Comment by weego 3 days ago
The sheer volume of sidequest projects they've put resources into that were clearly self-indulgence projects from internal staff, that had no obvious market need or target user-base put me off years ago.
They're kept in existence as a cost of doing business for the likes of Google, purely to ward off browser monopoly claims, and absolutely do not deserve to be taken seriously, or be given private funding.
I‘d argue you don‘t need a C-suite to develop firefox and that‘s the root of the problem.
So a foundation model instead, like discussed in: [Open Source Security] Open Source Foundations with Kelley Misata of Suricata #openSourceSecurity https://podcastaddict.com/open-source-security/episode/19338... via @PodcastAddict
I'm genuinely curious, no experience in any of that.
Yep.
Also worth reading: Reinventing Organisations by Laloux.
Incredible book - absolute book of the year for me. They talk about the history of organisations and how organisations can be run differently & better. And they research companies who are trying this stuff out today, and talk about what they do. The modern CEO idea is pretty silly on the face of it. We take the - ideally - smartest person at a company, divorce them from grounded reality, then burden them with all the hardest decisions your company has to face. All while disempowering the people on the ground who do all the actual work. In many ways it’s a pretty stupid way to run a company. There’s plenty of other options.
Just the other week the economist did an interview with the CEO of Supercell, a Nordic video game company. They have the same idea - the ceo in many ways doesn’t run the company, which frees him up to do actually useful work. And it lets the team leads take initiative and lead. Much better model in my opinion.
They're trying to diversify their revenue so it doesn't all come from Google. All these 'self-indulgent projects' are attempts to actually make enough money to compete with a multi-trillion dollar company's resources because they know they can't compete long-term.
The parent is referring to things like Coop (social media), SkyWriter (IDE), Persona, Solo (website builder), “data futures”, Servo [1], “big blue button”, most of them have little to no potential for revenue.
Meanwhile you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing, and it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
[1] including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF, making it more of a vanity project - it’s already thirteen years old at this point
> including Servo here since it seems to have had no real roadmap to become integrated into FF
They integrated at least a couple of components from Servo into Firefox before they cancelled it, so I don't think that's fair.
> it’s already thirteen years old at this point
Mozilla only developed it for 8 years.
> The parent is referring to things like
> you can’t really have more than a few YouTube tabs open in FF otherwise it starts freezing
> it’s been behind Safari in adding new features for a while.
I think that would be believable if a massive portion wasn't spent in venture capitalism based gambling, where they put 90% of their eggs in the AI basket, of which, 70% are small unknown groups, 30% is just hugging face which really doesn't need their money, but at least that was a good bet.
Because they are a non-profit, they have to spend their money every year. That’s why Mozilla is/was over employed and following all these projects that die, because they need these engineers to work on something.
My friend worked at Mozilla 15 years ago, arguably during their golden years and he said it was a joke how much money they wasted because they had to spend it.
That’s not how NFPs work. I’m on the board of a NFP, we absolutely are able to save money year to year. The big difference between us and a regular corp is we don’t have shareholders or paid board members.
I wasn’t clear. Mozilla was making > 400M from the Google deal. They needed to spend most of the money otherwise why would they be a nonprofit. So they would spent the vast majority of it on boondoggles, lots of all-hands in expensive locations, $400k salaries etc.
There are many NFPs with multi-billion dollar endowments, I don’t really understand this line of reasoning…
Charitably, I'd like to believe that all these side quests were in search of actual, real, substantial, alternative revenue streams, in order to reduce dependency on Google.
The problem, of course, is that all of these side projects just flat out failed. Maybe they were self-indulgence projects or maybe they were pursued in earnest, but either way, they failed.
I feel like these are stuff that the C-suite needs for justifying their pay. If it is "boring browser development", it will show that they are doing nothing, redundant, and cannot have bonuses and salary raise.