Firefox maker Mozilla axes a quarter of its workforce, blames coronavirus, vows to 'develop new revenue streams'
- Reference: 1597176564
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/11/mozilla_staff_layoffs_products_revenue/
- Source link:
“Economic conditions resulting from the global pandemic have significantly impacted our revenue,” Mozilla Corp CEO Mitchell Baker [1]said in a public statement today. “As a result, our pre-COVID plan was no longer workable.”
Mozilla gets the vast, vast majority of its funding from Google, Yandex, and Baidu, who pay to be the default search engine in Firefox in their regions. In 2018, these web giants had contributed $430m toward its $451m cash pile, or about 95 per cent. Those deals will expire
[2]PDF , p25] in November 2020 unless renewed or renegotiated.
With the plug about to be pulled on that funding source, the open-source browser developer planned to roll out [3]paid-for services to bring in more dosh. According to Baker, "our pre-COVID plan for 2020 included a great deal of change already: building a better internet by creating new kinds of value in Firefox; investing in innovation and creating new products; and adjusting our finances to ensure stability over the long term." Clearly, these efforts have not sufficiently mitigated the cash crunch the organization now finds itself in.
Mozilla doubles down on anti-tracking tech: It'll be tougher for wily ad-biz cookie monsters to track Firefox [4]READ MORE
In her [5]memo [PDF] to staff, Baker said Mozilla has shut down its operations in Taiwan, some 60 or so employees will be expected to change teams, and 25 per cent of the workforce will be cut.
"The people who are included in the reduction are both true Mozillians, and professionals with high degrees of skill and expertise and commitment," she said. "This action is not in any way – not, not, not – a reflection on personal or professional qualities. Indeed, to the contrary, the contributions of this set of people are valuable and important and are a part of Mozilla that we cherish."
Mozilla has offered to continue paying former staff their full salary until the end of the year as severance. Some people will also receive bonus payments based on their prior work performances.
“In order to refocus the Firefox organization on core browser growth through differentiated user experiences, we are reducing investment in some areas such as developer tools, internal tooling, and platform feature development, and transitioning adjacent security/privacy products to our New Products and Operations team,” the memo stated.
Those products include Moz's app Pocket that allows netizens to compile a list of saved articles to read later, its virtual social meeting rooms Hubs, and its $4.99-a-month VPN [6]subscription service . Mozilla also said it’s creating new teams to focus on design and machine learning.
"We are organizing a new product organization outside of Firefox that will both ship new products faster and develop new revenue streams," Baker said in her memo.
Google Chrome continues to dominate the browser market – desktop and mobile – though there are suggestions that Firefox's [7]extensive use of anti-tracking technology hurts its ranking among usage monitors. Net Marketshare [8]pegged Chrome at 71 per cent and Firefox on seven per cent on the desktop, and Chrome on 63 per cent on mobile, and Firefox less than one per cent.
"Today we announced a significant restructuring of Mozilla Corporation. This will strengthen our ability to build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech," Baker insisted. ®
Get our [9]Tech Resources
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/11/changing-world-changing-mozilla/
[2] https://assets.mozilla.net/annualreport/2018/mozilla-fdn-2018-short-form-final-0926.pdf
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2019/06/11/mozilla_firefox_premium_services/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/04/firefox_ad_tracking/
[5] https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Message-to-Employees-Change-in-Difficult-Times.pdf
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/15/mozilla_unveils_a_subscriptionbased_vpn/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/04/firefox_ad_tracking/
[8] https://netmarketshare.com/
[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Sadness
Why would Google being a competitor matter?
Apple and Samsung are competitors yet Apple pays Samsung for some components because Apple needs those components. Similarly Google pays Mozilla to deliver the search traffic from hundreds of millions of Firefox users because Google needs the traffic.
Mozilla had ended the arrangement with Google a couple of years ago as people were a bit uneasy with Mozilla being connected to a company with a dubious reputation. That didn't last very long as Google probably increased their offer above market rates and Mozilla couldn't resist. That's when Google came back in the fold.
This is actually a good thing
If they have fewer "developers" then they can't remove as many features as usual.
As far as I'm concerned, they're negative "value-add" these days.
Re: This is actually a good thing
Sadly I also agree. They will add less focus on creepy slurpy cloud services and get back to their humble beginnings of just making a trustworthy browser.
I feel sorry for them and am completely reliant on them and Firefox (potentially the only ethical browser left). Perhaps as a community we need to find better ways to fund them.
Re: This is actually a good thing
I think this is excellent news: it means that the constantly-threatened ruination of thunderbird might not happen after all. yay!
They will add less focus on creepy slurpy cloud services and get back to their humble beginnings of just making a trustworthy browser.
I think you underestimate Mozilla's commitment to awfulness. Given their track record over the last few years I just start with the assumption that the people they fired were all the competent people capable of making a trustworthy browser and that the people left are the ones who like the creepy slurpy cloud services (the ones that that bring in revenue).
completely reliant on them and Firefox
Try Waterfox or Pale Moon.
Perhaps as a community we need to find better ways to fund them
Or we could just not do that and let Mozilla die. They used to be great once and did important stuff and I'm sure that Jason Scott will have nice things to say about them in a documentary one day, but Mozilla is only part of the problem these days. All the code will still be there, able to be forked and managed by somebody competent and perhaps even ethical (gasp!).
Re: This is actually a good thing
"Try Waterfox or Pale Moon."
These are both fairly dependent on the upstream Mozilla codebase. For example individually they are not equipped to implement WebAssembly runtimes etc.
Also, I know Pale Moon has been fairly resistant in accepting patches for OpenBSD. Possibly due to their very small development team.
Re: This is actually a good thing
These days all the development is done in Chrome so expect further reductions.
Hard to believe...
Mozilla had 1,000 employees? Doing what? I've been a die-hard Firefox user pretty well since Day One but have been a little disillusioned with some of the "improvements" lately ("magnifying" address bar, anyone?) and a whole, whole lot disillusioned by them dropping Thunderbird. Yes, they certainly did. Phrase it however you want such as their excuse that "We are going to disentangle the technical infrastructure." but that's like saying "You're not fired, but you can't work here." Anyhow, what have the other 998 employees been doing lately?
Sadness
...reading this on Firefox. OTOH, it was a little doomed to expect their main competitor to continue paying them long term.