This article has many problems. One of the main problems is that the immediate reason for Firefox losing market share is totally outside the control of the CEO or anyone else at Mozilla: Google pouring billions into Chrome, both actual billions of dollars and similar resources "in kind", like free advertising on the world's most popular Web properties (i.e. Google's). The best CEO in the world can't magically come up with a strategy to counter that.
Another problem is that it's all very well to wish for an alternative revenue stream, but the reality is maintaining a competitive browser with an independent browser engine and the wraparound service regular users expect (accounts, updates, sync etc) costs hundreds of millions a year. Finding an alternative source for revenue like that is just really incredibly hard. Mozilla's been trying for a long time. Saying "Mozilla needs an alternative revenue stream" is just not helpful at all.
I don't agree that the reason that Firefox is losing market share is outside of the control of Mozilla. Most people seem who stop using Firefox seem to do so for concrete reasons within the control of Mozilla: speed (now perhaps a historical issue), compatibility with sites and user experience (the various controversial changes to the url bar over the years for example). These are all within the control of Mozilla.
I'm sure that marketing is an important point and it's true that Google can promote Chrome in many places. However Firefox gained considerable market share against internet explorer under (IMO) more difficult circumstances: it was pre-installed, Microsoft were considered as or more trustworthy by the public than Google now is and of course some sites could never work well with Firefox as they used proprietary features like ActiveX. Word of mouth is one of the primary reasons that browsers (other those that are pre-installed) are adopted and the word-of-mouth on Firefox has been poor relative to Chrome for some time.
Regarding speed: it's not that Firefox got slower, it's that Chrome set a new performance bar that Firefox had to meet --- and largely has met! Though a cost of meeting that performance bar was dropping XUL extensions, which is one of those changes that people still complain about.
Contribution to Mozilla's defeat of IE is one of the great accomplishments of my life, but having been there for both fights, the fight against Chrome definitely was much tougher. Microsoft took their eye off the ball and basically stopped working on IE for a few years, which gave Mozilla a huge opportunity; no such luck with Chrome. The complexity of Web sites has increased a lot which makes it much harder to keep up and surpass a more well-resourced browser.
The difference in resources between the companies obviously factors into product quality as well. The four-way focus of speed, security, compatibility with an evolving web spec, and extensibility is demanding to say the least.
> Finding an alternative source for revenue like that is just really incredibly hard. Mozilla's been trying for a long time.
What alternate revenue sources have they tried? Outside of their recent VPN offering, I haven't seen anything that they've tried to monetize. They didn't even try and monetize Firefox Send, even though the developers had a monetization strategy from the start.
Yes it's surprising given how many side-projects Mozilla have how few of them have been monetized given that you must assume they have a genuine interest in finding alternative funding.
I'm sure that a number of people would have been prepared to pay for Firefox Send. I know a lot of people who have trouble transferring files too large for email so it surprised me that putting a user interface around backblaze's object store api with Mozilla's brand on it could not be a profitable business.
Pocket was quickly rammed through. Mozilla denied getting paid for the integration. That baffled people who would've understood if it was about money. Mozilla eventually admitted getting paid for referrals. That upset people who felt Mozilla had lied to them.
Sponsored tiles kicked off with marketing drivel about transforming the user's content experience.[1] Addressing users first and being more honest might have worked better.
The Mr. Robot promotion silently installed an add-on with a cryptic name. People thought they'd been hacked. Mozilla denied getting money for it too.
Mozilla treated users like resources instead of stakeholders and lost their trust.
I think Mozilla should have worked on a cloud application suite, like Google and Microsoft have. And possibly they could have done a better job extending it into an ecosystem for other application providers. This is very natural for the company that invented javascript and is a leading contributor to web assembly. It also would have had excellent revenue potential.
I am trying to think what other role can use this excuse of factors out of my control and failure to move the top line metric (in fact moving the other direction) but yet rewarded with a 400% increase in pay
"As of June 2013, Nokia's mobile phone market share had fallen from 23% to 15%, their smartphone market share gone from 32.6% to 3.3%, and their stock value dropped by 85% since Elop's takeover."
"Controversy arose around Elop receiving a €18.8 million bonus after Nokia sold its mobile phone business to Microsoft and he stepped down as the CEO. The controversy was further fueled after it was revealed that his contract had been revised on the same day as the deal was announced."
But you can't write an article about the decline of Firefox market share during the rise of Chrome and blame it all on the CEO.
(Mitchell's only been CEO for a year or so, but it is true that she (and Brendan, before he left) were largely the powers behind the throne since the beginning of Mozilla.)
Another problem is that it's all very well to wish for an alternative revenue stream, but the reality is maintaining a competitive browser with an independent browser engine and the wraparound service regular users expect (accounts, updates, sync etc) costs hundreds of millions a year. Finding an alternative source for revenue like that is just really incredibly hard. Mozilla's been trying for a long time. Saying "Mozilla needs an alternative revenue stream" is just not helpful at all.