The board typically does not get compensated the way the CEO does so they are usually not in a position to 'suck it dry', on top of that they have some responsibilities and if they don't act in the best interest of the company they might be found to be personally liable depending on the jurisdiction and the details regarding their responsibilities.
I should study that to see if there is any way to solve it but frankly, even though FireFox has been my daily driver since about forever I don't see a happy ending here.
Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to.
Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.
In fact, I have seen this very debate play out in real life. We appointed a new President of the ASF during my term. That person had been a Director, but when they became President they stepped down from the Board.
For a non-profit charity that relies on volunteers, perfect separation is not always feasible, and especially in the early years when the ASF was smaller the President was often a Board member. But although I can't speak for anybody but myself, I believe that the ASF is likely to continue with an informal tradition of separating Board from Officers for the indefinite future.
A similar cultural change ought to be possible at Mozilla — and perhaps elsewhere.
The legal world has "managing partner" as the equivalent for LLPs.
It can vary, though; e.g. Kevin Sneader is the de facto CEO of McKinsey, but his official title is Global Managing Partner and his predecessor used Managing Director.
If they are not, the roles should be separate.
Their patron should rectify this, but it's possible they don't care.
The 'plan' may be to kill Firefox.
Given that, as you seem to agree, Mozilla is probably doomed now no matter what, why would they deprive themselves of these benefits (and possible future similar gigs!) sooner rather than later? It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.
Agreed. But the CEOs statement here is very peculiar and might actually rise to that level, the board not taking action in turn might just make them culpable.
It is a very dumb statement, especially for a lawyer, to make.
The Martha Stewart case revolved around a similar minor (for her) issue, $45K loss avoided but it landed her in jail. Rich people make stupid mistakes too, whether this is one of those remains to be seen (I think it will pass) even so, it isn't smart when your company is on a multi-year downslide.
It's not good optics.
Does this make you more or less willing to take risks? More or less focused? Does this decrease or increase the amount of attention you give to "optics" and politics?
As an FF user I hope Mozilla does a turn around, gets back its engineering culture and focuses on delivering the best - and most secure and private - browser in the market.
She is incompetent, but I dont think she has the intention to drive Mozilla to the ground. After all she co-founded the Mozilla Project, and was the Chairwoman for a long time, long before she was named the CEO.
Why did they not find someone else to be CEO is beyond me though.
Or remember Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer? She also did a great job at making the company ready to be sold out to Verizon at low price.
These CEOs know what they're doing. They take care of their personal interests and steal companies for the tech giants.
While I am absolutely pissed ( to say the least ) that Nokia was sold to Microsoft and Yahoo couldn't turn its ship around. I dont think both CEO were doing in their own interest or another companies interest.
Nokia refused to use Android. ( Which was what really killed Nokia ) That was only two possible outcome, either go full force with Symbian or partner with Microsoft. I mean there are so many wrong with Nokia even before Elop joined nothing much could have been done. It turns out the penalty for completely dismissing iPhone and Smartphone was death for their phone division. ( Currently the Nokia Smartphone are manufactured by a JV formed by former Nokia employees and Foxconn, with the name licensed from Nokia )
Elop did however completely neglect the importance of Carrier / Network Infrastructure segment, although arguably Ericsson wasn't competing much and Huawei didn't show up on their radar. ( Yet )
Marissa was trying very hard to recreate Google within Yahoo. She was absolutely executing it. But it is one of those example where I put the argument against execution eats strategy for breakfast.
It is not one OR the other. You need both. The equation times both together. When you have a strategy which trends towards zero or even negative, it doesn't matter how well you execute it.
In the end she failed. The strategy was wrong from the start. I actually thought the other CEO candidate's vision of turning Yahoo in to an Online Media Companies suits Yahoo better. But Marissa got the job, and the rest is history.
Circa 2010, Symbian was clearly uncompetitive and MeeGo was far behind schedule. There was a fairly ambitious plan to build a new UI framework in Qt that ran on both Symbian and MeeGo -- the Nokia N9 used this with Harmattan, which internally I don't think we ever referred to as MeeGo, IIRC! -- but I'm pretty sure when Elop arrived he took stock of things and thought, "My God, this MeeGo thing is Nokia's version of Apple's Copland project," and it's really hard to say he was wrong.
Looking back, it's really easy to say that he was wrong not to choose Android, but it was seriously considered. The problem was that Nokia insisted on two mutually exclusive conditions: they wanted to use a lot of Nokia-based services so the new devices still "felt Nokia," and they wanted to fully partner with Google and market the devices as Android. And Google wouldn't do it. If you want to call your device "Android (R)" then you use Google services; if you want to use your own, you have to do what Amazon did with the Fire devices. Google wouldn't make an exception for Nokia, but Microsoft -- who by that point had, at least internally, realized Windows Phone was seriously floundering -- would. And so they went with Microsoft.
They dawdled and ignored the problem for too long, and were left with selling to Microsoft and adopting their mobile OS as the only semi-plausible way to maintain a strong market position. Both Nokia and Microsoft's efforts ended up being too little, too late.
From the outset it looked (from the outside) exactly like his goal was as described - torpedo the company and get it bought by Microsoft, returning to the mothership in the process.
Yahoo was similar in a way -- they built a whole array of services around identity way before Google did. Ultimately it didn't work out well for the company.
She's a lawyer. She got the Mozilla deal out of Netscape and AOL. That's the highlight of her career and what she's good at too - that and public speaking. For what it's worth she even recognized this in the past and stepped down as CEO before - but stayed as Chairwoman of course and kept getting the salary.
I am not convinced that even if Mozilla/FF got a competent CEO tomorrow and started executing 'just so' that they would be able to recover from their slide, a newcomer would have it harder.
Shuttleworth did that with Ubuntu and it's barely surviving.
What trend should Firefox ride ? And how will it keep that project a secret for long enough, Given that it's all open-sourced ?
Firefox was originally competing against the pile of steaming garbage that was IE6.
Now they are competing against Chrome which is actually a good browser, and Chrome also has the advantage of having google behind it which can leverage their search/ad monopoly to push Chrome.
And which they have shamelessly done.
The way I’ve heard the story is that by the time of firefox, IE6 was still a really good browser, it had just stayed stagnant for a little too long, and bundled got with Microsoft’s monopolistic behavior.
I think there are more parallels between late IE6 and present day Chrome then you give credit for.
To do this today, with a much more complex product would be no mean feat, back then a browser was a much simpler piece of software than it is today.
Netscape was not “still hugely popular” when Firefox was created. IE market share was upwards of 90%.
ChromeOS of course puts them in the OS market, and it's doing very well for a niche operating system - my entire company runs on ChromeOS in fact.
And there are interesting parallels, Apple too was kept alive by their competitor as a fig leaf in light of anti-trust troubles.
Edit: Cal Peterson's article clearly shows how we got here. Such a shame.
So far what I am seeing and hearing does not make me very hopeful.
FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
Could you expand on this?
I think the goal should be to make Firefox the sane default firstly for business and secondly for consumers. Business users care about privacy and security, yet Chrome and IE are the standard platforms for business webapps.
If you want an example of how misaligned those values are from reality, I need to use Chrome to talk to my doctor. Safari and Firefox aren't supported. That's entirely because Firefox doesn't do enough to make it the default platform for developers and by focusing on the wrong users.
There is a bigger reason. Literally every software engineer at Google/Alphabet uses Linux, other than a very few exceptions (likely only a fraction of a percent).
Even if your laptop is a Mac or Windows machine, your source code access is exclusively on your Linux box in the office.
Google is a Linux shop. Regardless of their reputation for dropping products, Chrome on Linux isn't going away any time soon, for the simple reason that they need it internally.
I also use FF as my daily driver. However, should FF become unsupported, I'll go with Palemoon[0] rather than Chrome.
In fact, there really isn't anything that could get me to use Chrome. I find its interfaces to be insulting to my intelligence and not at all friendly enough to the idea that I should never see ads or be tracked through my browser.
Edit: Added link to Palemoon.
Yes and in Apple's case, no one could have pulled it off other than Steve Jobs.
So basically the answer to the original question is none, zero.