On this day (or near it) in 2015, I joined the Mozilla project by starting work as a full-time employee of Mozilla Corporation. I’m two hardware refreshes in (I was bad for doing them on time, leaving my 2017 refresh until 2018 and my 2020 refresh until 2022! (though, admittedly, the 2020 refresh was actually pushed to the end of 2021 by a policy change in early 2020 moving from 2-year to 3-year refreshes)) and facing a third in February. Organizationally, I’m three CEOs and sixty reorgs in.

I’m still working on Data, same as last year. And I’m still trying to move Firefox Desktop to use solely Glean for its data collection system. Some of my predictions from last year’s moziversary post came true: I continued working on client code in Firefox Desktop, I hardly blogged at all, we continue to support collections in all of Legacy Telemetry’s systems (though we’ve excitingly just removed some big APIs), Glean has continued to gain ground in Firefox Desktop (we’re up to 4134 metrics at time of writing), and “FOG Migration” has continued to not happen (I suppose it was one missed prediction that top-down guidance would change — it hasn’t, but interpretations of it sure have), and I’m publishing this moziversary blog post a little ahead of my moziversary instead of after it.

My biggest missed prediction was “We will quietly stop talking about AI so much, in the same way most firms have stopped talking about Web3 this year”. Mozilla, both Corporation and Foundation, seem unable to stop talking about AI (a phrase here meaning “large generative models built on extractive data mining which use chatbot UI”). Which, I mean, fair: it’s consuming basically all the oxygen and money in the industry at the moment. We have to have a position on it, and it’s appropriating “Open” language that Mozilla has a vested interest in protecting (though you’d be excused for forgetting that given how little we’ve tried to work with the FSF and assorted other orgs trying to shepherd the ideas and values of Open Source in the recent past). But we’ve for some reason been building products around these chatbots without interrogating whether that’s a good thing.

And you’d think with all our worry about what a definition of Open Source might mean, we’d make certain to only release products that are Open Source. But no.

I understand why we’re diving into products and trying to release innovative things in product shape… but Mozilla is famously terrible at building products. We’re okay at building services (I’m a fan of both Monitor and Relay). But where we seem to truly excel is in building platforms and infrastructure.

We build Firefox, the only independent browser, a train that runs on the rails of the Web. We build Common Voice, a community and platform for getting underserved languages (where which languages are used is determined by the community) the support they need. We built Rust, a memory-safe systems language that is now succeeding without Mozilla’s help. We built Hubs, a platform for bringing people together in virtual space with nothing but a web browser.

We’re just so much better at platforms and infrastructure. Why we don’t lean more into that, I don’t know.

Well, I _do_ know. Or I can guess. Our golden goose might be cooked.

How can Mozilla make money if our search deal becomes illegal? Maintaining a browser is expensive. Hosting services is expensive. Keeping the tech giants on their toes and compelling them to be better is expensive. We need money, and we’ve learned that there is no world where donations will be enough to fund even just the necessary work let alone any innovations we might try.

How do you monetize a platform? How do you monetize infrastructure?

Governments do it through taxation and funding. But Mozilla Corporation isn’t a government agency. It’s a conventional Silicon Valley private capital corporation (its relationship to Mozilla Foundation is unconventional, true, but I argue that’s irrelevant to how MoCo organizes itself these days). And the only process by which Silicon Valley seems to understand how to extract money to pay off their venture capitalists is products and consumers.

Now, Mozilla Corporation doesn’t have venture capital. You can read in the State of Mozilla that we operate at a profit each and every year with net assets valued at over a billion USD. But the environment in which MoCo operates — the place from which we hire our C-Suite, the place where the people writing the checks live — is saturated in venture capital and the ways of thinking it encourages.

This means Mozilla Corporation acts like its Bay Area peers, even though it’s special. Even though it doesn’t have to.

This means it does layoffs even when it doesn’t need to. Even when there’s no shareholders or fund managers to impress.

This means it increasingly speaks in terms of products and customers instead of projects and users.

This means it quickly loses sight of anything specifically Mozilla-ish about Mozilla (like the community that underpins specific systems crucial to us continuing to exist (support and l10n for two examples) as well as the general systems of word-of-mouth and keeping Mozilla and Firefox relevant enough that tech press keep writing about us and grandpas keep installing us) because it doesn’t fit the patterns of thought that developed while directing leveraged capital.

(( Which I don’t like, if my tone isn’t coming across clearly enough for you to have guessed. ))

Okay, that’s more than enough editorial for a Moziversary post. Let’s get to the predictions for the next year:

• I still won’t blog as much as I’d like,
• “FOG Migration” might actually happen! We’ve finally managed to convince Firefox folks just how great Glean is and they might actually commit official resources! I predict that we’re still sending Legacy Telemetry by the end of next year, but only bits and pieces. A weak shadow of what we send today.
• There’ll be an All Hands, but depending on the result of the US federal election in November I might not attend because its location has been announced as Washington DC and I don’t know if the United States will be in a state next year to be trusted to keep me safe,
• We will stop putting AI in everything and hoping to accidentally make a product that’ll somehow make money and instead focus on finding problems Mozilla can solve and only then interrogating whether AI will help
• The search for the new CEO will not have completed by next October so I’ll still be three CEOs in, instead of four
• I will execute on my hardware refresh on time this February, and maybe also get a new monitor so I’m not using my personal one for work.

Let’s see how it goes! Til next time.

:chutten

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#anniversary #mozilla #thisWouldBeThePotteryOrCopperAnniversaryIfThisWasAMarriage #work #yearOfGleanOnTheDesktop

Eight-Year Moziversary

At the end of my post for my seven-year moziversary, I made some predictions about what was to be and now has been the next year of work. And I got them pretty spot-on: Predictions for the next yea…

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