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Mozilla lays off 250 employees while it refocuses on commercial products

(blog.mozilla.org)
1602 points rebelwebmaster | 1 comments | 11 Aug 20 14:03 UTC | HN request time: 0.347s | source
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dblohm7 ◴[11 Aug 20 16:14 UTC] No.24122017[source]▶
[I am a Mozilla employee, and yes, I do recognize how my position influences my perspective.]

One thing that always frustrates me a bit whenever Mozilla comes up on HN or elsewhere is that we are always held to impossibly high standards. Yes, as a non-profit, we should be held to higher standards, but not impossible standards.

OTOH, sometimes it just seems unreasonable and absurd. Stuff like, to paraphrase, "Look at the corporate doublespeak in that press release. Fuck Mozilla, I'm switching to Chrome."

Really? That's what's got you bent out of shape?

Sure, Mozilla has made mistakes. Did we apologize? Did we learn anything? Did we work to prevent it happening again?

People want to continue flogging us for these things while giving other companies (who have made their own mistakes, often much more consequential than ours, would never be as open about it, and often learn nothing) a relatively free pass.

I'm certainly not the first person on the planet whose employer has been on the receiving end of vitriol. And if Mozilla doesn't make it through this next phase, I can always find another job. But what concerns me about this is that Mozilla is such an important voice in shaping the future of the internet. To see it wither away because of people angry with what are, in the grand scheme of things, minor mistakes, is a shame.

EDIT: And lest you think I am embellishing about trivial complaints, there was a rant last week on r/Firefox that Mozilla was allegedly conspiring to hide Gecko's source code because we self-host our primary repo and bug tracking instead of using GitHub, despite the fact that the Mozilla project predates GitHub by a decade.

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renewiltord ◴[11 Aug 20 17:56 UTC] No.24123463[source]▶
Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.

People in this business always discover this stuff and then they're always like "Why do they hate me?". The answer is "they never wanted to love you. They want to watch you fall". Like DDG with their favicon service (which HN billed as some sort of nefarious tracker).

Vanta bypassed all this by not playing to the Security Puffery crowd. Usually a quick way to do that is to require money because the Security/Privacy Puffery crowd doesn't have any.

I'm a happy Firefox and Chrome user. Honestly, it's been working fine for me.

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kibwen ◴[11 Aug 20 19:54 UTC] No.24125193[source]▶
> Haha, this is what it looks like to cater to the privacy/security crowd. They have a picture of ideological purity. They don't actually use your product. Essentially if these were customers you'd want to fire them.

Precisely this, and it's been apparent for a long, long time. The lesson that organizations should learn from watching Mozilla's reception in tech circles is this: never, ever, ever market to power users; casual users are more numerous and less demanding. Chrome won the war a decade ago when it decided to focus aggressively on casual users, leaving Mozilla to deal with the fractious dregs of the power user market.

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1. red_admiral ◴[12 Aug 20 08:17 UTC] No.24129685[source]▶
I disagree with "never, ever" - everyone's fighting to get _developers_ to use their tools, which is why both Chrome and Firefox have a great F12 inspector built in, Microsoft is open-sourcing a ton of stuff and building VS code and developing a native Linux subsystem etc.

Basically, there's money in being an ecosystem like Apple's or Google's app store - you can take a 30% cut just for being the platform if you play it right - but Microsoft noticed with Windows phone and UWP that you can't just set up a store and rake in the cast unless you can attract developers to build things on your platform.

Then there's anchor products, a term from supermarkets for things like coke/pepsi (depending on the country you're in) - the idea being, if you don't stock these then your customers will shop somewhere else. If Facebook/Uber/Whatsapp/$COMPANY decides to develop their app for mobile OS 1 and 2 but not 3, then that's a strong disincentive for some people to buy OS 3, even if it's privacy-respecting and open-source and diverse and whatever. (The desktop counterpart to this is MS Office. For most companies, the choice is between Win and Mac, and will remain so unless Office ever becomes natively supported on Linux.)

Even the government has realised this, with their "clean app stores" plan - I read this part as "we won't outright ban US citizens from buying Huawei phones, but we'll make sure they only have access to a segregated app store and we'll lean on major companies not to develop a separate version for this store.

So if you ever want to launch a new platform, service or similar with a business plan that third parties will develop software for it, you'd better keep these third parties happy with decent developer tools.