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by KingOfCoders 922 days ago
(Writing from FF)

$7bn. 2.66% market share.

"Expanding our Board to create the internet we want"

Sure, as long as the music is playing.

[Edit] Looks like the music will stop earlier than suspected, https://www.brycewray.com/posts/2023/11/firefox-brink/

2 comments

Where did you source the $7bn value from?

I have trouble reconciling this with the information present on the financial statement.

They have net assets of $1.2bn, and revenue for the year was $593mn minus $425mn for expenses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Corporation

Income $5bn from 2015 to 2020 + 2021 ($585M),2022 ($828M),2023.

Without the $1bn assets it's $6.000.000.000 spent on ~3% market share, down from 39% in 2009.

Also laying off rank-and-file worker to save costs.
Also, purge technical CEO for political reasons then replace him with MBA trophy politically correct CEO that takes home four times the pay while laying off engineers.
That was the turning point for Mozilla, after that it started to become involved in activism, including social justice and identity politics.
The Mozilla board appointed Eich CEO. He resigned after proving unable to manage predictable grass roots opposition. And he refused Mozilla's offer to remain in another role.

Chris Beard didn't make 4x what Eich did. Mitchell Baker didn't replace Eich and doesn't have an MBA. What would make either of them a trophy CEO?

As far as I know, you weren't privy to confidential legal docs to which only I among the two of us could possibly have been a party, so you can stop making stuff up and cease the mindless parroting of incomplete and one-sided statements from 2014 Mozilla foundation crisis PR staff who never worked for me.

The record of Mozilla mis-management and CEO over-compensation after I left, about which I'm free to comment, is plain for all to see.

You know perfectly well the circumstances of your departure were reported in the press. I added only the opinion the opposition was predictable.

Your vague complaints about Mozilla's statements stopped short of claiming they were false. And a legal agreement allowing 1 party to publish substantial falsehoods without recourse would be extraordinary. The most reasonable inference is Mozilla's statements were substantially true. Even if statements by both parties are assumed incomplete and 1 sided.

> a legal agreement allowing 1 party to publish substantial falsehoods without recourse

Wouldn't that include most employee termination agreements, where the (newly ex-) employee has to keep their mouth shut regardless of what their employer does or did?

"And a legal agreement allowing 1 party to publish substantial falsehoods"

Gag contracts I have seen, gag the person leaving and getting the money, not the company. Companies have the challenge that thousands of employees can't say something, it's hard to enforce and easy to trip over and get burned.

Do people forget Mitchell Baker has been a Mozilla employee for decades?
I do personally think tech companies [0] are better of if the CEO is a visionary techie instead of a lawyer.

[0] Mozilla and others might not think they are a tech company but a activist plattform, so this is irrelevant to them from their perspective

When would you say were Mozilla's best years?
From the techie perspective, Mozilla didn't have "best years" I think. As a Mosaic/Netscape/FF user, I liked Mozilla for two things, adhering to standards compared to IE and being open source (the second being the reason I still use it today, not because of technology (I don't like tab management with 50+ tabs open e.G, never liked the environment implementation)). I don't consider Firefox a technological marvel, but IE looked very bad. Firefox for me never innovated enough or seemed to have the user in mind. From my perspective the USP was always "We're the open source one" which wasn't enough when Chrome arrived.

Not an Opera user, but from the sidelines it always looked like Opera was innovating more.

To pay board members bigger bonuses **