Mozilla was never able to leverage its success in the desktop browser market into a successive platform story that evolved into mobile and beyond. They realized this too late, and then their extreme over-correction was to build a new mobile operating system. However an open-source OS already existed in the market with AOSP so FirefoxOS needed to try to thread a convoluted set of needles to justify its existence. It actually was a confusing set of Android Browser web-apps mixed with an OS for new devices -- a contradictory strategy that they could never resolve.
The worst part of the current tech-environment is that companies are dead years before they even know it. The next platform is already tearing apart your current one, while its in its infancy. And the entrenched players in the next space will be incredibly hard to unseat.
By the time you recognize the threat, attempt to turn the ship to respond, you are already deep down aware that there is very little chance of a happy ending. This results in convoluted late-stage product strategies that have 3+ directions since management knows no single one of them are viable.
This is a deeply uncomfortable truth that keeps me up at night.
Thank you for stating this. What people forget is that the early Android Browser was really, really bad. Chrome helped considerably, but it wasn't released until several years into Android. Also remember that Chrome was not preinstalled when it came out; you had to download it.
Firefox had an opportunity to become what Chrome for Android eventually became; the better 3rd party browser. But they made 2 critical mistakes (as an outside observer):
1. They didn't take mobile (and specifically Android) very seriously at first. Fennec felt like a side-project at best.
2. XUL didn't work very well on Android, and it took them a long time to make the switch to native.
I believe things could have turned out very differently had they done the right thing from the beginning.
I'm sorry but I couldn't disagree more with this comment. I don't have stats on Firefox or Chrome (or even the native browser) usage to hand, but I really think these are largely irrelevant.
1) Most people experience most of the "web" on their phones via a non-browser. This may be by clicking on a shared link within the FB/Twitter/WhatEver app and seeing it inside an integrated WebView, or it may simply be viewing content normally available via the web through the lens of an app presenting the "same" content "natively". Either way, the point here is that browsers have had less of a role.
2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here.
The above may not be the case for the typical HN crowd, but it's quite naïve to think the majority want and act the same as we.
I am hopeful that this trend is changing - that slowly dedicated mobile web browsers are becoming a more viable option - but certainly this was not the case when Fennec was launched. The best we could hope for was for Chrome/Safari to gain ground over "apps". Mozilla's offerings never stood any real chance of being super successful in this early climate and tbh FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.
I'm one of those people, but this is exactly what I was trying to get at in my comment. The HN crowd often seems to see the world through a strange lens, as if the majority of users use technology like they do. It's far from reality.
Yes, as well as many other extensions. I'm using Self-Destructing Cookies, Desktop by Default, Smarter Scrolling and Android Text Reflow in addition to uBlock, thus tweaking my mobile browsing experience to something much better than the stock browser.
Yes, you can. It's the reason I use it on my phone. Chrome Mobile is faster, but I cannot tolerate ads on the big screen and on my phone they are 100x more unnerving.
> FirefoxOS, ill fated as it was, was probably the least worst chance they had to do so.
They should have pursued commercial strategies like becoming the default browser for Samsung and others. That would have got them around the "default" problem. Sell the "differentiation", build a kick-ass browser for Android; that would have given them a chance. They didn't even try it.
It's resource-intensive and not generally straightforward to cut deals with Samsung. They have many hardware/software combos to support. They have their defaults to promote. And they often have money being thrown at them by other large players.
Of course. But all that effort pales in comparison to trying to persuade manufacturers and carriers to opt for an unproven OS with barely a reference implementation, as well as actually developing such OS.
>2) For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default. They're going to downloads apps for things their phone doesn't already do; for webpages, it already has an app for that. Android Browser is the "Blue e" here.
And yet Firefox, for a period of time, had trumped IE on Windows. And of course, Chrome trumps IE on Windows today.
Besides, the "age of the OS" doesn't matter -- the age of the users does, and younger users tend to be even more savvy and favorable of third party browsers.
Microsoft dropped the ball so badly in the IE6 days that the difference between IE and Firefox was enormous, in terms of performance, stability, and features.
Android's browser was never in a position quite that bad.
Yet Firefox had pretty good success competing with ie on Windows. I think they should have been able to replicate that success competing with the android browser.
That's because IE on Windows was shit, much worse so than the Android browsers, and everyone who used Windows had that exact same shit browser. On Android, you'll have some people with a bare bones AOSP browser, some with something their vendor came up with, some with Chrome, some with another third-party browser (Opera Mini, anyone?), so they may not all be using shit.
> For a comparatively new OS (Android is ~10 years old, modern Desktop OSes being 30+) people browsing the web directly are going to stick to the default.
I disagree, which is why I cited Chrome for Android as an example. It was not the default for a while (a couple of years at least?) but was still fairly popular. I remember doing webdev at the time and getting bug reports for Chrome. I also have received bug reports for Chrome for iOS.
I agree that it's hard to beat a good default, but the original Android Browser was so bad that it opened the door for competition.
When I was working on Opera, the reasons you stated above were also considered as the reason of the quick shrinkage of Opera’s market share at mobile, which eventually brought Opera to its downfall.
Firefox is at a similar position here because on mobile nobody cares about a browser with slightly more functionalities than the builtin one.
The built in WebKit engine was perhaps a bit out there, but besides Mozilla there was also Opera who had been doing mobile browsing for quite some time (Opera Mobile originated on Windows PocketPC).
Yup, but the surge of iOS and Android quickly brought that to an end, there is almost no OEM deals at mobile. (Still exists at TV/Set-top boxes, but those are not nearly as popular.)
I have this same deep-seated fear around the online advertising business and the content it has supported for over two decades. We've gone from print to online ad dollars over the years and we've watched many print pubs fold.
Meanwhile, the online ad dollars never paid for the remaining staff/product left behind to maintain web sites, so slowly those online entities have been shrinking to skeleton crews, too, or deploying beyond panicky revenue models that no user wants to endure, making matters even worse.
So, for 20 years now, it's been a constant zigzagging journey for publishers. Page impressions, lead generation, rich media (e.g video), 'viewable' ads...
And in 2 years it will be "the next big thing", all the while more and more pubs shutter their doors and content continues to be narrowly focused, delivered by social.
Hell, not just the publishers fading out... I'm seriously worried about how this content evolution is affecting our personal biases and cognitive abilities.
I have a feeling that behavior played a (small?) role when the EU decided to fine Google for abusing their market position to pressure themselves into the shopping comparison market - they saw what happened the last time Google did that.
Chrome team wasn't actually that big when they launched; IIRC they got their Founder's Award soon after I started at Google and all the team member names fit on 2 PowerPoint (well, actually Google Presentation) slides. This was almost 2 years after they had launched for internal dogfooding, so the initial team was likely quite a bit smaller.
I would chalk it up to the massive amount of experience among the early team members. Chrome was started by ex-Firefox people. The initial tech lead for Chrome, Ben Goodger, was the former tech lead for Firefox. Chrome Extensions were developed by the guy who invented GreaseMonkey. V8 was designed & led by Lars Bak, a veteran of Beta, Self, StrongTalk, and eventually tech lead of Java HotSpot. Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.
Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.
Edit: I found a full list of team members and description of their background from a blog post at launch:
It really was about 20 people, and they all have extensive resumes working on products like Firefox, HotSpot, GMail, Google Gears, or other Google products.
> Google literally hired all of the world experts in the technologies involved and had them put together a new browser.
> Rather than Chrome being the story of huge resources, I see Chrome as an example of what a small team of highly-skilled, highly-motivated experts can do.
I think this is a false dichotomy; the huge resources are what allowed them to hire all of those experts.
Actually, at $100k/yr per team member even Mozilla could afford such a team several times over. At least one if several of them of talent level nostrademons described were made ridiculous-good offers. :)
It appears it was management and/or politics that stopped other companies from doing what Google did.
Mozilla had around $7-8 million in profit last I looked. Currently over $9 million. They could still afford them at $250k each. Such a project would've even been worth most or all of a year's profit. Fortunately, they're doing Quantum to improve things. :)
Revenue is the important number to look at - Wikipedia has it at $329.5M as of 2014. Profit is after salaries - when all the early Firefox people left, they were replaced by other programmers, who probably cost a bit less but not a whole lot. I think tsunamifury's estimate of $500K-1M minimum isn't out of line, but even then, a team of 20 people making $1M fully-loaded costs $20M, which isn't exorbitant. Mozilla's revenue was estimated at $57M in 2006.
Chrome was already on a hockey-stick growth curve before the distribution deals started. I remember being in the TGIF where their Founder's Award was announced and one of the questions was "Isn't it a bit premature to give them this award?" (it was 8 months after launch, the Mac version wasn't out yet, and they had about 5% market share) and Larry pointed to the growth chart and said "They've already won, the rest of the world just doesn't know it yet."
I'd actually switched over to Chrome before joining Google, and told all my family to switch, and it was apparent at launch that it was just a better browser. Once you're at the point where your users tell their friends to switch to your product, there's basically nothing your competition can do to stop you other than massively improve their own product, because you're getting large and exponentially-growing amounts of free advertising.
You can start by letting them do their jobs. From TFA:
"The process involved coming up with an idea, presenting it and getting approval to run with it. You would then repeat this approval process at various stages during development. It was, however, very hard to get approval for enough resources (both time and people) to finesse an idea long enough to make it obviously a good or bad idea. That aside, I found it very demoralising to not have the opportunity to write code that people could use."
The early Chrome people indicated a similar frustration with upper management once Firefox got popular.
If you want a clear demonstration of the management clusterfuck that is Mozilla, see http://arewereorganizedyet.com/ The average time between reorgs in Mozilla is something like three to four weeks.
It's really not clear to me what definition of "reorg" is being used here, given those dates. The only one that might plausibly fit is "any change in the management structure, anywhere in the organization" to give you that frequency. As in, to get this frequency you have to count "a manager has too many reports, so another one was hired to take part of the load" as a "reorg".
That's fair, though it does seem like a fair number of people at Mozilla don't actually know what their reporting chain is nowadays yet alone who needs to approve any expense.
I'm not sure why people wouldn't know their reporting chain. It's in the company "phonebook": search for yourself, then follow the "Manager" links...
Expense approval is less clear, because it's not obvious which things your immediate manager can approve and which need to be kicked higher up the chain. But in my experience asking your manager works pretty well. It's possibly I've been lucky with managers.
All I can say is that this is not universal. My colleagues in Research and I have been able to pursue longer-term research directions at Mozilla that are now successful and which, frankly, most other companies would have shut down long ago for not having enough short-term value.
Yes, it's from the part of TFA article about developing IoT devices. Also in TFA is the author describing their time working on Firefox Mobile and later Firefox OS in glowing terms.
The Chrome team wasn't that big (though not that small either, in the grand scheme of things), but the marketing spend on Chrome was massive. Way more than Mozilla could ever have afforded for Firefox.
And for a number of years now, Chrome has had both a huge team _and_ huge marketing spend.
Firefox succeeded because the only other option at the time was IE6 and Firefox was far superior to IE6, especially among developers. It was Firefox that first gave us developer tools. Do you remember web development in the days before developer tools?
The web also nurtured the GNU/Linux server. Apache on Linux slaughtered IIS on Windows and itself got killed by Nginx on Linux in turn. The web giveth, the web taketh away...
The majority of web stacks, regardless of language, run on Linux.
ISP providers choose GNU/Linux because one cannot argue against free (gratis) that works good enough.
All the programming languages I care and use for web applications have zero dependencies on OS specific APIs, some of which I can even run bare metal or on an unikernel, with zero code changes.
The cloud concept, Web APIs and serverless executions, the OS of server running my web application is irrelevant, thanks to rich runtimes.
As for Apache and IIS, they are pretty much alive outside HN bubble.
The web, specifically Electron, is why I can run a bunch of modern applications on my Linux desktop and I don't have to switch to another OS to use eg. Discord.
To me, Mozilla jumped the shark when they did not take a principled stance against web DRM. At that point, to me, their raison d'être of advocating the open web was meaningless, since today, in contrast of when they started, the most popular browser is an open-source product anyway and there is a relatively healthy ecosystem of decentralized power across commercial companies in place to check and balance each other. The place where it breaks and a non-profit model would have been helpful was pushing back on DRM, but Mozilla chose to play along sacrificing its principles for popularity as any other commercial entity would.
This is why people like Richard Stallman who don't compromise on principles are critically important.
They did take that kind of principled stand and it hurt them. Firefox was late to support H.264 for that reason and users reacted by switching to Chrome where videos Just Worked. Mozilla resisted EME but that didn't delay DRM in any way, it just meant that everyone kept using Flash/Silverlight DRM or switched to a browser which didn't require them to install plugins to play video.
Getting users to make decisions in favor of openness is an unsolved problem and it's why Richard Stallman, while laudable for acting on principle, has increasingly little impact. Rather than hectoring Mozilla for not committing suicide, your efforts should be directed to figuring out how to get ordinary people to make different buying decisions so groups like Mozilla aren't faced with the decision between standing up for principles and having users.
Mozilla did take a principled stand against DRM. It proposed an alternative to EME that involved watermarking content rather than client-side DRM. But the combination of Google, Microsoft, and Netflix was enough to win over the W3C, and by the time that the developer community at large finally got up in arms about it (late 2012, early 2013) it was already too late to change course; by that point, Chrome was already shipping EME for use with Netflix. The tragedy is that Mozilla did try, and nobody cared. And, frankly, even if they had cared, I don't think any amount of dev outrage would actually counter such an influential industry consortium (but maybe I'm just cynical).
> And, frankly, even if they had cared, I don't think any amount of dev outrage would actually counter such an influential industry consortium (but maybe I'm just cynical).
I don't think the industry consortium is really even that relevant here; it was proposed to the W3C in Feb 2012 jointly by Google, Microsoft, and Netflix, and already had a fairly well fleshed out proposal. It was shipped in Chrome, with Netflix supporting it, little over a year later. I'm fairly certain those three companies would've gone ahead with it regardless of what the outcome of the W3C proposal was.
Let's be honest here, though. You're not the target market if you're willing to change browsers on philosophical principle.
Principles are fine and dandy until you have to commit suicide to maintain them. Given the good Mozilla does as a going concern, becoming "that one weird browser that can't play your videos" would just result in more people using Chrome and Edge.
This kinda reminds me of the GCC/Clang thing. If I recall right, Clang got a huge influx of attention, in part, due to Stallman's unwillingness to allow GCC to export its AST.
Perhaps we need a rule for this. "The tech community interprets developer obstinance as damage, and routes around it."
"This kinda reminds me of the GCC/Clang thing. If I recall right, Clang got a huge influx of attention, in part, due to Stallman's unwillingness to allow GCC to export its AST.
"
For me it was declaring they'd build in an ad blocker, then backtrqcking. Mozilla's positioning was that of "best interests of the user". This double take exposed them that they were for advertisers first and foremost.
This. So much this, I felt like Mozilla's fall along with their increased marketing push a few years ago about "being open" and "values driven". Don't get me wrong, I think people should speak loudly about that, but for them it seemed to become propaganda to compensate their lack of real values-oriented action. This was multiple encounters and touch points that I saw/experienced over a few years, so sad.
'Hug of death' isn't saying it's an attack/DDOS. It's equivalent to your suggestion of 'slashdotted' but probably a much more frequently used and relevant term.
The author's remarks about FirefoxOS actually mirror my own perspective as an outsider. It was a beautifully-made product that felt mismanaged and somewhat unfocused. It was definitely prematurely killed just as it was coming into its own.
I'm sore about it too. I had one of the original phones and I loved it. It was simple and elegant. The author mentioned something about spending too much time copying Android. That was definitely misplaced effort. Why not spend the time making something original? IMO, Mozilla spends too much time in general copying others. Look at the Firefox browser. It seems more and more like Chrome every release. I much preferred the original Firefox.
They should've just made the phone boot directly into the browser, and then focus all energy on making the browser better. One app. No screens, widgets, dialer, anything. Add all of that as open web APIs as users demand them. Don't bother with UI beyond proof of concept, let the web optimize it.
You sacrifice the best things about a web OS if you wrap it in a traditional OS UI.
The implication that "a web OS" is what people want raises some question marks. I use the web a lot on my phone--for reading documents. I use applications for interacting with services because, still (and this is years after FirefoxOS), the experience of using a mobile web app, especially for integrating with hardware, is awful. There may be something of a chicken-and-the-egg problem here, but at the same time--if it's awful, it's awful, and so going towards real applications is the only thing that makes sense unless you want to make devices that are awful. Nobody wants to make devices that are awful.
Letting "the web optimize" your dialer, though, is perhaps the most dangerous idea I've heard in a while. Core applications under no circumstances should be optimized by the web because that's how you get malware masquerading as those core applications. No bueno.
That's just the point. Every mobile platform that come out has tried to tell the "you don't need native apps you can build web apps story" at some point besides Android.
Instead of web apps, Google stuck the world with a sub optimal Java implementation that they spent years trying to optimize.
They are chasing market share, they used to have the goal of being the best preforming, most customizable, and most secure/private browser... The market share came with all those things.
Today they see Google Dominating because of Pure marketing, so they want to chase that dragon... They are killing everything Mozilla stood for in the process.
FirefoxOS should have competed against ChromeOS, not Android and iOS. Over time, as the product grow in popularity and web technologies become more capable, then you can introduce a mobile variant of the OS if it make sense to do so.
Chromebooks are great devices for a lot of people who simply don't need a full operating system. Look at how Chromebooks are successful in (US) schools. This is the perfect market for Mozilla.
I went to my public library the other day and they have computers to search for books, find info, etc, and the computers run Windows, but the actual app they use is browser based (IE)! Unbelievable. Mozilla could have the perfect product for them.
My biggest gripe about Firefox OS was that Mozilla partnered with companies making low end phones that were quite awful even for that time. At that time, I felt that if it were released with high end or near high end hardware, the overall user experience would've have been much better and there would've been more freedom for Mozilla to focus on the important things. It could've then percolated down to cheaper/low end hardware with a separate "make Firefox OS lean" program. Trying to compete with Android on devices that were underpowered, in my view, killed all prospects of it surviving.
"We're an open platform, unlike an Android"? "We don't rat you to the CIA, unlike Android"? "Our apps are all-js"? I wonder whether Mozilla could have not partnered at all and targeted a stock Android phone?
None of those are selling points to customers, though (well, perhaps the CIA one, but even then, most don't care). A manufacturer wouldn't take on a Firefox phone for those reasons, it needed a compelling consumer selling point, and it didn't have one.
FirefoxOS was primarily marketed at third-world consumers (who are literally in the billions). Third world consumers purchase $10 smartphones, not $400 smartphones, because they don't have that much money.
I've got two Firefox OS phones, and was very excited at first, but when I was no longer getting updates I felt where this was going to.
One of the phones, orange, I think the first or second model, is still in use. My wife now uses it on our annual trip to home country, and it still works fine as a phone. It's somewhat safer to use it, than the iPhone she has here in US - simply for not being stolen. It works just fine years after development. Most surprisingly though... the battery life was at 50%, a year after we haven't used it. (unless my son secretly charged it, and used it...)
I kind of wish for Firefox OS to come back. I liked the idea of apps being web apps, though it was a bit blurry what's downloaded and what's not, but with today's prevalent mobile internet that should not be a big deal (just a bit more pricey)
See http://kaiostech.com/. B2G lives, for now -- the "G" (for Gecko) part is not likely to last. Blonk, not Gonk, coming, I hope with Muon (https://github.com/brave/muon/) included, but the "Muonk" name goes too far ;-).
Mozilla isn't Google or Microsoft. They can't afford to spread their focus, and resources, so widely that effective focus on any particular area is degraded.
Clearly they can. Google especially likes throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks. Whether or not their brand can afford the failures, is another question, but from a financial standpoint, they're much better equipped to weather a failure than Mozilla is.
I'd put the start date of the "throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks" era at 2004 and end date in late 2010 or early 2011, basically when Larry became CEO again. I started in 2009 and we were still very much encouraged to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. It continued, for me personally, until early 2013, but I suspect that company policy changed around early 2011 and it just took 2 years for the memo to filter down my management chain. (I worked in one of the oldest and most experimental departments, Search, and a bunch of my management chain was pre-IPO and so had a lot of latitude with what they did.)
As an aside, I have found Firefox on Android to work fine as long as the device is relatively pristine. But quickly deteriorates in performance and responsiveness as internal storage fills up etc. This while webit/blink based browsers seems to behave fine under the same conditions.
Firefox works fine on my low-spec pre-paid Android phone that I purchased for $50 a year ago. And the storage space on that phone just got filled up recently and I haven't noticed slow downs...
I personally use firefox as my mobile browser. Native add-on support (adblocker, anti-adblockers, anti-tracking, paywall bypasses) are of a huge value to me.
I like the consistent experience between the desktop and mobile versions - eliminating the need to download dedicated apps for each adblock-like service you want on your phone and the dependencies that come with it (root etc).
I can empathize with the author on wanting to leave when not feeling like an essential part of a team. Personally, I like coding and designing, and definitely I like being part of a team and working towards a goal. But for all the dev managers out there: try to inoculate some form of ownership, so that your devs feel a sense of belonging.
Its not so much that I actively seek to leave when that happens as much as I become more receptive to other opportunities. And recruiters and other companies are very good at luring candidates, so it all adds up.
wow, the are way too many toxic teams at Mozilla :(
I'd expect the company to be pretty democratic. but every month you hear a story like that.
specially shocking:
"What business a not-for-profit company, based primarily on doing open-source, web-based engineering has making physical, commercial products is questionable, but it failed long before that could be considered." ...and that was right after their failed mobile phone line failure!
I guess one of the problems of Mozilla (as a not-for-profit company and with current trend on social media behavior) is that every single person working there feels entitled to criticize the strategy, just like what happens today in polítics.
Because for a software developer/designer to criticize a strategy they must have some skills that most of the time they don't, so their critics are most probably wrong (at least most of the times, for obvious 101 statistics), but their own ignorance don't let them see it and then they jeopardize their chief strategy :)
And the same happens in politics and economy: everybody also thinks that been a citizen makes then elected to say how the economy and the politics should be lead. But their efforts stops there, in talking. No hands on works, neither in politics, neither in the company they are complaining. Mostly because as they don't know the core business that much, they can't get the big picture and start thinking in a binary way.
Depends on who's doing it. In the abstract, everyone has a "right" to speak their mind, and everybody else has a "right" to ignore them. But that gets you nowhere. IMHO Unless you've done something that makes your opinion worth something, you should be focused on proving yourself.
Mozilla people for some reason feel they can criticize their own company publicly.
That just isn't done elsewhere. You criticize internally and form a front to the outside. Meanwhile, Mozilla employees cry for their own CEO to be fired. That's just insane and wouldn't fly elsewhere.
Mozilla has never run under the model of a traditional closed-walls corporation, at least with respect to personnel.
It's first and foremost an open-source community, and some people are paid by Mozilla Corp. or Mozilla Foundation to dedicate their entire working time to that community. Allowing open dissent has always been one of the community values, so long as it's otherwise respectful.
At least as of a couple of years ago when I left, there were no internal guidelines above and beyond these.
Socially, of course, you could shoot yourself in the foot just like anywhere else, but we did enjoy a great deal of intellectual freedom and were expected to be vocal if we thought something should be different. I can't possibly view that as a bad thing.
The Eich situation was and still is touchy, and I won't go much deeper into that other than to echo Fabrice's comment that it was originally driven by a handful of Foundation employees that weren't part of his company (Mozilla Corporation is a different corporate entity than Mozilla Foundation) and to add that within Corp there was a diverse range of opinions, both privately and publicly expressed.
As for "wouldn't fly elsewhere," there's never been any particular ethical reason why an employee shouldn't publicly speak their mind short of spilling trade secrets. The reason has always been fear of being fired. Influence via fear has some pretty sharp downsides, and I'm happy to see the current trend of people submitting to it less.
>I'm happy to see the current trend of people submitting to it less.
How so? I think most people have gotten the memo that if you want to keep your job you will toe the line and only say things that couldn't possibly offend anyone. Not only did influence via fear win, it has become so entrenched that it isn't even visible anymore.
Blurring the line between internal and external discussion in this is silly. You should be free to speak up internally and having fear there is detrimental.
But hanging internal disagreements out for the competition? Stupid. There's no upsides.
there's never been any particular ethical reason why an employee shouldn't publicly speak their mind short of spilling trade secrets
It's not about ethics. The public perception of a company matters. Hanging internal disagreements out there does not help so you're just hurting yourself.
Hi, I was harsh on your other reply -- too harsh. Sorry.
Here, I totally agree. Mozilla grew a dysfunctional pattern of participants (more likely to be employees than not in my experience, but Mozilla hired most of the active contributors) stabbing projects, individuals, and other sub-groups in the back, under cover of "being open". This was inevitable given the framing in the "open vs. transparent" document:
Even now, Mozilla punches itself in the face too often, with punchers (and sometimes punchees!) claiming it's all for the best.
Taking care to give colleagues a chance to interact over a nascent or less-than-clear technical controversy, before blogging or tweeting, is not being "closed". It is standard peer review with scalability via layers-of-the-onion socializing combined with the "hermeneutic spiral".
Shooting first, fast, and in public in a large community with competitors and press listening is "open" in a vacuous sense, but it has the downside risks you note.
I think it was already deeply entrenched so there's not much moving backwards there to be had. Over the last couple of years, I've seen a lot more employees coming out of the woodwork in the face of ethical and, sometimes, technological issues.
Maybe it's optimistic confirmation bias, but it sure seems like people are less afraid to speak publicly online.
You did claim otherwise. You wrote just above that "Meanwhile, Mozilla employees cry for their own CEO to be fired."
Mozilla Corporation (of which I was CEO) was the subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, not vice versa. So in no case were those few Mozilla Foundation employees who tweeted against me, the people who had me as "their own CEO".
Are you stupid, or dishonest? Pick one. Your posts are BS, and crucial logical contradictions are not "nuance".
Our plan then (while we were still at Mozilla), and my advice now, is to avoid blind trust. Use systems where you can both trust and verify that your data is not being secretly surveilled.
The worst part of the current tech-environment is that companies are dead years before they even know it. The next platform is already tearing apart your current one, while its in its infancy. And the entrenched players in the next space will be incredibly hard to unseat.
By the time you recognize the threat, attempt to turn the ship to respond, you are already deep down aware that there is very little chance of a happy ending. This results in convoluted late-stage product strategies that have 3+ directions since management knows no single one of them are viable.
This is a deeply uncomfortable truth that keeps me up at night.