Mozilla has announced major staff cuts and the closure of its Taipei, Taiwan office. Approximately 250 employees will be laid offs of the company and approximately 60 employees will be transferred to other teams.
Since the company employs approximately 900 people, the layoffs will affect approximately 30% of the workforce. The key reason for the reduction is the desire to stay afloat amid the crisis caused by the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Mozilla CEO, Mitchell Baker announced the layoffs in a blog post, within hours of notifying affected employees.
Baker, who became CEO in April, explained that Mozilla was struggling to adapt its finances to a post-COVID-19 world and that it was trying to refocus on new and more profitable business services.
Mozilla tried to minimize the financial impact of the pandemic with "immediate cost-saving measures, such as stopping our hiring, reducing our wellness stipend, and canceling our meetings for everyone," Baker said.
But that was not enough, and the nonprofit organization has taken the drastic step of reducing its workforce by about a third.
"We've talked about the need for change, including the likelihood of layoffs, since the spring," Baker said. "Today these changes become real."
In addition to the layoffs, Mozilla to close its operations in Taipei, Taiwan, and will transfer 60 workers to new teams.
Of the layoffs, these hits the entire threat management team who is dedicated to the identification and analysis of incidents, as well as being part of a security team.
Layoffs hurt Mozilla's research team, who was developing the Servo motor written in the Rust language and also this includes all the employees of the MDN team (Mozilla Developer Network) who have also been fired.
It is observed that realizing the importance of the old model, which implies the dissemination of free services, under current conditions the company is forced to start looking for other business opportunities and alternative values.
It remains to develop a business model that allows an optimal balance to be achieved between social and public benefits and business profit opportunities.
One of the areas you will focus on the company is the development of new products that will generate additional sources of income.
Firstly, It is planned to invest in services such as Pocket, VPN, hubs, Web Assembly, in addition to products related to security and privacy protection. Additionally, new design and user experience teams and machine learning teams will be created to support these products.
Firefox will continue to be the flagship product, but its development focus on user experience, at the cost of reducing investment in features such as web development tools, internal tools and platform improvements.
The related security and privacy capabilities will be transferred to the "product and operations team" responsible for new product development. Likewise, the company's interaction methods with the community will be reviewed, aimed at a more active attraction of volunteers.
Mozilla's problem is simple: it's not making as much money as it used to. Its main source of income is derived from its open source Firefox browser, which was once the most popular on the Internet. In 2011, Mozilla signed a $ 300 million a year deal with Google LLC to make its search engine the default in Firefox.
However the declining popularity of the browser means that companies like Google are no longer willing to divest of so much cash. In 2017, 11% of all Internet users were using Firefox, but that number has dropped to less than 4%, according to statistics from the US government's Digital Analytics Program.
Finally, if you want to know more about the news, you can check the details of the announcement in the original publication. The link is this.