Everyone here has been overreacting about the Mozilla layoffs, but they only laid off poeple working on the metaverse, ai, and their VPN and stuff. They’re actually refocusing on Firefox. People have been freaking out about them working on ai now, too, but theyve been doing ai for a while (Mozilla common voice anybody?)(Firefox’s translation feature?) And it’s always open source, and runs offline, they’re not gonna add a shitty internet-connected ai sidebar.
Here is the entire internal memo fore the interested:
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Scaling back investment mozilla.social: With mozilla.social, we made a big bet in 2023 to build a safer, better social media experience, based on Mastodon and the Fediverse. Our initial approach was based on a belief that Mozilla needed to quickly reach large scale in order to effectively shape the future of social media. It was a noble idea but one we struggled to execute. While we resourced mozilla.social heavily to pursue this ambitious idea, in retrospect a more modest approach would have enabled us to participate in the space with considerably greater agility. The actions we’re taking today will make this strategic correction, working through a much smaller team to participate in the Mastodon ecosystem and more rapidly bring smaller experiments to people that choose to live on the mozilla.social instance.
Protection Experimentation & Identity (PXI): We’re scaling back investment in some of our standalone consumer products in the Security and Privacy space. We are reducing investment in market segments that competitors crowd and where it is challenging to deliver a differentiated offering. Specifically, we plan to reduce our investments in VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber. We will maintain investment in products addressing customer needs in growing market segments.
Hubs: Since early 2023, we have experienced a shift in the market for 3D virtual worlds. With the exception of gaming, education, and a handful of niche use cases, demand has moved away from 3D virtual worlds. This is impacting all industry players. Hubs’ user and customer bases are not robust enough to justify continuing to dedicate resources against the headwinds of the unfavorable shift in demand. We will wind down the service and communicate a graceful exit plan to customers.
Right-sizing the People Team
Given the reduction in staffing and lower headcount budget moving forward in MozProd, some roles have been consolidated in the People and other support services orgs so that we are offering the right level of support to our product portfolio. Optimizing our org to sharpen focus.
In 2023, generative AI began rapidly shifting the industry landscape. Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed. Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content, and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization. More details on the specific organizational changes will follow shortly. Within MozProd, there are no changes within MDN, Ads, or Fakespot. There are also no changes to Legal/Policy, Finance & Business Operations, Marketing, or Strategy & Operations.
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But what if they don’t need that many people working on Firefox? What if AI, VR, and Network programmers are fundamentally different in skills from a web browser programmer, and don’t want to change their career trajectory?
What if, by not firing these people, Mozilla folds in 3 years and everyone ends up without a job?
Not every project makes 2x the money with 2x the people. It’s the “Why can’t 9 Mom’s give birth in 1 month” problem. Hell most projects will slow down significantly with an influx like that.
Look, layoffs suck, but it’s quid-pro-quo. Employees can leave at any time too. If a company isn’t abusive or arbitrary with their layoff decisions, has decent layoff benefits, and doesn’t refuse to give job recommendations, it’s hard for me to hold it against the employer.