21 ms·
Do you see any realistic chance of this happening? Generally if a company is captured by a parasitic leadership sucking it dry, that's it, right? Is there anyon
by patrec 6y ago
Do you see any realistic chance of this happening? Generally if a company is captured by a parasitic leadership sucking it dry, that's it, right? Is there anyone on the board whose interests are more aligned with keeping Mozilla alive (probably hard to do at this point) than feasting on it whilst there is still something left to feast on? Presumably you'd need a few such people.
- jacquesm 6y agoIt is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account unless the board members that want her out would resign if she does not want to make way. That would be a major statement and would put the remaining board members on notice. The board typically does not get compensated the way the CEO does so they are usually not in a position to 'suck it dry', on top of that they have some responsibilities and if they don't act in the best interest of the company they might be found to be personally liable depending on the jurisdiction and the details regarding their responsibilities. I should study that to see if there is any way to solve it but frankly, even though FireFox has been my daily driver since about forever I don't see a happy ending here.
- culturestate 6y ago> It is a problem that she is both on the board and CEO, which effectively makes her impossible to hold to account Is this really a problem? The CEO is often a director, and even as chairwoman I doubt anything in the bylaws prevents the board at large from removing her if they wanted to. Instead, it seems like the board itself is the issue, since they allowed Mozilla to stray so far from its core mission.
- jacquesm 6y agostay/stray.
- culturestate 6y agoCheers. MacBook keyboard strikes again.
- mschuster91 6y agoA bit offtopic, but I really really recommend the 16-inch MBP. That's what I call a keyboard, not the 15-inch crap.
- ilrwbwrkhv 6y agoWhat about the new Macbook pro 13 inch?
- mschuster91 6y agoDon't have experiences with it, that's too small for me, sorry.
- chipotle_coyote 6y agoThey're all identical keyboards -- AFAIK, literally -- so if you like it on one (or don't like it on one!), it'll apply to the rest. I have a 2020 MacBook Air and think it's one of the best laptop keyboards I've used in a long time. (And it makes me really hate going back to the butterfly keyboard on my work laptop, even though I found it okay to type on previously. I actually never had any dead keys on it, or on a previous work laptop with butterfly keys, or on a personal MBP 13" that the Air replaced.)
- culturestate 6y agoThis one went nearly 3 years before it had a problem, but as soon as one key started acting up the rest of the row quickly followed. I'll trade up for the latest model (with the touch bar, which I actually like, and physical escape key) the next time I can afford to be unproductive for a couple days.
- 6y ago
- jeltz 6y agoIs that common in the US? Because here in Sweden it is regarded as bad practice for medium sized companies and up. The CEO is almost never part of the board here except for in tiny companies.
- evancox100 6y agoExtremely common, not frowned upon at all here
- arethuza 6y agoDefinitely the normal thing in the UK for companies of all sizes for the CEO to be an executive director and therefore to sit on the board of directors.
- DonnyV 6y agoAnything corrupt is ok in the US. We just frame it as being efficient.
- notmurdoch 6y agoWhat does this comment bring to the discussion, in line with the HN site guidelines? Does your comment inspire curiosity? Or is it a vague, arguable insult against a nation you dislike?
- rectang 6y agoI served on the board of the Apache Software Foundation for a year and everything about the experience convinced me that it is desirable for the board to be completely separate from the corporate officers. In fact, I have seen this very debate play out in real life. We appointed a new President of the ASF during my term. That person had been a Director, but when they became President they stepped down from the Board. For a non-profit charity that relies on volunteers, perfect separation is not always feasible, and especially in the early years when the ASF was smaller the President was often a Board member. But although I can't speak for anybody but myself, I believe that the ASF is likely to continue with an informal tradition of separating Board from Officers for the indefinite future. A similar cultural change ought to be possible at Mozilla — and perhaps elsewhere.
- jariel 6y agoIf the CEO is a majority or major shareholder, they will be on the board, point blank. If they are not, the roles should be separate. Their patron should rectify this, but it's possible they don't care. The 'plan' may be to kill Firefox.
- patrec 6y agoWell, concerning the sucking dry: maybe I'm overly cynical but I wonder if being on the mozilla board is not a nice sinecure (so high effective hourly wage, even if the yearly compensation is not egregious) with a massive CV boost: none of the people I can see on the board of either the corp or the foundation, with the exception of Brian Behlendorf (and I had to look him up) seem to have much name recognition and being on the board of Mozilla might well be the most high profile thing they'll ever do. Given that, as you seem to agree, Mozilla is probably doomed now no matter what, why would they deprive themselves of these benefits (and possible future similar gigs!) sooner rather than later? It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability.
- jacquesm 6y ago> It seems extremely unlikely to me the mismanagement is rising to the level of personal liability. Agreed. But the CEOs statement here is very peculiar and might actually rise to that level, the board not taking action in turn might just make them culpable. It is a very dumb statement, especially for a lawyer, to make.
- patrec 6y agoYou mean the "competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to"? It's pretty funny, especially the word "competitive"? I assume the bit you could see landing her in hot water are the three words "and their families"?
- jacquesm 6y agoYes, because if and when Mozilla goes belly up and the CEO has been found to enrich herself with this as her motivation for continuing to raid the till when it was clear that Mozilla was in trouble then you don't want to have stuff like that on the record. The Martha Stewart case revolved around a similar minor (for her) issue, $45K loss avoided but it landed her in jail. Rich people make stupid mistakes too, whether this is one of those remains to be seen (I think it will pass) even so, it isn't smart when your company is on a multi-year downslide. It's not good optics.
- indymike 6y agoOne of the best and hardest things to do for anything with a board of directors is to establish that EVERY BOARD MEETING starts with a vote on one simple question: "Shall the CEO/Executive Director be retained?" Every company, not for profit or even tiny club that makes this the big question performs it's mission well. Those that don't, well, you get a lot more politics.
- jacquesm 6y agoI love that idea, it formalizes the board taking responsibility for the continued performance of the CEO, and it may also warn a CEO that the board that hired them is about to flip before it is too late.
- indymike 6y agoAccountability is underrated, and I've been in more than one meeting where there was a surprise no vote from a couple of board members. The result was that problems got fixed quickly.
- warbaker 6y agoImagine if, every quarter, a committee voted on whether you keep your job. Does this make you more or less willing to take risks? More or less focused? Does this decrease or increase the amount of attention you give to "optics" and politics?
- mantap 6y agoPerhaps if you can't deal with that small pressure you shouldn't be a CEO. When things get bad it's going to be a lot more pressure than that.
- indymike 6y agoThis doesn't bother me in the least. A CEO's boss is the board of directors, period. Every board meeting is a review on the performance of the organization, and therefore the CEO. Most employees do not roll up to a committee, and their review is usually with a supervisor. The board meeting is no different.
- KingOfCoders 6y agoIt's not just the leadership at Firefox. FF has been hijacked by a bunch of people who have no interest in the browser and sucked it dry while it went down. Sad for the people at Mozilla who cared about the browser and wrote the code. As an FF user I hope Mozilla does a turn around, gets back its engineering culture and focuses on delivering the best - and most secure and private - browser in the market.
- andrewgioia 6y agoIf you have a link or other details I’m interested in who you’re referring to that hijacked/influenced development. I’ve never heard that and am really curious. I too really hope they can turn it around but sadly have been less and less hopeful.
- dayjobpork 6y agoPossibly taking one of the best parts of Firefox, the addons, and replacing it with a system that doesn't bother to support many of the most popular addons.
- FeepingCreature 6y agoThe sad part is -- I genuinely believe they were trying to do the right thing with that.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y agoSlavishly copying Google's plans to nerf the addon interface isn't "the right thing". Thankfully, Google has gone too far by crippling ad blockers and Firefox is unlikely to fall on that sword.
- IainIreland 6y agoAn opposing point of view, from somebody at Mozilla who cared about the browser and wrote the code: https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addons/ https://yoric.github.io/post/why-did-mozilla-remove-xul-addo...
- albertzeyer 6y agoFirefox and co are open source projects. Couldn't you just create a new company, "Next-Mozilla" or so, and fork off the projects, install a new CEO, take over the developers? You would have to use a new branding, i.e. they cannot reuse the trademark, and they have to make sure that enough people (developers and users) will switch over. But with such bad press, this might not be too hard, if there is one focused attempt for this. Financing is another issue initially, but at some point they would get a similar Google deal. And otherwise, financing like Wikimedia or Internet Archive (mostly donations, right?).
- jacquesm 6y agoHow will you pay for this? Without critical mass you are not going anywhere. FireFox had critical mass, and lost. You won't be able to recover that position without some extremely deep pockets even if you start off from what is there today. I am not convinced that even if Mozilla/FF got a competent CEO tomorrow and started executing 'just so' that they would be able to recover from their slide, a newcomer would have it harder.
- trasz 6y agoThey could try to convince Google to sponsor them instead.
- jacquesm 6y agoChicken, egg.
- Tom4hawk 6y agoSteve Jobs was able to do that with Apple. There is no reason to believe that is not possible with Mozilla. Especially taking into consideration that Mozilla doesn't have to be profitable as a company. Being sustainable would be enough.
- jacquesm 6y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565032 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24565032
- pyb 6y agoAre there any examples of a company recovering from what you describe ? I don't know of any.
- jacquesm 6y agoApple. Currently the most valuable company of all time. And there are interesting parallels, Apple too was kept alive by their competitor as a fig leaf in light of anti-trust troubles.
- kinleyd 6y agoApple was the ultimate outlier in that respect. It would be great if someone could pull this off for Mozilla. The odds are slim, but one can hope. Edit: Cal Peterson's article clearly shows how we got here. Such a shame.
- jacquesm 6y agoIf played smart Mozilla could be another. I have some ideas about how this could be achieved but Mozilla in its present day configuration would never be able to make any of them work so I'm curious to see if and how they will get out of their current predicament. So far what I am seeing and hearing does not make me very hopeful. FF will be my daily driver until they stop updating it, where FF does not work I very reluctantly use Chrome. I suspect that if and when FF dies Chrome will no longer be available for Linux because the main reason for offering it (as an alternative to FF) will be gone.
- hoseja 6y agoThere is also a possibility they will start updating it with adware, IMO they've come close already.
- jacquesm 6y agoAuto update strikes again. I'll react to that when it happens. One of the main reasons I use firefox is because I hate advertising, if there is one thing that would make me jump ship that would probably be it.
- seqizz 6y agoThere is a possibility, doesn't matter how low, I like to think about: Group of people leaving Mozilla, forking the Firefox and creating another non-profit.
- ksec 6y agoWhile I definitely agree with changing leadership. I dont think she can be described as parasitic leadership. She is incompetent, but I dont think she has the intention to drive Mozilla to the ground. After all she co-founded the Mozilla Project, and was the Chairwoman for a long time, long before she was named the CEO. Why did they not find someone else to be CEO is beyond me though.
- behnamoh 6y agoRemember Stephen Elop, former CEO of Nokia? He did an awesome job in reducing Nokia's marketshare (and hence, its market capital) to make the company ready to be acquired by his mother company, Microsoft, at a very low price (cheaper than just one app—WhatsApp which was sold to Facebook). Or remember Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer? She also did a great job at making the company ready to be sold out to Verizon at low price. These CEOs know what they're doing. They take care of their personal interests and steal companies for the tech giants.
- ksec 6y agoOh no. While I am absolutely pissed ( to say the least ) that Nokia was sold to Microsoft and Yahoo couldn't turn its ship around. I dont think both CEO were doing in their own interest or another companies interest. Nokia refused to use Android. ( Which was what really killed Nokia ) That was only two possible outcome, either go full force with Symbian or partner with Microsoft. I mean there are so many wrong with Nokia even before Elop joined nothing much could have been done. It turns out the penalty for completely dismissing iPhone and Smartphone was death for their phone division. ( Currently the Nokia Smartphone are manufactured by a JV formed by former Nokia employees and Foxconn, with the name licensed from Nokia ) Elop did however completely neglect the importance of Carrier / Network Infrastructure segment, although arguably Ericsson wasn't competing much and Huawei didn't show up on their radar. ( Yet ) Marissa was trying very hard to recreate Google within Yahoo. She was absolutely executing it. But it is one of those example where I put the argument against execution eats strategy for breakfast. It is not one OR the other. You need both. The equation times both together. When you have a strategy which trends towards zero or even negative, it doesn't matter how well you execute it. In the end she failed. The strategy was wrong from the start. I actually thought the other CEO candidate's vision of turning Yahoo in to an Online Media Companies suits Yahoo better. But Marissa got the job, and the rest is history.
- syshum 6y agoWell if she were to post any kind of Right Leaning political views they would get rid of her pretty quick.... They have a history of that
- dang 6y agoPlease don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. We've had to ask you this multiple times. This kind of provocation leads to discussion that is equal parts nasty and brain dead. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html