Mozilla lays off 70 people
Mozilla had hoped to make money through service subscriptions, but that didn’t happen.
It seems that Mozilla is having a tough time at the moment, with news that the company behind the Firefox web browser has laid off 70 people – a considerable amount considering it employs around 1,000 people worldwide.
Back in 2018, Mozilla generated $429 million from deals with search engines. Companies like Google, Yahoo and Yandex pay Mozilla to have their search engines included as the default search engine in Firefox. Mozilla had been hoping to reduce the dependency on these deals, which accounts for around 90% of the company’s revenue, because Firefox’s market share continues to fall and those deals could become less lucrative in the future.
The company had planned to bolster its revenue with subscription services, such as the Firefox Private Network service (https://fpn. firefox.com) and other products including file transfer software and password managers, but these have failed to earn the company the kind of money it was hoping for. As Techcrunch reports (http://bit.ly/lxf260mozillatc), Mozilla interim CEO Mitchell Baker sent an internal memo, stating, “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. This did not happen.”
Baker reveals that Mozilla underestimated “how long it would take to build and ship new, revenue-generating products.” This has led to Mozilla being more conservative over its 2020 revenue projections, as well as taking the regrettable step of reducing its headcount.
While the Mozilla Corporation is laying off 70 people, it is continuing the Mozilla innovation fund, pledging $43 million to build new products.