>That means reducing investment in other areas, though, such as in building out developer tools.
Damn, big mistake. So this is what triggered the creator of the awesome CSS grid tools to join Apple and Safari?
Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
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Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#382That's sad, many of them would have joined Mozilla not just for money but genuinely believing they are working for social good and they did. I understood how bad Mozilla, for lack of a better term 'sucked' at making money when I saw how the small team of KaiOS picked up the remains of Firefox OS and not only turned it to be a viable business but did so in the ruthless, hyper-competitive market of Smartphone OS ecosys…
> I understood how bad Mozilla, for lack of a better term 'sucked' at making money when I saw how the small team of KaiOS picked up the remains of Firefox OS and not only turned it to be a viable business but did so in the ruthless, hyper-competitive market of Smartphone OS ecosystem where even Microsoft had failed. KaiOS is in the ultra-low-end smartphone/feature-phone market that Microsoft/Google/Apple don't care a…
>Like Firefox OS before it, actual KaiOS devices were not well-received, because of poor performance and lack of apps.
As of Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were shipped. It stood second in terms of market share in India due to JioPhone(even ahead of iOS). It seems future Jio Phones would be Android, especially considering Google is now invested in Jio(It's an investor in KaiOS as well). Mozilla had recently signed a deal to develop the gecko engine for KaiOS further.
KaiOS team saw where Firefox OS would fit well and they brought it to fruition; Something I feel Mozilla could have pulled off too.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#383Does the Baidu revenue and shutting down the Taipei office rub anyone else the wrong way? I am not sure Mozilla works outside of a nonprofit model.
I think it works, they simply have no market share.
Baidu and others will pay millions to be a default search engine of a popular browser.
But Firefox just isn't that popular anymore. Which, mind you, sucks, because we need a Firefox (and Quantum is actually pretty good).
That said, Mozilla's focus is no longer Firefox apparently - so, there's that.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chrome didn’t destroy Firefox. Firefox destroyed Firefox. Chrome was SO MUCH better it could't help but win. Turns out people do actually care about performance and responsiveness.
Chrome isn't better than Firefox, and both browsers have varied in terms of their performance. Google had the advantage of plastering Chrome all over google.com when people performed searches. That's how it got installed everywhere.
That is patently false. Chrome was light years ahead of Firefox in both cpu and memory use for years.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#385I wonder why they didn't ever try to make it as a cloud provider, it would fit their mission well to provide cloud services, it would just be for the server side instead of the client side. Guess it's about a decade too late to pivot there, but firms like Cloudflare shows that it's possible to compete with the big actors with enough focus.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#386'The coronavirus pandemic “significantly impacted our revenue,”' - Most of their revenue comes from search engines paying to be the default. Are there any details on why the pandemic would have a significant impact on that?
It's odd also because those search engines have long-term contracts to the tune of like $350-$500M a year, and Google seems to be doing okay.
The contract ends start of 2021 IIRC and Firefox market share has been dropping and will continue dropping (specially now after this news).
Which means I'm sure they are planning for a large reduction in revenue, like 50% or whatever. These contracts are usually on a 3-6 year basis..
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be rapidly downvoted but what strikes me as an outsider (reading most of the comments in this thread) is the collective psyche in the US is viscerally against any entity rising to the top that does not have profit as its sole goal. What they want is for Mozilla to solely focus on Firefox, on the technicalities, and shut up about everything else. And yet no one will actually pay for it as a product. The tragedy…
What they want is for {product X} to solely focus on their needs {set Y}, disregarding everyone else's needs that conflict. This selfishness is expressed for lots of things, not just Mozilla, but things like Ubuntu and Homebrew too. I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".
> I wonder what HN startups must think when they read HN comments and so very often see "my needs aren't met, I quit you".
I know a couple of guys who posted their stuff here. They don't care about the complainers because the complainers don't have and don't offer to have skin in the game. They did the sensible thing, which is to be polite and respond noncommittally thanking them for the feedback or to ignore them.
Because you don't get information that will improve the product from them, they aren't potential customers, and they usually don't know what they're talking about anyway.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#388[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 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…
I don't want to invalidate what you've said, so please don't interpret my comment that way. I would encourage you to think a bit more about a few things:
> For example, Google executives don't release statements after employees die trashing the employee because of an underlying difference in personality and/or political views.
While I agree that it was probably a mistake for Mitchell to have made that post, I think that it also says something about Mozilla's culture that a lot of people outside of Mozilla do not quite grasp.
Mozilla throughout its history has been mostly "open by default." IMHO there was an attempt to change that in MoCo during the latter couple years of Chris Beard's tenure as CEO, but traditionally (and Mitchell, as a co-founder of Mozilla, very much comes from the traditional side) Mozilla has been very open.
As a consequence of this openness, sometimes things come out that, from the outside, look like airing of dirty laundry, because in just about any other organization, they would be. But notwithstanding a few NDA exceptions and the Community Participation Guidelines, Mozilla employees can identify themselves as such and blog about whatever they want without having to filter it through PR.
As you can see, this also raises a tension between "Mozilla should be more mindful about what its executives are saying online," vs "Mozilla is too corporate and should not be silencing its employees." There are people on both sides of that who will be upset, and again, no matter which side they're on, seem to always conclude, "Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome!"
A more expansive NDA would obviously mitigate that, but Mozilla doesn't do things quite like Google or any of its other competitors.
> 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.
There was a lot of poor reporting during the Brendan Eich affair. Personally I think that the stuff written by the WSJ was a hitpiece that contained multiple falsehoods, but those falsehoods stuck around and built up this narrative that still lives today. Having been there when it happened, the least inaccurate account of what happened was written by CNet's Stephen Shankland [1], IMHO. I suggest you read it.
Finally, the Brendan Eich thing happened over six years ago. Is this really something for which Mozilla should be repeatedly be attacked, ad infinitum? Personally I think that it is increasingly off-topic, yet any time Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere, I can pretty much guarantee that `Ctrl-F` `Brendan Eich` will turn something up. People just don't seem to be able to move on from that. I don't think that Mozilla's cause and the vast majority of the people who work there deserve to be punished because of that.
And since you mentioned Google, keep in mind that they are not saints without their own controversies. eg Andy Rubin.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/mozilla-under-fire-inside-the-9-da...
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#389Mozilla's support model was left too weird, too long. Baker is to blame, this should have been rectified years ago.
What does Mozilla really bring to the table with this new focus? The world is full of VPN vendors.
Re: Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products
#390I find this sad, Mozilla is really an advocate for the open web and web standards. Since web browsers are free, they can't make much. They might be able to sell something like Thunderbird; if they improve it and make it more into a service, like Hey! for example. They could also try the sponsorship model that a lot of open source projects are doing. They already have sponsors, but maybe sponsors for their open source…
Mozilla made over $500M revenue in 2017 and $451M in 2018. Apparently the decline has continued, but it should still be enough to develop a browser. I would guess that Firefox is profitable but all of Mozilla's other things are dragging them down.