ad blocking, but I didn’t like it as much.

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

#680

Post by roca » Wed, Sep 23, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

marcthe12 wrote: post #295

mattlondon wrote: post #245

Stupid question perhaps, but I thought Firefox was an open source project? Why does it need a company with highly-paid executives and HR departments and all that to exist? If Firefox/Mozilla the company goes out of business then .... nothing changes? Apart from of course a bunch of people sadly lose their full-time jobs and development speed slows dramatically as people are no longer working on it full-time and only…

Well web browsers are to complex to maintain by part time Dev unless you have an upstream to rebase on or do not mind in implementing new stuff. You need at least 10 to 20 full time Devs at the minimum and that's if you libaries for all web APIs which clearly Firefox and Chrome are not doing. I wish there was a way to browser modular frankly.

To sustain an independent, cutting-edge, competive browser engine you need several hundred excellent engineers working full-time, at least. No-one's been able to do it with less.