Just a reminder that Mozilla was able to pull of an unbelievably good deal with Yahoo thanks to Marissa Mayer in November 2014, which made Mozilla winning the lottery in case Yahoo was sold afterwards before 2019.
Yahoo was sold to Verizon shortly after the deal which made it possible for Mozilla to pull out of the deal unilaterally, and still getting a yearly payment until 2019 ($375 Million fixed annually, to be exact).
Please tell me: Who makes a 4 year fixed deal with a browser maker that is losing 10-15% of its users annually? It does not make any sense for Mayer to do this, except if she was completely on the side of Mozilla.
My personal theory is that this free money until the end of 2019 has created a culture of passivity and laziness inside the Mozilla management.
It is hard to overstate the deal with Yahoo. It makes Mozilla basically immune to drops in market share until 2020. The deal with switching to the Yahoo search engine (starting in 2016) was already too good to be true, as Yahoo gave Mozilla way more money than Google had done before, and Google was already paying well.
The result is that for around 3 or more years now Mozilla is living inside a bubble, where basically nothing what they do has financial consequences.
Not only that, they are building up enourmous amounts of financial reserves, so I think we will actually never again see Firefox innovating.
When the finances finally will reflect the state of Firefox, that is when they have used up their reserves somewhere in 2021 or 2022, Firefox won't play an active role anymore. Most of the 1000+ employees will have to leave during the next 5 years.
Mozilla switched back to Google with the aim of getting both the Yahoo money and additional Google money.
- vanityfair.com/news/2017/12/the-ghost-of-marissa-mayer-is-still-haunting-yahoo
- techcrunch.com/2017/12/06/oath-and-mozilla-are-suing-each-other-after-firefox-switches-back-to-google-search/