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Mozilla Lays Off 70 People as Non-search Revenue Fails to Materialize
Mozilla lays off 70 people as non-search revenue fails to materialize:
Mozilla has laid off 70 people, TechCrunch reports. It's a significant move for an organization that employs around 1,000 people worldwide.
"You may recall that we expected to be earning revenue in 2019 and 2020 from new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside of search," wrote Mozilla interim CEO Mitchell Baker in a memo to staff obtained by TechCrunch. "This did not happen."
Baker said Mozilla had decided not to shelve Mozilla's $43 million innovation fund, which focuses on creating new Mozilla products. She said Mozilla would provide "generous exit packages and outplacement support" to those who were let go.
Mozilla Lays Off 70 Employees
Mozilla lays off 70 employees:
Mozilla laid off about 70 employees Wednesday as part of an effort to preserve funding for its top new priorities like protecting privacy and fighting surveillance online. The nonprofit is best known for creating the Firefox web browser, but it also is expanding into new areas including password management, file sharing and private network connections while doubling down on its longstanding push to improve online privacy.
"We're making a significant investment to fund innovation. In order to do that responsibly, we've also had to make some difficult choices which led to the elimination of roles at Mozilla which we announced internally today," Mozilla Chair Mitchell Baker said of the layoffs in a blog post.
And Mozilla is being more cautious with revenue and expenses. "We are taking a more conservative approach to our finances. This will enable us to pivot as needed to respond to market threats to internet health, and champion user privacy and agency," Mozilla said in a statement.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @02:56PM (2 children)
Password Managers and VPN Services are both niche services. People who want them have already found suitable solutions. Mostly these are desired by security conscious and privacy minded individuals. Your earlier inclusion of Pocket directly into the Firefox browser acts counter to privacy as it is provided by a third party company that sells user activity tracking data to fund it's services, much like Google does.
I applaud your attempt to show that Firefox is, or could be, a privacy first web browser. The first thing you need to do is to remove Pocket from the core of the browser and made it an optional add-on that users who want it choose to install.
If your goal is to generate revenue, you may want to consider offering more main stream services to either the users of the browser or businesses. I understand that this is much more difficult.
If your goal is truly to provide a more privacy focused and secure service offering that goes beyond a web browser, step one is to extricate Pocket (as I said early). I would think the next logical step would be to offer popular services with a stronger focus on security. Some examples might include:
* a secure e-mail service at a reasonable price (such as 99 cents per month per e-mail account with reasonable storage). Secure should include malicious e-mail scanning AND client side encryption for long-term storage messages. I'm not completely sure how to achieve both of these in a service but there are very few secure e-mails service and none are free. This might also work wonders at bringing your log ignored e-mail client back to life.
* a secure web storage solution with client side encryption to compete with the likes of Google Drive, OneDrive, or Dropbox. None of the major players offer built-in client side encryption. 3rd party client-side encryption solutions are awkward (at least the ones I've tried). This could be an extension of the file transfer service you have already hinted at.
* This is probably a risk but a good quality privacy focused secure real-time chat solution that doesn't come from Facebook might be worth looking at.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 17 2020, @10:14PM
There are ways to do malicious scanning and encrypted email. In PGP and S/MIME, the subject line and other headers are sent in the clear. This allows for SPF, DKIM, DMARC, DNSBLs, greylisting, and more still work on the network side. You could also use LPH, LSH, fuzzy checksums, through things like homomorphic encryption, or almost anything you want done by the client.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @11:17PM
MEGA [mega.nz] does. Highly recommended.