In the absence of sufficient revenue, Mozilla lays off 70 employees

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In an internal note, cited by TechCrunch In a January 15, 2020 article, Mozilla President and Acting CEO Mitchell Baker announced the layoff of 70 workers due to the slow deployment of new revenue-generating products. This figure could further increase as the Firefox publisher is still studying how this decision will affect its employees in France and the United Kingdom. Note that today, Mozilla Corporation has approximately 1000 employees worldwide.

Products that do not generate the expected income

"You may remember that we expected to generate revenue in 2019 and 2020 from the new subscription products as well as higher revenue from sources outside the search function. This does not happen"writes Mitchell Baker in the document. The emblematic figure of the organization underlines that the dismissed employees were going to receive from"generous compensation"and were going to be supported in their reclassification solution.

She also notes that management has considered closing the Mozilla innovation fund but has finally decided that it needs to continue developing new products. In total, Mozilla spends $ 43 million (38.5 million euros) per year on new product development.

Breaking with dependence linked to partnership income

Over the past few months, Mozilla has started testing a number of new products, most of which are subscription-based. We can mention in particular its password manager "Firefox Lockwise", which is currently completely free. There is also its VPN "Firefox Private Network", which is only available in closed beta version United States.

This strategy was intended to gradually break with the dependence linked to income from partnerships with search engines and create new revenue channels. In 2018, 91% of Mozilla's revenue came from partnerships with search engines. In the same year, spending ($ 451 million) exceeded revenue ($ 450 million) for the first time.

Quitting Firefox OS

The last wave of layoffs dates back to 2017, when 50 positions related to the development of software for smart health connected objects were eliminated, including that of Ari Jaaski, the vice-president in charge of the smart health connected terminals pole, or Bertrand Neveux, San Francisco-based software manager.

This cut in staff was the consequence of the abandonment of the Firefox OS mobile operating system for smart health connected objects. The goal was then to get around a major problem: on iOS, Firefox is based on Apple Webkit. A configuration that prevents Mozilla from being distinguished from Apple's homemade browser, Safari.

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