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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

#531

Post by sah2ed »

freeopinion wrote: post #474
barrkel wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Apple when Jobs came back. Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly. It's very hard to do psychologically, though. IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be pr…

Your counterpoint is a little confusing to me. Apple reversed their sinking fortunes when they released the iPhone. That seems to make the exact opposite of your point.

> Your counterpoint is a little confusing to me. Apple reversed their sinking fortunes when they released the iPhone. That seems to make the exact opposite of your point.

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1996 and one of the things he stopped was the heavy bleeding from having too many (confusing) SKUs.

His first new product was the iPod, released in 2001 while development of the iPhone started around 2005.

The release of the iPhone would happen ~11 years after his return.

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

#533

Post by sp332 »

m0ck wrote: post #502

I just wish they shift their focus again to technical solutions, instead of political/social issues. I don't know why software company has need to act like NGO/activist group (doesn't matter if I agree with their stances or not).

It's self-defense. It does no good to focus on the tech if the people writing the code are being murdered or deported.

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

#534

Post by Santosh83 »

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.

To this day they do provide a toggle in settings to turn EME off, so its not as if it is compelled on the user.

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

#535

Post by School-Cotton »

craigsmansion wrote: post #479
Santosh83 wrote: post #290

Earlier 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…

> 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. It might be the other way around in this case. Mozilla rose to the top because of the promise of an open web and always making sure their users would come first, generating near endless goodwill and advocacy, and it was free software to boot. Throughout the years when choices had to be m…

Mozilla rose to the top because IE6 was obsolete trash, Opera cost money, and Chrome didn’t exist. The “promise of an open web” didn’t enter into it.

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

#537

Post by mellow2020 »

news12klm wrote: post #489
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 may have made mistakes over EME but would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS?

> would you have sacrificed netflix or other stuff and continued to use pure OSS

Yeah, in a heartbeat. I actually never used Netflix and probably never will. I won't be be party to destroying what is good and not-like-TV about the web, for the sake of stuff that is like TV, and usually is less interesting to me than even silence.

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

#538

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#539

Post by gowld »

nugget wrote: post #463
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…

Like an addict, Mozilla became dependent upon the revenue they earned from their Google and Yahoo search deals. Search compliance requirements then prevented them from innovating in the areas you mentioned (and others). Mozilla had an opportunity to reduce the search dependency and transition to a subscription business around 2014-2015 when the paid consumer VPN market started to scale, but based on the internal ince…

> Search compliance requirements

What is this?

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

#540

Post by treis »

gfodor wrote: post #334
barrkel wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterpoint: Apple when Jobs came back. Sometimes the answer to a company which is trying too many things at random is to drastically reduce the dispersion of effort, and focus ruthlessly. It's very hard to do psychologically, though. IMO Mozilla would probably be better served, business-wise, as being "the customizable Chrome". It would be a much smaller business (i.e. less IP under development), but it could be pr…

I think one challenge is a lot of Mozilla's users see Mozilla as a browser company, whereas Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company. The users may be right. Your Apple analogy is a tough one - if Apple had just stayed focused on PCs, and not the higher level mission of the company around comput-ing-, they would have not invented new kinds of computers. Focus makes sense, once you've locked in on something. The tri…

> Mozilla sees itself as an Internet company.

I don't think Mozilla sees themselves as a "company". Their philosophical core is as a foundation promoting core believes. The title of their website is "Internet for people, not profit" and their recruiting pitch is "We're on a mission. Join us".

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