4 ms·

> Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down... You'd really need to decide if you thought their marketshare would go down faster or not with s

by bradly 3y ago

> Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down... You'd really need to decide if you thought their marketshare would go down faster or not with someone else.

wkat4242 3y ago
Even still. These two trends can't be reconciled. With the marketshare the importance of the role also drops. In 10 years she'd be making 100M per year and have 100 customers :P
- bradly 3y ago
  I know nothing of this person or Mozilla internals, but I could imagine a company heading towards bankruptcy, that was avoided while still losing market-share. In this situation the role of CEO could become more important as market-share decreases and the situation becomes more precarious. Now if that person caused the downward slide to begin with, that's a different conversation. Again, I don't know the internals of Mozilla well enough to make an educated argument one way or the other.
roenxi 3y ago
If Firefox is destined for a market share of 2%, may as well get there quickly. A few years of decline vs a few months makes little difference in the long term. To be honest, market share shouldn't ever have been Baker's goal and losing it isn't necessarily a black mark against her. Firefox should have a vision of what it wants a browser and the internet to look like and be working to make software that supports that. Firefox seems to just be following along as Chrome with some minor tweaks [0] and that is the real problem. Google's vision of the internet is not what Firefox should be working to implement. There are deep strategic issues here that go far beyond market share. I'm personally happy to use niche software, I don't care what other people are using (Linux reached my desktop a long time ago). But it is hard to see what even Mozilla thinks the point of Firefox is. One of the things that makes Brave interesting to me is that it sees a web where middle men get cut out through the use of cryptocurrency. Is that going to work? Probably not. But it is a different take on what the internet could be. We need competitors like that. Even for privacy; it is hard to tell who Mozilla thinks the internet should look like. I'd hazard little change from now except without 3rd party cookies. That isn't a very impressive vision. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrome/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrom...
- geoelectric 3y ago
  Market share was/is a means to an end. Mozilla positioned Firefox in part as a reference for how web standards should behave (*), particularly for ones where Chrome/IE/Safari diverged with competing non-standard implementations. But for that to work in the real world, not just at W3C debates, you need major websites to care if they function correctly on your browser. And for them to care, enough people have to be using your browser that these companies see a business case for spending money to add your browser to project plans and QA test matrixes as a compatibility target. That decision is heavily informed by market share, whether global or as a percentage of the site’s own access records. In particular, double digits is a rough threshold for that, and that was pretty much Mozilla’s target. 50% would be wonderful but 10%+ let them assert standards in the ecosystem via the implicit threat of users leaving a site if Firefox didn’t work. As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when they hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.” (*) I’m pointedly ignoring some of the more aggressive introductions of things like device-interface APIs crucial to making a browser engine act like a phone OS, etc. Ultimately, someone has to build a working implementation before it’ll become a standard, anyway. There’s a race aspect for new ground and Mozilla was part of that. But generally speaking, where there was an actual recognized standard, Firefox used it and not some homegrown alternative. So websites also had to develop to that standard to function correctly for a significant percentage of users.
  - BrendanEich 3y ago
    You're exactly right, and this threshold effect killed Opera's Presto engine. It may yet kill Gecko.
- bbor 3y ago
  Great, informative comment. Thank you. I think this whole discussion of market share smacks a little too much of evaluating a president by the country’s GDP. Useful for a pithy remark, but doing any sort of detailed analysis seems doomed. I think the factors you listed are far more relevant
stephen_g 3y ago
That’s irrelevant. People were starting to see alarm bells ringing when her salary had quadrupled to $2.5m (this is in 2018 or 2019 I think?) while market share was dropping, it should have stayed basically around there until she turned things around with an increase as an incentive. Instead it doubled and then increased again (wasn’t it more like $7m by the end?)
- p-e-w 3y ago
  And someone said yes to that. Think about that for a second. The product's global importance is now a tiny fraction of what it was 15 years ago, and the person during whose tenure this happened was recently making 10x as much as back then. TEN TIMES. And whoever approved that obscene compensation thought this was a good idea.
  - archerx 3y ago
    It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host... I used to be a big Firefox fan, but the last 10 years made me abandon it, I don’t even check if my sites work on it anymore because the market share it has is so tiny. My time is better spent making sure it works with Safari...
    - bradly 3y ago
      > It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host... Over the past few years Mozilla has increased revenue while reducing the percent derived from Google with expenses slightly down.
      - bohwaz 3y ago
        Only the percent has reduced, but the actual revenue from Google has been growing over the years.
  - Certhas 3y ago
    Mozilla is also making 10x as much revenue as 15 years ago, has massively increased cash reserves, and is finally starting to diversify its income streams. And it's absurd to put the fault for the declining market share purely at the feet of Mozillas leadership. Not to say they were blameless, but when Google threw its weight behind Chrome, including massive ad campaigns on billboards, pushing it on its web properties, and regularly breaking Firefox on their own websites for no technical reasons, you can't reasonably expect Firefox to just magically maintain their market share. That said, at the upper end you could look at Germany, where Firefox is still between 10-20% (depending on the estimate you look at), as what could have been achievable more broadly.

by bradly 3y ago

> Her salary kept going up as the marketshare was going down... You'd really need to decide if you thought their marketshare would go down faster or not with someone else.

wkat4242 3y ago

Even still. These two trends can't be reconciled. With the marketshare the importance of the role also drops. In 10 years she'd be making 100M per year and have 100 customers :P

bradly 3y ago
I know nothing of this person or Mozilla internals, but I could imagine a company heading towards bankruptcy, that was avoided while still losing market-share. In this situation the role of CEO could become more important as market-share decreases and the situation becomes more precarious. Now if that person caused the downward slide to begin with, that's a different conversation. Again, I don't know the internals of Mozilla well enough to make an educated argument one way or the other.

roenxi 3y ago

If Firefox is destined for a market share of 2%, may as well get there quickly. A few years of decline vs a few months makes little difference in the long term. To be honest, market share shouldn't ever have been Baker's goal and losing it isn't necessarily a black mark against her. Firefox should have a vision of what it wants a browser and the internet to look like and be working to make software that supports that. Firefox seems to just be following along as Chrome with some minor tweaks [0] and that is the real problem. Google's vision of the internet is not what Firefox should be working to implement. There are deep strategic issues here that go far beyond market share. I'm personally happy to use niche software, I don't care what other people are using (Linux reached my desktop a long time ago). But it is hard to see what even Mozilla thinks the point of Firefox is. One of the things that makes Brave interesting to me is that it sees a web where middle men get cut out through the use of cryptocurrency. Is that going to work? Probably not. But it is a different take on what the internet could be. We need competitors like that. Even for privacy; it is hard to tell who Mozilla thinks the internet should look like. I'd hazard little change from now except without 3rd party cookies. That isn't a very impressive vision. [0] https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrome/ https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/browsers/compare/chrom...

geoelectric 3y ago
Market share was/is a means to an end. Mozilla positioned Firefox in part as a reference for how web standards should behave (*), particularly for ones where Chrome/IE/Safari diverged with competing non-standard implementations. But for that to work in the real world, not just at W3C debates, you need major websites to care if they function correctly on your browser. And for them to care, enough people have to be using your browser that these companies see a business case for spending money to add your browser to project plans and QA test matrixes as a compatibility target. That decision is heavily informed by market share, whether global or as a percentage of the site’s own access records. In particular, double digits is a rough threshold for that, and that was pretty much Mozilla’s target. 50% would be wonderful but 10%+ let them assert standards in the ecosystem via the implicit threat of users leaving a site if Firefox didn’t work. As a test professional at the time, one of the most discouraging things I saw after leaving Mozilla was Firefox dropping off all the test plans I knew about when they hit single digits. I’d poke at that decision where I had influence, and would basically get back a response that “Firefox is dead, just look at the numbers.” (*) I’m pointedly ignoring some of the more aggressive introductions of things like device-interface APIs crucial to making a browser engine act like a phone OS, etc. Ultimately, someone has to build a working implementation before it’ll become a standard, anyway. There’s a race aspect for new ground and Mozilla was part of that. But generally speaking, where there was an actual recognized standard, Firefox used it and not some homegrown alternative. So websites also had to develop to that standard to function correctly for a significant percentage of users.
- BrendanEich 3y ago
  You're exactly right, and this threshold effect killed Opera's Presto engine. It may yet kill Gecko.
bbor 3y ago
Great, informative comment. Thank you. I think this whole discussion of market share smacks a little too much of evaluating a president by the country’s GDP. Useful for a pithy remark, but doing any sort of detailed analysis seems doomed. I think the factors you listed are far more relevant

stephen_g 3y ago

That’s irrelevant. People were starting to see alarm bells ringing when her salary had quadrupled to $2.5m (this is in 2018 or 2019 I think?) while market share was dropping, it should have stayed basically around there until she turned things around with an increase as an incentive. Instead it doubled and then increased again (wasn’t it more like $7m by the end?)

p-e-w 3y ago
And someone said yes to that. Think about that for a second. The product's global importance is now a tiny fraction of what it was 15 years ago, and the person during whose tenure this happened was recently making 10x as much as back then. TEN TIMES. And whoever approved that obscene compensation thought this was a good idea.
- archerx 3y ago
  It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host... I used to be a big Firefox fan, but the last 10 years made me abandon it, I don’t even check if my sites work on it anymore because the market share it has is so tiny. My time is better spent making sure it works with Safari...
  - bradly 3y ago
    > It’s almost parasitic, suck the host of it’s resources and dump it when it’s near death for the next host... Over the past few years Mozilla has increased revenue while reducing the percent derived from Google with expenses slightly down.
    - bohwaz 3y ago
      Only the percent has reduced, but the actual revenue from Google has been growing over the years.
- Certhas 3y ago
  Mozilla is also making 10x as much revenue as 15 years ago, has massively increased cash reserves, and is finally starting to diversify its income streams. And it's absurd to put the fault for the declining market share purely at the feet of Mozillas leadership. Not to say they were blameless, but when Google threw its weight behind Chrome, including massive ad campaigns on billboards, pushing it on its web properties, and regularly breaking Firefox on their own websites for no technical reasons, you can't reasonably expect Firefox to just magically maintain their market share. That said, at the upper end you could look at Germany, where Firefox is still between 10-20% (depending on the estimate you look at), as what could have been achievable more broadly.