Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by feanaro 2132 days ago
I feel bad for doing a "me too" comment, but you've nailed exactly my thoughts on the subject. I feel like Mozilla hasn't really tried something like this. Every time it gets suggested, it quickly gets shot down (by other internet commenters) as "can't be done" and "wouldn't generate nearly enough money".

Well... maybe not with that CEO salary.

1 comments

Mozilla can model itself after Microsoft somewhat.

Provide a development stack (they're experts at Web and Rust). Make themselves the go-to shop for developers in that realm.

Sell them on an OS and editor with support. Partner with Ubuntu. Hell, I would even reach out to Nadella and see if they'd be willing to work with Mozilla on hedging against Google. Mac is becoming locked down and kind of unpleasant to develop on/for. Mozilla could win this.

Block all the advertising and tracking. Build a Spotify-like news aggregation service you can access from your Mozilla subscription.

Build an email service like Hey and a file backup service like Dropbox. It's too bad Zoom bought Keybase, but perhaps Chris Coyne wants a new gig?

We should team up to beat FAAMG. Most of the FAAMG actors are actually quite damaging to open source despite benefiting from it greatly.

This all sounds to me like capital intensive businesses against entrenched players where even the not so average consumer would likely not do more than pay lip service to it unless there was some secret sauce to this that was more compelling to the options

They neeed a good out of the park product in those markets to make any real headway. Too idealistic.

My only thought on this is that they should pivot to be like algolia , focus on Firefox being a reference implementation browser and seek their expertise to the other vendors, maybe. It’s one of the few verticals I can think of that would work strategically Without them having to pivot into things they have no experience with

Do they? I mean, most of these vendors are already competing, and unlike Firefox, they're not necessarily competing for the average Joe, but technical users who often have different priorities.

Those are also services that groups are used to paying for already, which means if they could eat the start-up costs, even at a reduced scale, they could make a profit at even a slight premium for things that they already do very well, and go from there.