Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

ghacks.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 154 posts

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#61

Post by leeoniya »

wutbrodo wrote: post #53
leeoniya wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living. ...so long as a "don't be evil" mega-corp continues paying for it

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously doesn't mean requiring that of every one of your customers: There's not a company in the world that isn't economically connected to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple degrees of separation at most.

> They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction.

IMO, this is a silly way to look at it.

Mozilla's existence is critically dependent on a single "customer" that requires the privacy-focused "do good" company to preset a user's default search choice to an anti-privacy track-you-everywhere company.

don't get me wrong, it's a great [and necessary] compromise for the money and being easily changeable. i hope firefox can regain user share so that google continues needing it.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#62

Post by bigbugbag »

wutbrodo wrote: post #53
leeoniya wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living. ...so long as a "don't be evil" mega-corp continues paying for it

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously doesn't mean requiring that of every one of your customers: There's not a company in the world that isn't economically connected to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple degrees of separation at most.

Nice logic but somehow it fails short of explaining why they are paying much more, from several tens of millions to several hundreds of millions, for a service that has lost a lot of steam, from 33% of market share at peak to 6% at the moment.

How could that be a sound business transaction ?

Then again your saying "one of your customers" as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#63

Post by bigbugbag »

forapurpose wrote: post #48
leeoniya wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's also nice to be able to show other groups: Yes, you can be a "do good" company, and make a good living. ...so long as a "don't be evil" mega-corp continues paying for it

I don't think Google provided much revenue in 2016; Yahoo was the search provider in the U.S. Mozilla is not tied to Google.

google was the default search engine in the rest of the world where it has the most market share except maybe Russia, also this was a move by yahoo in order to help with selling their business at a non negative price tag.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#64

Post by wutbrodo »

leeoniya wrote: post #61
wutbrodo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously doesn't mean requiring that of every one of your customers: There's not a company in the world that isn't economically connected to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple degrees of separation at most.

> They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. IMO, this is a silly way to look at it. Mozilla's existence is critically dependent on a single "customer" that requires the privacy-focused "do good" company to preset a user's default search choice to an anti-privacy track-you-everywhere company. don't get me wrong, it's a great [and necessary] compromise for the money and bein…

That makes a lot more sense. Your initial comment without this context sounded like economic contact with someone reduced you to their level of "goodness", which I strongly disbelieve. That isn't to say that you shouldn't draw any lines about who you'll do business with, but this line in particular didn't make a lot of sense.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#65

Post by khedoros1 »

forapurpose wrote: post #57
khedoros1 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because fairly frequently, I'll search for something on DDG, not find what I was expecting, and try on Google as a backup. And because in many people's minds, Google is search.

I thought the same thing, then I realized there was a significant selection bias: I was only looking at events where half the hypothesis (DDG fails & Google succeeds) is true. For example, how does DDG perform when Google fails?

That's true, but I wasn't thinking in that direction. I was just trying to answer "why are people still using Google?".

But honestly, if Google doesn't have it (down below whichever ad-driven first results I have to skip), it's a good bet that I'm not going to find it on other search engines either, unless some specific site indexes its own content better than the search engines do (archive.org comes to mind, for some things).

Of course, this is all colored by my search style and the topics I'm usually looking for information on.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#66

Post by fabrice_d »

bigbugbag wrote: post #29
staunch wrote: post #23

The Mozilla Treasurer and Chair are still taking $1M each, right? Why is this scandal going unreported? Are there really no experienced managers willing to run this potentially great organization for $300k/year? Why would we want people who are willing to take so much money from an open source project? Why are there 1200 people at Mozilla and so little product to show? Why do they constantly spend all of their revenu…

This is something I wondered about for quite some time now. How come so many employees and so much spent money with so little to show for it. Reading the reason for dropping alsa support or refusing to have better linux integration it seems mozilla is short on dev time and resources which they clearly are not. Do you remember when they got 10 000 people donating money to pay to place an ad for firefox 1.0 in NY Times…

Their user base has not been divided by 5. Their market share is way down, because they are not growing with the pool (not surprising given their lack of success in Mobile), which is a different metric.

They are paid for the number of eyeballs they send to their search partners, and it's still a few hundred millions users. Also, it seems that they were underpaid compared to other companies like Opera and Apple were getting per user.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#67

Post by mediaman »

stocktech wrote: post #2

If you want me to take you seriously talking about revenue, don't show me half a balance sheet.

Mozilla has $500mm in assets, most of which is fairly liquid, and less than $70mm in debt.

Furthermore, they increased net assets by about a third in one year, and they cleared $160mm in profit from their $520mm in revenue.

They are in a very good financial position.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#68

Post by bigbugbag »

roblabla wrote: post #56
bigbugbag wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean much appreciated ? My experience with bugzilla is that it is a place where users are ignored and told they are not part of a large enough portion of the user base to be significant for using linux, or for using alsa or for needing an option to keep the previous interface. I do not dare going close to mozilla's bugzilla, it has been a waste of my time almost every time and taking abuse and frustration…

I have no idea where you get all that. I've done a few reports on bugzilla, bugs in firefox on ArchLinux (so linux, and not a standardized setup). They've all been answered, and most have been fixed. Sometimes, I've been told the setup I was using wasn't supported, but they'd accept a patch if I was willing to invest some effort in it. I did once, and the patch was indeed accepted. Obviously, Mozilla cannot support e…

I get that from using bugzilla from time to time since around 2005 maybe. Last time and one of the worst was the ALSA debacle. IIRC first time was about integration in KDE.

To recap the ALSA one, mozilla pretended ALSA had shortcomings it actually does not have (some things about edge cases of netflix and 5.1 audio or something) and it turned out it was Mozilla implementation that was so bad and pretty much abandone that no one at mozilla wanted to work on it. It was taunted at people complaining that for ALSA to stay they should do it themselves or find someone to do it, until someone came forward and offered to do it and suddenly it was too late so it was not happening. The other reason invoked was that a very little number of people did not have libpulse installed which it turned out was false (because most distro disabled mozilla's spying) and irrelevant (libpulse is often pulled as a dependency on ALSA only system). So suddenly it was the fault of distro packagers and people caring about their privacy had it coming because they took the extra step of disabling telemetry (which is not supposed to be enable on release channel anyways).

I supposed those bug reports are still somewhere in bugzilla, if you wanna look for them. The KDE integration one is one of the longstanding open ones, and openSUSE provided a patch for better KDE integration at some point but it was refused for some reason. you can find it on AUR https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/firefox-kde-opensuse/

Even a simple one related to the ALSA debacle was ignored, see they forgot to mention dropping ALSA in the release notes somehow they overlooked this "detail" but they thought to include a warning message with a link to an URL that happen to be broken. A bug report was filed to report this along with the correct URL but the fix that should have taken about a minute to implement had not seen the light of day after two weeks and AFAIK did not happen at all.

I sincerely doubt KDE, debian, arch, ALSA are obscure platforms, and turns out chromium supports alsa (IINM firefox is the only linux browser with a hard dependency on pulseaudio).

To be honest with time I have learned not to expect better of Mozilla or more like to expect mozilla to not deliver on its marketing promises and to dismiss user feedback.

/edit

here's the recent iteration of the KDE integration bug, this one has been opened for 16 years: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=140751

here's the main one for dropping ALSA and making pulseaudio a hard dependency, it got locked and discussion continued on google groups somewhere: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1247056 there are other with several duplicates such as: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345661

I can't find the main broken URL one with the duplicates, but it seems this one is about the same issue and had been marked as solved (Only took 3 months to fix a broken URL which was the only was to get details on why the browser suddenly stopped playing sound): https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1345439

To my knowledge there are many other examples in bugzilla in the last 10 years, maybe I've been unlucky and found myself in the worst of bugzilla making my experience not representative of the actual thing, but from what I gathered around on mozillazine, HN, distro forums and some other places my experience is not out of touch with what others have to say about theirs.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#69

Post by briffle »

bigbugbag wrote: post #62
wutbrodo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a silly way to look at it. They're paying for a service that Mozilla provides to them, as a business transaction. Being a "do good" company obviously doesn't mean requiring that of every one of your customers: There's not a company in the world that isn't economically connected to something you'd consider "evil" by a couple degrees of separation at most.

Nice logic but somehow it fails short of explaining why they are paying much more, from several tens of millions to several hundreds of millions, for a service that has lost a lot of steam, from 33% of market share at peak to 6% at the moment. How could that be a sound business transaction ? Then again your saying "one of your customers" as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since…

> as if google was not over 85% of mozilla revenue and had not been the case since the beginning.

This is not true, Yahoo has been their partner the last few years.

Re: Mozilla’s revenue increased significantly in 2016

#70

Post by recursive »

neonhomer wrote: post #18
deckarep wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2017 who’s still using Yahoo anyway for their search engine?

I was going to ask the same thing. But also why are people still using Google? I've been using DuckDuckGo for years and only use Google when I'm forced to (like in Chrome on iOS).

Because it works better.
Post reply on HN