I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place.
I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component. As much as I hated Lotus Notes, something between Lotus Notes, Outlook and MS Teams could be something great and that the Mozilla org would be in a good position to create.
I know they may have good reach with the VPN service as well... I'm unsure how they can reduce security, qa and release management people when orchestration, automation and verification are such huge needs.
They get enough income from search (for now) that they could concentrate on best of breed tech, build mindshare from that, then re-introduce marketing for critical mass.
But this is a game they could never win, if they try to compete against google on marketing.
Where Mozilla could have the upper hand, is the idealistic community.
They would do the marketing, if FF would align with their goals ... which seems to be more and more a problem.
I was really alienated when FF tried to sell me advertisement as a feature some time ago. Those moves destroy trust. "Ah, so just another bullshit company. No thanks. Why should I support them?"
But the community and people who actually love open technology, privacy and the internet and don't want to hand it all over to google, facebook and co. are still there.
If you believe that Mozilla has no chance in the marketing game against Google, then maybe this is proof of Google's monopoly position and maybe this will convince you it is time for antitrust action against Google.
I think a lot of us came to that conclusion years ago, and that's why we want to like Firefox. Unfortunately I have not yet ascended to my rightful throne as emperor of earth, so I cannot simply snap my fingers and command the dismantling of Google.
If Mozilla were throwing resources at a legal battle against Google, I'd be skeptical but interested. But marketing? I've never seen a paid advertisement for Firefox. Where the hell is that money even going? They should have purged their entire marketing staff after that "Mr Robot" advertisement debacle, but instead there was little other than half-hearted apologies.
Mozilla's competition is default apps and chrome which I've only seen advertise on google and youtube, on the random day I use a computer without an ad blocker. Not like Safari is putting out any ads, or that Edge has any fans outside of geriatrics who don't know any better.
The competition (chrome) is just enjoying the runaway success of being the household name for over 10 years, simply by being a better product than firefox was 10 years ago when the market shares were much closer.
If firefox wants to enjoy this runaway success that chrome has, mozilla should steal the playbook of being the contrarian option for tech minded people just like how chrome was the foil to IE and Safari a decade ago before it became the dominant web browser. The focus should therefore be on dev tooling, not marketing, and the rest of the user base will follow the devs.
Firefox got where it was by being faster and less bloated than the current alternatives at the time. Then it lost its way completely and Chrome was that and took all the market share. There’s a theme here. People like fast browsers that just work and don’t do a lot of extra crap. If Firefox ever wants to take market share this is a great time to do that with how bloated Chrome is becoming and how much privacy it constantly encroaches on. If Mozilla is smart it will figure this out and go for the kill. Is Mozilla smart? I keep trying to use Firefox and every time I go back to Chrome (or Brave or Safari on my phone) because Firefox is too slow, it changes radically every version, and things just don’t work right in it that do work on other browsers. I don’t need marketing, I just need them to make the browser better. I’m the target audience; I want to switch!
I started using chrome originally 10ish years ago because the company tech person said it was good and fast (I was not in tech at the time). I think you’re right.
They pour a ton of money into events like SXSW. They had huge displays of their new branding up and down Congress Ave a couple of years ago, with several other "brand awareness" things going on throughout the conference.
Actually, given the current demographics of SXSW, that probably IS good marketing to potential customers. SXSW now costs quite a bit and is often a hipster corporate management perk. That sounds like a good demographic for Mozilla to market to.
Lone gone are the days where SXSW was a bunch of grubby hippies listening to a bunch of crappy bands. Now it's a bunch of hipster drones listening to a bunch of crappy mainstream pop artists.
I see a big gap in the market when it comes to self-hosted Office 365 or G Suite alternatives. Microsoft Exchange is a beast both in terms of complexity as well as licensing cost, and I think most small/medium orgs don't actually need the complexity which is why they're going towards G Suite which is a less complex product to manage.
I can see them succeeding with an open-core enterprise e-mail & calendar solution where the base features are free to use and an enterprise version with extra features, like the Gitlab model with self-hosting as the key selling point.
Which is partly why Mozilla is in a better position than most, being mainly tech and open-source at their heart. They are making enough off of search that they could create a product then sell/saas it themselves.
> I'm not sure why they don't largely sack half their marketing budget and concentrate on community outreach from the developer side... that's how they grew in the first place.
Which worked because IE 6 was a dumpster fire for both users and developers. Developers were looking for any excuse to jump ship off it.
The browser market in 2020 is 'good enough' for users and developers. It's like gasoline - nobody cares which refinery the gas in their tank comes from.
I kinda disagree, as a huge Mozilla fan. I think their technical development is fine, if not fantastic (especially for all they're doing with WebRender/Servo).
Personally I'd like to see them roll out paid privacy products. Like Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1. I currently pay for that, and if Mozilla rolled out a similar service across the Firefox ecosystem I'd gladly pay for that too.
I'm not saying their development isn't fine, but they're laying off the people that support development... which will make it worse, when they're spending far in excess of that cost in marketing and imho not even getting the best value out of that space.
> I'm not sure why they don't (...) concentrate on community outreach from the developer side.
Unless e.g. Lin Clark was among those who were laid off, they've been doing some excellent developer-side community outreach through the Mozilla Hacks blog in the past couple of years.
It's hard to say one way or another without the data. How big is the marketing team and budget/headcount/overhead? What's their ARR? How many QA people were laid off and at what salary ranges? How big was QA compared to other departments?
I seem to recall some article about their expenses a couple years ago, and that their marketing department and budget exceeded development and infrastructure combined.
I'm also surprised they haven't tried to create commercial mail and communications products. Thunderbird used to be one of the best options out there, and they could easily spin this off into a SaaS and self-host product on the server component. As much as I hated Lotus Notes, something between Lotus Notes, Outlook and MS Teams could be something great and that the Mozilla org would be in a good position to create.
I know they may have good reach with the VPN service as well... I'm unsure how they can reduce security, qa and release management people when orchestration, automation and verification are such huge needs.
They get enough income from search (for now) that they could concentrate on best of breed tech, build mindshare from that, then re-introduce marketing for critical mass.