| > Typically, Mozilla seems to pick a middle-ground. Deeply disagree. I think you are avoiding looking at facts by presenting the issue as a matter of contradicting opinions. Mozilla did fire an executive with a track record of good decisions for political pressure by a minority linked to things unrelated to his tenure. Mozilla invested significant amount of moneys in a lot of projects which all failed: buying Pocket, the tv thing, the smartphone things. Meanwhile, their main product has been losing market share while they barely fought on the marketing side of things. Worse, there were multiple events leading to negative marketing created by poor strategy. Despite this string of failures, top management has been significantly increasing their compensation. The issue is not knowing if these compensations are competitive. Everything points to the top management being grossly incompetent. Nobody wants them to treat it like a passion project. People want them out. I mean except Google of course which is all to happy that they meet the goal assigned to them: not being a competitor in the browser market and being an useful umbrella in case competition authorities wants to take a look at Chrome. |
This right here is the myth that keeps getting repeated without evidence. As I said in a different comment, most of these widely criticized side bets happened long after the market share decline, so the attempt to tie that to cause and effect just doesn't work. And the "significant" money invested in the side bets is almost never quantified (normally people trying to make this argument, once you ask for numbers, are just browsing the 990 for the first time and making random guesses).
The VPN cost seems like it was utterly trivial, the amount to purchase Pocket was never disclosed but I read of fundraising around $14MM and implied valuations in the low to mid tens of millions, which may be the ballpark of what Pocket costed to acquire. And Pocket did bring in revenue, also possibly on the order of tens of millions. So the worst case is that they lost low tens of millions, the best case is that it was a wash.
So that's not nothing, but that's what it looks like to attach these claims to facts. It's probably less than what their endowment earns them in a year, and relatively small against their annual revenue. But it doesn't tell a story of side bets triggering a collapse in market share like people keep claiming.
And it seems like I keep having to repeat this, but these kinds of narratives completely ignore what were likely the real drivers of market share change, which was Google leveraging its powerful position in search, on Android, the rollout of Chromebooks.