I have a couple of thoughts, but by no means I am an expert in this area, so treat it with a grain of salt.
Firstly, this is a bad and sad news. Don't let the corpo language in the press release cover the truth. Organizations that are doing well do not let 25% of their people go. It certainly means that Mozilla is in trouble and it might have a lot of negative consequences for the balance in the web space:
it means that 250 people, who were working for an organization with great mission and goals, now will have to find another employer, and it's impossible that they all will work on something as important and vital for the internet as Mozilla's products.
it means that great tools that people use everyday, now won't be kept up to date. MDN documentation is of top-notch quality, and apparently the entire team behind it was laid off. The same with Firefox Dev Tools - those developers who use Firefox will move to Chrome and might stop supporting Firefox on their sites. This will further strengthen Google's position in web browsers market. Then there are other affected projects like Servo (browser engine written in Rust, parts of which were merged into current Firefox engine) - will Mozilla continue investing in Rust following the recent news? It is doubtful.
it's very hard to say what the future brings. Mozilla is a not-for-profit organization which has been strongly relying on a single source of income (search engine deal, with Yahoo until 2017 and Google since then). They've been trying to become less dependent on this one source, but as of 2018 (2019 data not available yet), around 90% of the revenue comes from the deal with Google. What's more, the search engine deal might not be renewed (I think it expires next year), and what other search engine will pay Mozilla if all of Google's competitors have no more than 10% of market altogether?
Is there some bright side to that? Not immediately, things will certainly get worse first.
In longer perspective, I see 2 scenarios:
Mozilla as we know it might be gone: if the new search engine deal is not nearly as good as the current one, and if Mozilla does not find other sources of revenue, they will have to further scale down. This would have a lot of consequences, one of them being a total dominance of Chromium as browser engine (similar to dominance of Internet Explorer in early 2000s)
the more positive scenario is that Mozilla finds more sources of revenue and they won't have troubles if some company stops supporting them. They have started introducing paid products (VPN, Pocket Premium) and who knows, maybe together with a few more they'll provide steady income that's enough to be the leading power in fight for users' privacy. It certainly won't be easy though.
@gregorywitek
, thank you for sharing your thoughts and making fair points. Over time, I recognize a few trends and I don't think Mozilla troubles are recent (obviously, I can be wrong about it all). Summarizing...
this isn't the first time Mozilla operates substantial layoff in "recent" years. I do not have statistics about how previous ex employees managed their careers afterwords. As an aside, something looked weird since before Rob Hawkes left.
it seems to me that the (attempt to) switch from a team managed to a somewhat "community"/other entities managed MDN has been going on for some time now. It is interesting how I moved from Chrome to Firefox and happily lived with its idiosyncrasies.
the search engine deal has been a recurrent Achilles heel for ages now. And, for what I can remember, Mozilla never hid concerns about such situation (and chances of many layoffs).
Points I wonder about is how currently "healthy" is Firefox (vast topic) and the future of Rust (will be Go the new I.E.?). I am also not sure if people is akin to access Mozilla products...
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I have a couple of thoughts, but by no means I am an expert in this area, so treat it with a grain of salt.
Firstly, this is a bad and sad news. Don't let the corpo language in the press release cover the truth. Organizations that are doing well do not let 25% of their people go. It certainly means that Mozilla is in trouble and it might have a lot of negative consequences for the balance in the web space:
it means that 250 people, who were working for an organization with great mission and goals, now will have to find another employer, and it's impossible that they all will work on something as important and vital for the internet as Mozilla's products.
it means that great tools that people use everyday, now won't be kept up to date. MDN documentation is of top-notch quality, and apparently the entire team behind it was laid off. The same with Firefox Dev Tools - those developers who use Firefox will move to Chrome and might stop supporting Firefox on their sites. This will further strengthen Google's position in web browsers market. Then there are other affected projects like Servo (browser engine written in Rust, parts of which were merged into current Firefox engine) - will Mozilla continue investing in Rust following the recent news? It is doubtful.
it's very hard to say what the future brings. Mozilla is a not-for-profit organization which has been strongly relying on a single source of income (search engine deal, with Yahoo until 2017 and Google since then). They've been trying to become less dependent on this one source, but as of 2018 (2019 data not available yet), around 90% of the revenue comes from the deal with Google. What's more, the search engine deal might not be renewed (I think it expires next year), and what other search engine will pay Mozilla if all of Google's competitors have no more than 10% of market altogether?
Is there some bright side to that? Not immediately, things will certainly get worse first.
In longer perspective, I see 2 scenarios:
@gregorywitek , thank you for sharing your thoughts and making fair points. Over time, I recognize a few trends and I don't think Mozilla troubles are recent (obviously, I can be wrong about it all). Summarizing...
this isn't the first time Mozilla operates substantial layoff in "recent" years. I do not have statistics about how previous ex employees managed their careers afterwords. As an aside, something looked weird since before Rob Hawkes left.
it seems to me that the (attempt to) switch from a team managed to a somewhat "community"/other entities managed MDN has been going on for some time now. It is interesting how I moved from Chrome to Firefox and happily lived with its idiosyncrasies.
the search engine deal has been a recurrent Achilles heel for ages now. And, for what I can remember, Mozilla never hid concerns about such situation (and chances of many layoffs).
Points I wonder about is how currently "healthy" is Firefox (vast topic) and the future of Rust (will be Go the new I.E.?). I am also not sure if people is akin to access Mozilla products...