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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

#881

Post by edumucelli »

I am curious how COVID impacted a company like Mozilla? Their main revenue comes from search partnerships, there were more people at home searching things during lockdown. In the internal message Mitchell Baker said:

“We started with immediate cost-saving measures such as pausing our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend and cancelling our All-Hands. But COVID-19 has accelerated the need and magnified the depth for these changes. Our pre-COVID plan is no longer workable. We have talked about the need for change — including the likelihood of layoffs — since the spring. Today these changes become real.”

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

#882

Post by olodus »

jjordan wrote: post #48

The reduced spending on dev tools makes me sad. Their efforts in the past, for example their unparalleled support for CSS grid, have set the standard for web developer tools. I hope they find a way to continue to innovate in this space.

Yeah, I very much agree. For a diverse Web development needs to be good on as many browsers as possible.

Maybe this could be one of the separate parts some of the devs could split out as a donation/patreon project or something. You pay for them giving you better dev environment in Firefox.

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

#883

Post by kasabali »

echelon wrote: post #378
TylerE wrote: post #375

Earlier 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.

> Google had the advantage of plastering Chrome all over google.com when people performed searches. That's how it got installed everywhere.

That, and aggressive bundleware campaign in early-mid 2010s.

Google paid above market rates for authors of popular Windows freeware like CCleaner, Adobe Flash etc. [0]. They even tried to bribe VLC at some point [1].

I'm always baffled to see commenters in HN were aware of Google Search banners but not this bundleware business. I guess it's due to people here having disproportionately high use of macOS and Linux compared to rest of the world.

[0] https://imgur.com/gallery/WWZxj

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15280808

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

#884

Post by GoblinSlayer »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #784
vages wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

I think they could have learned something from wartime speeches here in terms of reading their audience. People who care about Mozilla as an entity are sophisticated readers. They could have said pretty much the same thing, but with a nod to the fact that it is hard to believe the corporate version. E.g. "Mozilla has laid off 250 employees today. Why? Well here are our reasons, let's start at the beginning...". And t…

The audience is her employers.

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

#885

Post by nextaccountic »

momokoko wrote: post #850
vages wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

This lay-off is not because of Covid or racism. It is because of the overwhelmingly awful executive leadership at Mozilla. Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion. FirefoxOS anyone? The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard worki…

> This lay-off is not because of Covid or racism. It is because of the overwhelmingly awful executive leadership at Mozilla.

Yeah! They are cutting out key technical employees while not cutting top-level exec salaries.

https://twitter.com/lizardlucas42/status/1293232090985705478

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

#886

Post by josteink »

momokoko wrote: post #850
vages wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to respectfully disagree. It is common for leaders to re-state their entity's reason for being as they bring bad news. See Churchill's speeches during the battle of France, for instance. I think this opening was well-written and clearly communicated Mozilla's purpose. You can blame it for being populist, but don't hate the player, hate the game.

This lay-off is not because of Covid or racism. It is because of the overwhelmingly awful executive leadership at Mozilla. Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion. FirefoxOS anyone? The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard worki…

> Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion. FirefoxOS anyone?

FirefoxOS gets a lot of hate, but I honestly thought it was a pretty good idea. The problem was that it was terribly executed.

It’s a bit unclear to me wether that was your point or not.

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

#887

Post by rleigh »

pitay wrote: post #276

Here is a (selective) look at the management of Mozilla in the recent past. From Mitchell Bakers blog https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2018/08/07/in-memoriam-gerva... “Gerv’s faith did not have ambiguity at least none that I ever saw. Gerv was crisp. He had very precise views about marriage, sex, gender and related topics. He was adamant that his interpretation was correct, and that his interpretation should be encode…

I had the pleasure of meeting Gerv once at a UK Linux conference in the mid 2000s. He was a really nice person, and an asset as a public face of Mozilla. I can't help but feel that his critics are genuine "illiberals" who can't tolerate any point of view but their own. And unfortunately, it's those people who are part of its current management problems.

I did disagree with him about the Mozilla position upon trademarks, which was unusually aggressive for an open source project at the time, and for the most part still is. As a Debian developer at the time, that may have influenced my views somewhat.

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

#888

Post by addicted »

All the hand wringing here is kind of pointless without pointing out that it appears that Google has not renewed its contract, which accounts for almost 90% of Mozilla’s revenue.

It’s obvious and necessary for Mozilla to consequently focus on revenue earners and put infra dev on the back burner.

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

#889

Post by rleigh »

Yoric wrote: post #165
kgraves wrote: post #75

Did anyone find anything in this post about Mozilla refusing to take money from Google? I can’t find it. Mozilla, stop taking money from Google and letting them be the default search engine! Please don’t enable and legitimise surveillance capitalism.

So what you're saying is... since Mozilla has cash difficulties, let's get rid of the main income source? Or am I misunderstanding?

Being beholden to your main competitor is a losing strategy. It's made them a lot of money in the short term to lose it all in the longer term. It's easy to comment on this in retrospect, but I personally think they should have considered this more seriously before making a deal with the devil.

Maybe settling for less cash, and working with partners you don't directly compete with, like DuckDuckGo and the like, would be a better long-term strategy even if it means less cashflow and a smaller company in the short term.

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

#890

Post by xiphias2 »

bsimpson wrote: post #408

Sounds like Servo, the next-generation browser engine that brought the world Rust, is one of the teams being destaffed: https://twitter.com/SimonSapin/status/1293231187167784960

This was the only important team in the whole Mozilla organization. I'm looking for a browser to beat Chrome on my mobile on performance, and Servo was the best competitor.

At the same time this is not a big surprise to me: Mozilla was already becoming a PM driven organization instead of an engineer driven one. At least they gave us Rust, that will live on and be extremely successful.

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