| HN Mirror

Somehow they also think we'll pay for Gemini, GPT, Claude, perplexity and their browser thingy, co-pilot and whatever else they have going on. Not to mention, all these things do 95% the same and don't really have any moat.

I don't understand why these CEOs are so confident they're standing out from the rest. Because really, they don't.

Right now firefox is a browser as good as Chrome and in a few niche things better, but its having a deeply difficult time getting/keeping marketshare.

I don't see their big masterplan for when Firefox is just as good as the other AI powered browsers. What will make people choose Mozilla? It's not like they're the first to come up with this idea and they don't even have their own models so one way or another they're going to play second fiddle to a competitor.

I think there's a really really strong part of 2. ??? / 3. profit!!! In all this. And not just in Mozilla. But more so.

I mean OpenAI, they have first-mover. Their moat is piling up legislation to slow down the others. Microsoft, they have all their office users, they will cram their AI down their throats whether they want it or not. They're way behind on model development due to strategic miscalculations but they traded their place as a hyperscaler for a ticket into the big game with OpenAI. Google, they have fuck you money and will do the same as Microsoft with their search and mail users.

But Mozilla? "Oh we want to get more into advertising". Ehm yeah basically what will alienate your last few supporters, and getting onto a market where people with 1000x more money than you have the entire market divided between them. Being slightly more "ethical" will be laughed away by their market forces.

Mozilla has the luck that it doesn't have too many independent investors. Not many people screaming "what are we doing about AI because everyone else doing it". They should have a little more insight and less pressure but instead they jump into the same pool with much bigger sharks.

In some ways I think it's that Mozilla leadership still seems themselves as a big tech player that is temporarily a little embarrassed on the field. Not like the second-rank one it is that has already thoroughly deeply lost and must really find something unique to have a reason to exist. Because being a small player is not super bad, many small outfits do great. But it requires a strong niche you're really really good at, better than all the rest. That kinda vision I just don't see from Mozilla.