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

calpaterson.com

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

#721

Post by pfraze »

calpaterson wrote: post #717
roca wrote: post #698

This article has many problems. One of the main problems is that the immediate reason for Firefox losing market share is totally outside the control of the CEO or anyone else at Mozilla: Google pouring billions into Chrome, both actual billions of dollars and similar resources "in kind", like free advertising on the world's most popular Web properties (i.e. Google's). The best CEO in the world can't magically come up…

I don't agree that the reason that Firefox is losing market share is outside of the control of Mozilla. Most people seem who stop using Firefox seem to do so for concrete reasons within the control of Mozilla: speed (now perhaps a historical issue), compatibility with sites and user experience (the various controversial changes to the url bar over the years for example). These are all within the control of Mozilla. I…

The difference in resources between the companies obviously factors into product quality as well. The four-way focus of speed, security, compatibility with an evolving web spec, and extensibility is demanding to say the least.

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

#722

Post by calpaterson »

dx87 wrote: post #707
roca wrote: post #698

This article has many problems. One of the main problems is that the immediate reason for Firefox losing market share is totally outside the control of the CEO or anyone else at Mozilla: Google pouring billions into Chrome, both actual billions of dollars and similar resources "in kind", like free advertising on the world's most popular Web properties (i.e. Google's). The best CEO in the world can't magically come up…

> Finding an alternative source for revenue like that is just really incredibly hard. Mozilla's been trying for a long time. What alternate revenue sources have they tried? Outside of their recent VPN offering, I haven't seen anything that they've tried to monetize. They didn't even try and monetize Firefox Send, even though the developers had a monetization strategy from the start.

Yes it's surprising given how many side-projects Mozilla have how few of them have been monetized given that you must assume they have a genuine interest in finding alternative funding.

I'm sure that a number of people would have been prepared to pay for Firefox Send. I know a lot of people who have trouble transferring files too large for email so it surprised me that putting a user interface around backblaze's object store api with Mozilla's brand on it could not be a profitable business.

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

#724

Post by bryan0 »

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 was looking for the source of this quote and it's from an interview in June 2020:

"I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

https://answers.thenextweb.com/s/mitchell-baker-aGY62z

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

#725

Post by bdcravens »

chmod775 wrote: post #628
RobertoG wrote: post #69

This: "Mitchell Baker, Mozilla's top executive, was paid $2.4m in 2018, [..]. Payments to Baker have more than doubled in the last five years." and this at the same time: "Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people." It's shameful. Specially for a "non profit".

You could save a lot of jobs by cutting into the CEOs salary, jobs of people who actually do something productive.

How many jobs? I agree they are overpaid, but that salary covers maybe 10% of those job cuts.

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

#726

Post by bdcravens »

jansan wrote: post #292
findthewords wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it possible that non-profitness does not inherit to a child company? Seems like a conflict of interest.

And why should anyone contribute to an open source project of a for-profit company without being compensated?

Compensation takes many forms.

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

#727

Post by onlyfa1r00 »

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…

It would be immoral to to place figurative death on a living persons social status due to actual acts

But it’s moral to let people starve, die of preventable disease due to sitting on your ha day

Welcome to America’s emotional prison

Old people have convinced young people to pander to them until they’re the grave, they’re locking up the judiciary to force themselves on the future

And Americans sit here like coddled children

Isn’t that pretty much living in a sinking ship of a country?

No one here going to admit the top down political failures of the past aren’t able to handle modern reality?

There is no artificial shortage of code anymore. GitHub and GitLab are gutting that labor market. Who cares if they can’t make new code shapes? Business only cares that the machines keep sorting. Self aggrandizing nerds care about code shapes.

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

#728

Post by [deleted] »

driverdan wrote: post #718
eeh wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brendan_Eich says he left, rather than was fired. It looks like Brendan held popular political views, but not popular in relevant places.

> It looks like Brendan held popular political views That's a generous way to say he opposed equal rights for a minority group, some of whom he employed.

[deleted]

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

#729

Post by bdcravens »

rv-de wrote: post #376
jansan wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why should anyone contribute to an open source project of a for-profit company without being compensated?

what idiots downvoted this very reasonable statement?

I think it's a one-dimensional view, assuming that there is no compensation. For starters, most of us work for for-profit companies and use open source to do our jobs.

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

#730

Post by grumple »

luckylion wrote: post #585
grumple wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t pay competitively, you won’t get someone who can do the job well. You might get lucky with someone cheaper, but it will require that luck. The fact is that 2.5 million probably isn’t enough to get the kind of turnaround leader Mozilla needs. They have no revenue model. You’re basically handing a CEO a bunch of talented devs and free products and saying “make a revenue stream” for products where their com…

> If you don’t pay competitively, you won’t get someone who can do the job well. I always have to think back to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, who, in reaction to that exact argument for Goldman Sachs & Co paying out huge bonuses from the bailouts they've just received for crashing the economy shouted: You Don't Have The Best People. What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives - what i…

> What if you don't get the best people by offering huge financial incentives

You aren’t guaranteed the best people if you do; but you are excluded from getting the best people if you don’t.

If a person is the best person, then all other things being equal (they interview well, like all potential job opportunities equally), they will accept the job with the highest pay. Obviously that’s a simplification of any situation.

Focusing on financial incentives and career development is what makes most of us get better. I study my craft and improve not just because of intrinsic value, but because I can make more money. The extrinsic rewards are the only reason people join corporations, otherwise we’d all work for ourselves. You may not like it, but it is true.

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