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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 3 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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ameshkov ◴[15 Jan 20 19:55 UTC] No.22057804[source]▶
Brendan Eich tweeted that they laid off about 70 people: https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1217517703914643456

This is about 7% of all their employees.

People report that a lot of QA, security, and release management folks were sacked.

A lot more details in the TechCrunch article: https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/15/mozilla-lays-off-70-as-it-...

> In an internal memo, Mozilla chairwoman and interim CEO Mitchell Baker specifically mentions the slow rollout of the organization’s new revenue-generating products as the reason for why it needed to take this decision

edit: fixed the numbers, added some more details.

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tracker1 ◴[15 Jan 20 20:58 UTC] No.22058483[source]▶
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.

I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component. As much as I hated Lotus Notes, something between Lotus Notes, Outlook and MS Teams could be something great and that the Mozilla org would be in a good position to create.

I know they may have good reach with the VPN service as well... I'm unsure how they can reduce security, qa and release management people when orchestration, automation and verification are such huge needs.

They get enough income from search (for now) that they could concentrate on best of breed tech, build mindshare from that, then re-introduce marketing for critical mass.

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1. Nextgrid ◴[15 Jan 20 21:28 UTC] No.22058853[source]▶
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.

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2. thrower123 ◴[15 Jan 20 22:34 UTC] No.22059562[source]▶
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.

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3. tracker1 ◴[15 Jan 20 23:44 UTC] No.22060137[source]▶
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.