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The world today is different. Can't skimp on marketing any more, as the competition is extremely heavy on marketing.

I don't think I have seen any marketing material from Mozilla. I have seen some Chrome marketing though.

They pour a ton of money into events like SXSW. They had huge displays of their new branding up and down Congress Ave a couple of years ago, with several other "brand awareness" things going on throughout the conference.

I don't want to second-guess the marketing team, as I clearly don't know all of the things I'd need to know to do that.

But let me second-guess the marketing team: wouldn't all that money be better spent marketing to potential customers rather than things like SXSW?

Actually, given the current demographics of SXSW, that probably IS good marketing to potential customers. SXSW now costs quite a bit and is often a hipster corporate management perk. That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.

Lone gone are the days where SXSW was a bunch of grubby hippies listening to a bunch of crappy bands. Now it's a bunch of hipster drones listening to a bunch of crappy mainstream pop artists.

> That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.

Why does that sound like a good demographic? Sure, cover that group, but not at the expense of the much, much larger demographic of "ordinary people".

That demographic can cut you checks with 7 digits or more.

"Ordinary people" earn you nothing unless you vacuum up their personal information.

Firefox users don't cut checks, though. What Firefox needs is a much larger number of users. How wealthy they are isn't terribly relevant.

I've seen firefox ads in the subway in Paris. Mozilla is absolutely paying big bucks for marketing.

Is it though? Tesla is very light on traditional marketing, while its competitors are spending heavily.

Nothing changed. People are the same.

Tesla also has a product that basically sells itself

This is usually what people do say of successful marketing campaigns. Note, that Musk is a walking ad.

Tesla has Musk who has become extremely popular, he's probably better than whole marketing department with good funding.

Mozilla's competition is default apps and chrome which I've only seen advertise on google and youtube, on the random day I use a computer without an ad blocker. Not like Safari is putting out any ads, or that Edge has any fans outside of geriatrics who don't know any better.

The competition (chrome) is just enjoying the runaway success of being the household name for over 10 years, simply by being a better product than firefox was 10 years ago when the market shares were much closer.

If firefox wants to enjoy this runaway success that chrome has, mozilla should steal the playbook of being the contrarian option for tech minded people just like how chrome was the foil to IE and Safari a decade ago before it became the dominant web browser. The focus should therefore be on dev tooling, not marketing, and the rest of the user base will follow the devs.

I started using chrome originally 10ish years ago because the company tech person said it was good and fast (I was not in tech at the time). I think you’re right.

(I use Firefox now)

Firefox got where it was by being faster and less bloated than the current alternatives at the time. Then it lost its way completely and Chrome was that and took all the market share. There’s a theme here. People like fast browsers that just work and don’t do a lot of extra crap. If Firefox ever wants to take market share this is a great time to do that with how bloated Chrome is becoming and how much privacy it constantly encroaches on. If Mozilla is smart it will figure this out and go for the kill. Is Mozilla smart? I keep trying to use Firefox and every time I go back to Chrome (or Brave or Safari on my phone) because Firefox is too slow, it changes radically every version, and things just don’t work right in it that do work on other browsers. I don’t need marketing, I just need them to make the browser better. I’m the target audience; I want to switch!

But this is a game they could never win, if they try to compete against google on marketing.

Where Mozilla could have the upper hand, is the idealistic community. They would do the marketing, if FF would align with their goals ... which seems to be more and more a problem.

I was really alienated when FF tried to sell me advertisement as a feature some time ago. Those moves destroy trust. "Ah, so just another bullshit company. No thanks. Why should I support them?"

But the community and people who actually love open technology, privacy and the internet and don't want to hand it all over to google, facebook and co. are still there.

If you believe that Mozilla has no chance in the marketing game against Google, then maybe this is proof of Google's monopoly position and maybe this will convince you it is time for antitrust action against Google.

I think a lot of us came to that conclusion years ago, and that's why we want to like Firefox. Unfortunately I have not yet ascended to my rightful throne as emperor of earth, so I cannot simply snap my fingers and command the dismantling of Google.

If Mozilla were throwing resources at a legal battle against Google, I'd be skeptical but interested. But marketing? I've never seen a paid advertisement for Firefox. Where the hell is that money even going? They should have purged their entire marketing staff after that "Mr Robot" advertisement debacle, but instead there was little other than half-hearted apologies.

I see a big gap in the market when it comes to self-hosted Office 365 or G Suite alternatives. Microsoft Exchange is a beast both in terms of complexity as well as licensing cost, and I think most small/medium orgs don't actually need the complexity which is why they're going towards G Suite which is a less complex product to manage.

I can see them succeeding with an open-core enterprise e-mail & calendar solution where the base features are free to use and an enterprise version with extra features, like the Gitlab model with self-hosting as the key selling point.

If this was easy to do, Office 365 and GSuite wouldn't have a lock on the market.

IBM can't even be bothered to try anymore - they sold off the carcass of Lotus a while back.

Which is partly why Mozilla is in a better position than most, being mainly tech and open-source at their heart. They are making enough off of search that they could create a product then sell/saas it themselves.

> I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place.

Which worked because IE 6 was a dumpster fire for both users and developers. Developers were looking for any excuse to jump ship off it.

The browser market in 2020 is 'good enough' for users and developers. It's like gasoline - nobody cares which refinery the gas in their tank comes from.

> The browser market in 2020 is 'good enough' for users and developers

Sadly, I agree.

I find it sad because I haven't personally found any modern browser that I'm happy using.

Totally, I'd be a lot happier if they cut efforts on the branding side of things and strengthen the technical one.

I kinda disagree, as a huge Mozilla fan. I think their technical development is fine, if not fantastic (especially for all they're doing with WebRender/Servo).

Personally I'd like to see them roll out paid privacy products. Like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. I currently pay for that, and if Mozilla rolled out a similar service across the Firefox ecosystem I'd gladly pay for that too.

I'm not saying their development isn't fine, but they're laying off the people that support development... which will make it worse, when they're spending far in excess of that cost in marketing and imho not even getting the best value out of that space.

Marketers are usually pretty good at selling themselves.

> I'm not sure why they don't (...) concentrate on community outreach from the developer side.

Unless e.g. Lin Clark was among those who were laid off, they've been doing some excellent developer-side community outreach through the Mozilla Hacks blog in the past couple of years.

It's hard to say one way or another without the data. How big is the marketing team and budget/headcount/overhead? What's their ARR? How many QA people were laid off and at what salary ranges? How big was QA compared to other departments?

I seem to recall some article about their expenses a couple years ago, and that their marketing department and budget exceeded development and infrastructure combined.