Their reckoning day is coming when Google stops paying them $500m+ a year to be the default search engine. That payment alone account for 80% of Mozilla's budget, and has made them fat, wasteful, and directionless. It's really upsetting to me personally, I gave a lot (time, code, and money) to Mozilla in the early days when they were really struggling.
Google should be split into several business units [1], should
be forced to give up Chrome [2], and should be forced to invest several billion of its war chest into competitors.
That's what the DOJ would do if it still had balls.
The fact that there's no money in a product like Firefox is insane. It's absolutely bonkers. There is so much value in it, yet everybody's favorite mega monopoly is pouring value into commoditizing everything to keep eyeballs and attention and dollars and a taxation regime the size of a medium-sized country in its gravitational singularity.
Google is an invasive species in every market. We need the EU/DOJ/BRICS equivalent of Chicxulub-level regulation to end its throat-grip predation on everyone.
[1] Six "Baby Bells", or "Tiny Googs": Search, Android, Deepmind, Cloud, YouTube, Ads. Shuffle everything else into another bin or spin it off independently. Waymo, etc.
[2] You could put Google with the Ads business as there is (1) no synergy between Chrome<->Android<->Search anymore, and (2) if Ads fucks it up, it doesn't kill the broader browser market or web ecosystem.
What's bonkers to me is that people are alway complaining about ads and they're not putting "delete web ads from your life" front and center of their value proposition. Go to firefox.com and look at the the "why Firefox" copy. It's could be about basically any modern browser. It's like selling a car with "it has wheels!".
I guess that might threaten their tie-up with the world's biggest adtech company which is why they keep it at arm's length, but that's just slow death by strangulation.
India won't. The call of the hour is re-industrialization, and manufacturing Pixel phones is one piece of that puzzle. Give employment to millions of people is far more important in the short run. And there are other ways of enforcing sovereignty.
I’ve got job alerts, and it looks like they are going all in on VPN services given how many people they want to hire… yet I don’t know a single person who would use Mozilla’s VPN service let alone pay for it.
I also hope that Google stops paying Apple $20B/yr for the same reason. The effect on the stock market due to a sudden reduction in Apple services revenue will be fun to watch.
Does anyone know if Mozilla has built up an endowment/trust fund type thing that will allow them to operate without further revenue from an entity like Google?
