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.
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 working they are.
Mozilla has collected such a large group of well behaved and well liked underperformers to an absurd level like no other company in history. This is no more obvious than the woefully under-qualified and perennially under-performing leadership.
Someone please explain to me how Mitchell Baker continues to have a job? How is Mozilla still paying this person millions, yes millions, of dollars?
Pocket?! You are going to save Mozilla with a glorified bookmarking app?
What a sad waste.
Yeah! They are cutting out key technical employees while not cutting top-level exec salaries.
https://twitter.com/lizardlucas42/status/1293232090985705478
How is that still an NGO?
It doesn't change because upper management is all in the "cult", and there's no incentive to lower salaries. If all programmers (or any other profession) were in charge of their own salaries, I'd suspect something similar happening with people rewarding each other more and more compensation while pointing at other companies to justify it.
If the current CEO, whom from the outside is not doing a great job, is not willing to. You find a different CEO. I am not convinced that no one wants to do the job for $500k instead of $2.5m. Whether that person would be good/bad/worse is pure speculation, but it's not like organizations are taking the chance.
they'd probably have to have at least a negative $2m impact before it mattered right?
revenue on its own may not even be the best measure, if the revenue comes via methods that conflict with the larger ideology. I don't know if Mozilla has that conflict with itself or not.
Your point is accurate though, and I've held the same views for a while now. This sort of thinking would seem to dictate that the next Mozilla CEO will need to come in at around $2.5m - that's been defined as the floor now. Regardless of how well that person executes, they've got that base. And... you can't really judge them after 3 months. You'd need to give them a year to make a 'real' assessment... and you've just spent that money on someone, regardless of outcome.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#cite_note-14
Yes. Mozilla Corporation, The wholly owned subsidiary of Non-profit Mozilla Foundation, is a for-profit organization and taxable entity. [1]
For any for-profit organization, increasing profit is one of the major responsibility of the CEO.
And the worse your company is doing, the more important it is to find a good CEO and the harder it will be for you to attract a good one. So you can even make an argument for why CEOs that joined companies that are doing badly might be getting paid more on average.
Of course startups CEO will have different goals - company at different stages of their growth will have very different goals and tangentially they need different CEOs with different skill sets to achieve those different goals.
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.
It never works.
A thing can be good and successful without being the global leader, unless you want monopolies for everything.
Sometimes you need to plough your way through the field to get the bountiful harvest - Mozilla did that and then left the harvest to burn.
I think what OP was saying is that Mozilla is so poorly managed that they took a great idea and made it crash and burn.
Firefox OS was abandoned pretty quick as I remember, 2 years tops?
I would not single that out as a failing.
Microsoft made a new OS where they needed developers to target their platform. Too few did, and the platform failed.
Mozilla tried to bypass this chicken-and-the-egg problem by being able to leverage PWAs which “everyone” is making anyway these days. It wasn’t a too crazy bet that it might have worked.
In a similar vein the Pinephone is trying something similar these days: not asking developers to target it, but instead leverage existing app eco-systems (Linux and web).
I don't expect a runaway mainstream success here, but I do wish them luck.
Then hardware manufacturers started producing cheap hardware that could run Android with acceptable performance, thus eliminating the price advantage for FirefoxOS, before that OS could take off in third world nations.
> Watching Mozilla leadership drive Mozilla into the ground over the last 8-10 years has been like watching a bus accident in slow motion.
I honestly am not aware much of that.
> FirefoxOS anyone?
I can't tell if you're unhappy they started that project or unhappy they stopped it. I'm guessing you're unhappy, so I'm going to go along with the guys that were involved on that project for the rest of your post.
I am curious though, since you seem to know so much about Mozilla driving itself into the ground, do you know the resources that were spent on FirefoxOS?
> The only benefit Mozilla now provides is a warning to companies that place how liked and popular employees are over how skilled and hard working they are.
I know that Andreas Gal was disliked, but how was he unskilled and what did his position have to do with the nature you're speaking of?
> Mozilla has collected such a large group of well behaved and well liked underperformers to an absurd level like no other company in history. This is no more obvious than the woefully under-qualified and perennially under-performing leadership.
How did you asses that Andreas Gal was under qualified and under performing?
> Someone please explain to me how Mitchell Baker continues to have a job?
Mitchell Baker is one of the oldest closely related employees to Netscape, Mozilla etc. She is very much the original culture of company. Her particular focus is the overall business aspect of operating the organisation rather than the technical. The technical work would have been people like Andreas Gal.
> How is Mozilla still paying this person millions, yes millions, of dollars?
That's not her sallary, that comes from compensation. Compensation is based on looking at what other similarly sized companies, usually in the same sector are paying based on similarly skilled people. Companies do not want to lose their CEOs etc. What might suprise you is that she's being paid at the lower end of the scale, and this is because she's a CEO sourced internally.
If Mozilla were to replace her with an external CEO, they would likely end up needing to pay vastly more. The compenstion paid is usually pegged to performance. While the company might have not done well as a whole, there are likely things this person has navgiated the company through that you did not see? But, if you did, please share.
> Pocket?! You are going to save Mozilla with a glorified bookmarking app?
Mozilla is following a common technique to help bring stability to the company when one or more revenue stream starts struggling or drying up -- It is diversifying income. Mozilla appears to be a very R&D sort of company, so they seem to be doing what you see companies like Microsoft Garage or Alphabet do and try to create their own 'start ups' without the company bit to try to innovate new products. Hence where FirefoxOS came from.
Many people originally scoffed at the idea of Apple doing a phone.
You just don’t seem to get the obviousness in front of you, just like almost all of Mozilla while the rest of the world sees how absurd and sad things are.
Mozilla has zero chance of survival at its current size without the browser tech. Instead of working on creative ways to monetize that, back when Firefox still had enough market share for it to matter, precious time was wasted on a wide variety of valueless diversions.
Mozilla without Firefox is dead. Pocket or a VPN service has zero chance of bringing in similar revenue. Zero. It was and is a giant waste of time.
And so here we are. Years wasted on what could have been real honest and creative attempts at monetization from competent leadership. They had 10 years to figure it out. Instead they played with whatever new shiny toy fell in front of them.
It would be a hilarious joke if it wasn’t so sad.
I don't know, I feel like I have more context you do right now. But maybe that is just experience from working in organisations like this.
> Mozilla has zero chance of survival at its current size without the browser tech. Instead of working on creative ways to monetize that, back when Firefox still had enough market share for it to matter, precious time was wasted on a wide variety of valueless diversions.
That's not really true though, is it? FirefoxOS derivatives took off significantly and did very well, but, unfortunately, it turned out listening to the public saying to cut it was an awful idea.
> Pocket or a VPN service has zero chance of bringing in similar revenue.
It's not about bringing in similar revenue on a single project, it's about having many different income generators though.
> It was and is a giant waste of time
Did you actually check the development effort involved? They didn't have to spend much on resources to do so, to do these alternate revenue streams, the organisation spent relatively little rather than putting all their money behind a big project and then if it doesn't work out, collapsing -- which is likely to occur trying to pursue large projects like you're suggesting?
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 then I'd be more interested to read.
I would love to know why - short on cash? Google's teet running dry? Or do they believe fewer people = more agility? or maybe the roles really were redundant.
Mozilla has always been political. It was born so. Why do you think Jamie Zawinski got Shepard Fairey to design its logo? The Mozilla manifesto is full of political statements. Do you remember the fight against DRM? Net neutrality? SOPA?
Often, people that speak like you mean “speech favoring equal treatment” instead of “politics”.
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/10/they-live-and-the-secret-hi...
Furthermore Mozilla has the expertise, connections and brand when it comes to the web they can use as leverage to solve web-related social/political issues, but might not have much leverage for unrelated issues so the risk/reward ratio will not be in their favor.
If I keep that in mind while listening/reading people complaining about "politics" it is often the smallest change to their stated message that would make it clear and internally consistent. So I ask clarifying questions to see if their complaint is poorly articulated rather than picking at their words to defend the thing they're criticizing.
There's no way to donate directly to Firefox development.
There is. It is called "restricted funds":
https://www.501c3.org/kb/what-are-restricted-funds/
The more people use restricted funds designation, the less bloated non-profits with wishy-washy missions there would be and the less money there would be to pilfer by the parasite class that lives in the executive roles of the non-profits.
Here's a related discussion on exactly this topic, from 11 months ago. I see that it was you who mentioned restricted funds in that thread, too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874641
If so, there's a lot of people who would like to do this, I believe.
Write "Restricted funds - see attachment" on a check. On the attachment list check details and a restriction such as "Direct expenses for <blahblahblah> only." If you just do not want it to go to G&A fluff fund the execs use to live a large life, just exclude G&A: "<blah blah blah> purposes only. No G&A"
Regulations for non-profits aren't a joke. If they took your restricted funds, you bet they are going to follow the restrictions.
Non-profits may hate it but at the end it is money. So they take it. If they decline to cash the check, no skin off your back.
Source: lived in a non-profit land as a tech consultant. Heard constant bitching about big donors being smart and always restricting funds above a few hundred dollars. Execs of every non-profit that pretends it cannot deal with restrictions are taking the donor for suckers and are fleecing them.
If MoFo made Firefox, this would make sense. But they don’t.
It is their problem, not my. They want money. It is restricted. Money is fungible. If they figure out how to use the money that is restricted then they need to spend less unrestricted money.
Thanks for elaborating though! I didn't know about this feature of donations.
Supporting and directing Internet standards, resisting Google, etc, are a byproduct of developing an independent browser.
I didn’t think it was well written at all. The sheer number of words is a red flag. There are five focus areas that are all extremely vague. Good writing is clear and concise.
I'd rather they kept politics and so-called fights against racism out of Software, because they were never problematic there to begin with.
The terms master and slave for example are only in bad taste because people make them to be.
Silicon Valley is polluted, all your hardware is made in China, algorithms shape what we see.
And they want to offer me leadership? For what? Seriously considering if Mozilla still has a place on the donation list.
This blog post is pretty bad. Doesn't mean I just drop my support, but I don't see how you cannot be disappointed here or who feels like this is a road to improvement.
I was a loyal Firefox user and can't even remember why I switched to Chrome. Sometimes shit happens. Kohler can be all ecited about making the next great toilet bowl. Just don't expect me to get excited every morning to go take a poop on that bowl. It's an impossibly high standard!
If the purpose of Mozilla is to fight systematic racism, then I'm sorry building a web browser and running a VPN is a terrible way to go about it and the leadership team should be removed.
"Corporate double-speak" is still far better than not saying anything and/or hoping that nothing leaks.
Public acknowledgement in difficult times is near impossible for most companies, especially those that are private, to accomplish.
Also, people who don't know anything about a task tend to underestimate its complexity. I can't remeber the name of the effect but it's a variant of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
As others have mentioned, layoffs should not be templatized, it is an indication that the company doesn't care much about the employees, the heart and soul of the company. I hope to God it was more than 5 minutes to draft a message to put 250 people out of a job in the middle of a Pandemic.
Putting it up to "well this is the standard of the industry" is bullshit, if you want more realistic examples, sexism in the work place is _not_ a hyperbole and is still very normal and very wrong.