It's worth noting that in 2015 Mozilla negotiated a deal with Yahoo netting them an additional $100+ million a year. It makes sense that in 2016 the board would see a significant raise for however long their next contract is. I doubt this trend continues after 2018, when the sale of Yahoo saw a huge drop in revenue. They likely should have judged more on market share, but it's a fairly understandable move.
Also, that huge spike on the chart was roughly $4.5 million of the over $100 million in increased revenue.
> in 2015 Mozilla negotiated a deal with Yahoo netting them an additional $100+ million
... after spending years saying that the relationship with Google regarding search royalties was a serendipitous one that involved getting paid for a decision that was the right thing for users whether money was changing hands or not, and that the default search engine spot wasn't actually for sell.
That lie is not unlike their carefully crafted PR statements that were intended to mislead people about the financial arrangement regarding the Pocket partnership. Those efforts turned out to be so successful that they hoodwinked many of Mozilla Corporation's own employees—who interpreted the statements to mean that there was no financial incentive, just as it was intended to be interpreted by the general public. Then those employees began showing up on places like HN and started saying explicitly that there was no money changing hands, even though that's not what the PR statements ever said and reality actually differed.
>after spending years saying that the relationship with Google regarding search royalties was a serendipitous one that involved getting paid for a decision that was the right thing for users whether money was changing hands or not, and that the default search engine spot wasn't actually for sell.
What? The default search engine is unambiguously for sale, that's what Google (and other companies depending on your country) are buying. And it was the right decision to sell it to the highest bidder to fund development, when Yahoo bid more than Google they sold it to Yahoo.
I genuinely have no idea what point you are trying to make.
> I genuinely have no idea what point you are trying to make.
The point, as already stated, is that people who were official mouthpieces for Mozilla said for years that the default search engine simply wasn't up for sale to just whomever would pay for it. That it pointed to Google because Google's search engine was the best search engine for Firefox's users. Just like Google was the default search engine before Mozilla ever signed a deal. Just like Wikipedia was added to the searchbar without anyone paying to make it happen. That any royalties were icing on the cake. (See "serendipitous" in the previous comment). What's hard to understand about this or the earlier comment?
>is that people who were official mouthpieces for Mozilla said for years that the default search engine simply wasn't up for sale to just whomever would pay for it.
This is untrue. They openly stated they sold it to Google in 2008, and in 2011 a bidding war between Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo saw the price triple from 100 million to 300 million.[1]
Maybe at some point following a contract they had a generic "Google was the best choice" PR statement, but they've never hid that it was up for sale to whoever wanted it or that it made up most of their budget.
And even if they did say the royalties were icing on the cake, what would be wrong with then changing their policy to generate as much money for development as possible?
Look at your graph again. The usage dropped from 30% to 10% from 2010-2015, and 10% to 5% from 2015 to 2020. It doesn't seem clear that the staff had significantly raised the value of the product before the deal, and there is at least an argument to be made that the huge influx of cash stemmed the bleeding.
While I won't claim the leadership has been truly outstanding, I think the extreme criticism of their salary is unwarranted.
Pfft, please. The staff cuts are among the least offensive things done under the Mozilla name. Much more value was created earlier by unpaid volunteers who were rewarded by having their project hijacked by a Valley-inspired corporate mania concerned with breaking into the mobile market (with a strategy that would be generous to even refer to it as DOA). The size of staff at the time of the cuts is something that only came about because of the absurd growth of the corporation that has became the new face of Mozilla over the last 10 years. Mozilla is an incompetent, bloated organization in need of further cuts still. So it's hard to seriously consider the cuts to be either unfortunate or tragic, particularly given the obnoxious tendency of those on staff to "other" non-MoCo employees whose contributions and involvement predated the layer of corporate sleaze that has come to be emblematic of the modern day Mozilla. Should we feel sorry? The fact that we're even talking in terms of cuts and layoffs means that those affected at least got paid at some point for their role in Mozilla's descent.
The only bad thing about the layoffs is that Mozilla leadership was shitty enough to do it during the middle of a pandemic. At this point though, keep it coming. It's been a bittersweet experience watching the tide turn against Mozilla over the last year, as the popular perception of it has only just now begun to align with how unworthy of an organization it has been for years already.
Also, that huge spike on the chart was roughly $4.5 million of the over $100 million in increased revenue.