Comment by manquer
1 year ago
It will hurt but it won’t be their death.
They have been saving up a bit last year if you see the financial reports their reserves are just above $1B now and there are others who paid in the past (like Yahoo did till 2017) who will pay Firefox a decent amount if not like Google does .
My guess it is likely be Bing or probably a new generation AI company like OpenAI who will replace Google and perhaps even pay similar or close to what Google pays. The traffic is worth a lot. Bing attested to click flow as the reason they cannot make a better product in their testimony in this trial.
Also Google will either be allowed to continue the contract till its current end (I believe 1-2 more years ) or will pay fully and release Mozilla from their obligations (Mozilla is not party to the case so early termination without compensation would be penalty on them for no reason ).
Mozilla will need to make some significant cuts and layoffs no doubt will be hard on the team, but the product will survive.
They can start by reducing their CEO salary from check notes $6.9 million in 2022. It increased by millions in just a decade while their market share declined and they layed off hundreds.
Any other CEO in Silicon Valley with similar circumstances (25 years experience in tech leadership, increasing revenue dramatically despite shrinking market share, negotiating successfully with their biggest competitor, etc.) would be making $5M-$20M depending on stock compensation, which Mozilla does not offer. How does paying less than market rates for a CEO help improve Mozilla's lot?
Or are you suggesting that none of these CEOs should be compensated at current rates? If so, hate the game and not the player my friend.
Compensation is complicated and function of value added to the organization may not correlate to work put in. I have no opinion on what should be cut, just pointing out it won't the end of Mozilla without Google deal.
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For anyone who wants to know what the other side of the compensation discussion would go like..
One could argue though the Mozilla leadership has also more than quadrupled their revenue from $150M in 2011 to $690M in 2024, despite loosing market share, revenue generated from their only competitor no less. It isn't a easy job to convince your competitor to be your primary source of income to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars and keep increasing that every year.
Yes, Google is not funding the search deal out of the goodness of their hearts, but they also don't have to pay $500M+ per year to keep Mozilla alive if that is all they cared about.
Such a deal doesn't happen without a ton of work by Mozilla to build relationships, show value of paying 500M to Google etc.
If the leadership can no longer generate the growth/value they too will face the music sooner or later. Mozilla still would need competent people(this group or another) to be able make the deals to pivot to other revenue sources and they don't come cheap.
A for profit subsidiary of a non-profit in software world will always end up paying what looks like generous compensation perhaps even compared to the market for similar roles in pure for-profit companies, because unlike those companies, Mozilla cannot offer stock compensation on top of cash.