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Mozilla lays off 70

(techcrunch.com)
929 points ameshkov | 4 comments | 15 Jan 20 19:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.004s | 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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Sammi ◴[15 Jan 20 21:16 UTC] No.22058694[source]▶
The world today is different. Can't skimp on marketing any more, as the competition is extremely heavy on marketing.
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_-david-_ ◴[15 Jan 20 21:40 UTC] No.22059012[source]▶
I don't think I have seen any marketing material from Mozilla. I have seen some Chrome marketing though.
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save_ferris ◴[15 Jan 20 21:48 UTC] No.22059110[source]▶
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.
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JohnFen ◴[15 Jan 20 22:08 UTC] No.22059316[source]▶
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?

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1. bsder ◴[16 Jan 20 00:39 UTC] No.22060526[source]▶
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.

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2. JohnFen ◴[16 Jan 20 00:54 UTC] No.22060624[source]▶
> 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".

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3. bsder ◴[16 Jan 20 01:31 UTC] No.22060825[source]▶
That demographic can cut you checks with 7 digits or more.

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

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4. JohnFen ◴[16 Jan 20 16:09 UTC] No.22065824{3}[source]▶
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.