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Comment by martin_a | Hacker News Reader

> but COVID and other business factors contributed to 25% of the organization being made redundant.

Well... Maybe the leadership is just plain incompetent and 25% of the organization would still be there if the C-level people would have been kicked...

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I think the C-level largely has. Compare

Today: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/leadership/

One year ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20190923050403/https://www.mozil...

Two years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20180923185143/https://www.mozil...

(Disclosure: I work for Mozilla)

How do you mean that? (Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker, don't understand the sentence.)

He means: I think the C-level largely has been kicked.

For those unwilling to count; most categories are the same or differ by 1 person (today vs 1 year ago) except for management which is half the size it was 1 year ago. I am not a software dev or manager so I am unsure if this is just because those are the teams that got cut or if these were senior over-paid managers.

If companies start to fail, the good people tend to leave first. Maybe that's what happened here.

I fail to understand how COVID could have made 25% of the people redundant at Mozilla. Where those all facility managers or working in the cafeteria(s)?

It may take a bit more speculation. If it is like almost every large organization in 2020 they are under going a consolidation effort to mitigate the economic fall out of covid. You often don’t throw away talent due to a consolidation until after you determine the redundant roles. The roles did not begin as redundant. They became redundant after smooshing teams together.

What I don't understand is how covid affects Mozilla's revenue. I mean nobody stops browsing the web because they have to work from home, or can no longer eat out, or whatever other measures where taken.

The economy gets worse. Ad spending goes down. Google's search revenue decreases. Mozilla's search deal with Google is less profitable.

Do you a source that google ad revenue is down? YouTube Ad Inventory, seems to be WAY UP, as many of the youtubers that were not getting ads before are saturated with ads today.

Further I do not believe their Search deal is dependent on Advertising at all, it is about number of searchs, and being the default not a % of ad spend

There might be more ads, but that doesn't mean that they're converting into sales.

Iain and I are both Mozilla employees, and terms of search deals are very much NDA-covered things -- we can say very little about our limited knowledge.

All I will say is that the revenue from Google is not fixed, and what the press release said was in fact true: revenue was substantially affected by COVID.

Let me Google that for you: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267606/quarterly-revenue...

Revenue is down two consecutive quarters. It is well-known that the vast majority of Google's revenue comes from ads (see eg https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/12/24/is... or https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/25/18024654/alphabet-google...)

During the pandemic, fewer people have been searching for (and more importantly, purchasing) niceties. They're buying things like toilet paper. That's going to directly affect ad revenue.

At the same time, online-shopping is through the roof because of lockdowns. People still want to buy things, especially when they're scared or bored.

This helped the Kleenex brands of online retail. It doesn't help drive Mozilla's search deal when you go to Amazon and impulse shop.

I'm working for large affiliate sites and they have seen unprecedented traffic across all categories since March. Most people aren't going directly to Amazon, people are still using Google, where they see ads that they click on and then buy stuff.

Okay, but how much of that translates into partnership revenue? Again, we're all just making a bunch of assumptions in an effort to cast Mozilla's press release as false.

I have no idea, but if Mozilla's partnership revenue is sinking despite record online shopping, then it's not "because of the pandemic", I think. The pandemic is a godsend for anyone that serves consumers online.

I wouldn't understand it either if I wasn't exposed to it. It's not something I can disclose but the general concepts at play are human reactions to risk. There's a short term boost in impressions across the internet as individuals are locked down. They order more delivery, they order more from the brands they trust, but they don't spend more during an economic downturn. We're for the most part less inclined towards risk during uncertainty. The forecasts for fully recovering to mid 2019 vary by industry but some of the largest ad buyers were the most affected. They don't care about a short term increase in ad views when no one is gonna buy their service. The largest retailers also run their own ad services so the amount of pie left after everyone has their cut isn't something that keeps many employed.

It's just a lame excuse, nothing more, as you've already said.

It did not, I dont see how COVID has any bearing on Mozilla Revenue or business...

It is just a convenient (and likely good legally) way to cover for bad management.

More than a few companies with poor management are using COVID to cover for their poor choices

I wrote a longer comment on my somewhat insider take on the management stuff a while ago.

tl;dr I agree with your hypothesis that the top level management should leave

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24238633

Thank you very much for the helpful insight. From "the outside" Mozilla lacks kind of a vision, you'd probably call it "marketing bs" ;-) but I'd love to see a vision like "build the best browser of the world".

Focussing resources on this and maybe one or two other big projects (Thunderbird, anybody?), which could really make an impact in the modern day and age of the internet, would be great. That would be a clear way to go, I could become a "follower" or "supporter" with no fear in my heart and let it run.

Right now Mozilla looks pretty clueless to me. Losing market share, all the gossip, massive layoffs, starting and ending side projects like Firefox Send (which I'd really would have loved to see take off, competition for WeTransfer and alike would be good)... There's just a big bunch of "hmpf, don't know".

No "let's build the best browser" is a vague goal but still a goal. When I say marketing bullshit I mean stuff that is even more vague or even completely without any discernable meaning. E.g. "synergies" is such a bs term to me that springs to mind (tho, I don't think the mozilla leadership used it)

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