Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

This lay-off is not because of Covid or racism. It is because of the overwhelmingly awful executive leadership at Mozilla.

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.

> This lay-off is not because of Covid or racism. It is because of the overwhelmingly awful executive leadership at Mozilla.

Yeah! They are cutting out key technical employees while not cutting top-level exec salaries.

https://twitter.com/lizardlucas42/status/1293232090985705478

> 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?

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 might have had some neat technical designs, but it is not a good idea to try and launch an OS into a maturing market, which the smartphone market clearly was by 2013.

It never works.

An NGO has execs with salaries >1M???

How is that still an NGO?

If you aren’t being sarcastic ... go research NGOs.

The FirefoxOS fork KaiOS is now installed on 100M+ devices worldwide - mostly as cheap devices below full smartphones.

Obviously the idea of Firefox OS is great. It's successor KaiOS (fork of Firefox OS) is the third most popular mobile OS with hundreds of millions of users.

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.

It worked in India - it was a success. And it was a shock when Mozilla just gave it up. Giving up on an install base of hundreds of millions just when it was taking off...the US is not the only market you know ?

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 never really understand why people ask for things like this. Presumably Mozilla is paying these salaries because that's what they need to pay to hire good people at that level. Why would those people stay at Mozilla if they suddenly had their salary cut? They are probably already making less than they could make in a comparable position elsewhere.

Could they make any money off it though?

Even Microsoft - with countless more resources and motivation - failed to make traction in mobile. Blackberry was swept off the stage in the blink of an eye.

Firefox OS was abandoned pretty quick as I remember, 2 years tops?

I would not single that out as a failing.

The current CEO of Mozilla Corporation and Chairwoman of Mozilla Foundation (the parent organization of Mozilla Corporation) earned a total compensation of $2,458,350 [1] on a $436 million company revenue on 2018, or half a percent of the company's revenue. I can't find 2019 stats, but on a company that's not doing well, CEO's comp seems high.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitchell_Baker#cite_note-14

In comparison, how much are eff paying Cindy Cohn to be CEO?

I can't think of a good reason why Mitchell Baker should keep her job. I'm fine with competitive executive compensation, but what has she done other than lay off the people doing the work?

They could have - they gave up just as it was gaining traction. Now, Reliance Jio earns all the money from it...

Because people feel like C-level compensation is way too high, and people feel this is disconnected from actual performance. C-level compensation has risen way, way faster in the last decades than general employee compensation [1].

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.

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-compensation-2018/

How else do you justify their salary. Increasing revenue? please.

> Increasing revenue?

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.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

I can see how one can argue that C-level compensation is too high (although there are also good arguments against that) but surely you can't expect Mozilla to solve this problem by themselves? If Mozilla cuts C-level salaries while the rest of the industry doesn't then why would any of them keep working for Mozilla?

I have no idea what normal CEO salaries look like as a percentage of revenue. I'm not even sure if that's the right way to measure it. But it doesn't sound crazy high to me?

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.

Fascinating stuff! https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/credit-cards/15-h...

This is a crap argument. Every company/NGO can use that and it doesn't solve the problem. Mozilla as a self-proclaimed altruistic ideologically-driven org should lead by example.

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.

"Whether that person would be good/bad/worse is pure speculation"

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.

So, I don't really know the context of the stuff you're writing about, if you would please indulge me...

> 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.

I think the parent means that she failed at this. At the very least, her salary went up while Firefox market share went down.

If I read the 990 right, 257500. This is 2x the lowest officer salary and 30% higher than the second-highest. By comparison Mitchell is 8x the second-highest officer and 17x the lowest. There may be more comparable salaries at MoCo, but those are not on the 990s.

> Even Microsoft - with countless more resources and motivation - failed to make traction in mobile.

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.

NGO or non-profit doesn't mean they took a vow of poverty. It means the corporation does not distribute profits to shareholders (and may be exempt of some income taxes). It still can be loaded with money, and many NGOs are.

Firefox made the right call, they were never going to succeed against Android. Looking at statcounter, Kai has not been able to resist it either, dropping from somewhere over 4% to under 1%, while Android sits at over 95%.

1.3 billion Android devices sold last year worldwide.

Honestly, and I mean this with full sincerity, your response is exactly the point.

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.

> 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.

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?

FirefoxOS was a good idea: a portable phone system that could run on cheaper hardware than Android could, built with web technologies instead of Java.

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.

Why was Andreas Gal disliked?

Fire her and hire a new CEO then. Why would you raise an under-performing CEO's takeaway ?

I wondered how much it was, and did a quick search. Apparently Sundar Pichai (Alphabet) had a total comp equivalent to ~0.13% of the revenue, and Tim Cook (Apple) was at 0.05%. So Mozilla's CEO is at 3 to 10 times more than those two examples, while arguably underperforming them.

Not entirely certain on the reasons why the general public didn't like him, but, I suspect the real reason was because he was leading the FirefoxOS project.

No I meant that I order to justify her salary she needs to either increase profits or reduce costs. Looks like she went with reducing costs ...

So, "significant market share in some markets" for KaiOS, given it has 10% the global numbers and is basically not present in EU and US?

A thing can be good and successful without being the global leader, unless you want monopolies for everything.

I really don't think it's that simple. Why should CEO salary depend on revenue? Should the CEO of a startup that doesn't have customers yet make $0?

How do you know she is under-performing? It's not like Mozilla was profitable before she joined.

Mozilla, Google and Apple are no startups.

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.

Well ChromeOS was successful so you could see Firefox OS as an alternative in the market. They both came out at the same time. There were of course 6 different table/mobile OSes at the time. Maybe it was a difference in execution. Or maybe resources.