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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

blog.mozilla.org

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

#511

Post by marcinzm »

fwn wrote: post #380
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like this should go down as one of the worst layoff announcements in history. The whole post seems to be an attempt to smooth over the layoffs with glorious language about the battle against systemic racism, internet freedom, etc. If I worked there, or was laid off, this would just make me more cynical.

Mozilla PR is famous for their absolutely meaningless and elusive corporate communication. I'm not sure how they ended up that way but it's a reoccurring theme.

Mozilla (or the CEO) wants to be a large profit driven corporations. Right now Mozilla makes its money by saying it's a privacy focused non-profit. These announcements are about saying they are the former without making it too obvious to those who like them for being the latter.

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

#512

Post by andrew_ »

blihp wrote: post #309
camgunz wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty ignorant about how they monetize Firefox, but isn't it pretty hard? The attempts I (think I) know of are selling the search box, putting some ads on the home/start page, and that mr. robot ad thing. I'm skeptical FF alone could fund Mozilla's mission to build an open, free web, and doubly skeptical when you consider its adversaries (Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, Microsoft, heavy hitters for sure).

Selling the search box brings in on the order of hundreds of millions a year. This alone puts them in a singularly unique category of 'well funded' open source software. Granted, their 3-year billion dollar deal may have been the high water mark (edit: it wasn't, revenues have increased since then), but a lot of valuable work can be funded with even $100 or $50 million a year. Sure, they need to constantly be on the…

I would agree that the persona they're projecting tends to align with your last sentence.

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

#513

Post by est31 »

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 failed their users and the ecosystem by not standing up to industry pressure for h.264 and EME

I agree about the EME point, but for h.264 they did stand up and lost. I can remember h.264 not working in Firefox for a long time while it did work on Chrome. It probably cost them a lot of users, but at some point you have to stop and realize that you are harming yourself more than advancing the cause.

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

#514

Post by diag »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #505
news12klm wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Of course, I keep EME disabled everywhere anyway.

Intellectual purity isn't good for the end user.

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

#515

Post by est31 »

shock wrote: post #510
news12klm wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Computers are powerful enough these days to have multiple browsers installed and running simultaneously. One could have used Firefox for general browsing and just used Chrome for Netflix.

Power users might do it, but most people don't.

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

#517

Post by Zenbit_UX »

Mozilla's ace up the sleeve, which I'm sure has been a temptation to them many times - and seems more and more inevitable the more they brand themselves as the privacy browser - is to make ublock origin a default and baked-in feature out of the box.

I see this as an if, not when situation. Google may pull funding immediately if they do so but the surge in users would be extreme, possibly forcing big G to reconsider or lose an ever increasing market share to Bing and DDG.

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

#518

Post by wlesieutre »

nix23 wrote: post #418
wlesieutre wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If downsizing the organization and bringing some revenue in from a VPN service helps them be less financially beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive. I don't know that they would need to sell Thunderbird as a whole bundled product/service like Hey; they could launch a paid email service (in the "it's not Gmail" market occupied by Proton, FastMail, Posteo, etc.) and use that money for work on Thunderbird. N…

>beholden to Google, I think that's a net positive For the Mozilla Management, not the Company itself.

For anyone worried about what will happen to Mozilla if Google decides they don't want to pay for being the default search engine in Firefox anymore. Their current arrangement is a lot of eggs in one basket.

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

#520

Post by mulmen »

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…

Why are you reading the Firefox Reddit?
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