Mozilla recently announced that it’d be laying off a quarter of its workforce. This also includes a “new focus on technology” and “a new focus on economics”.
The Verge’s article has the Mozilla Corp CEO say “… Mozilla will initially focus on products such as Pocket, its VPN service, its VR chatroom Hubs, and new “security and privacy” tools.”, although I cannot find that in the blog post she authored.
In the original blog post, the CEO stated that Mozilla’s long-term goal was “to build new experiences that people love and want, that have better values and better characteristics inside those products.”, which is neither here nor there.
I think Mozilla has a huge opportunity here, but its vision, at least as articulated publicly, is not broad enough.
The opportunity I see is the following: there is a growing section of people who have become aware, through increased press coverage, of the dominance of a few american internet companies and their own dependence on these companies [1]. They aren’t going to be Stallman-like in their use of technology any time soon – the trade off is far too unfavourable – but they are looking for reasonable alternatives and are willing to pay for them. Baker the CEO has said exactly this, that Mozilla plans to “build and invest in products and services that will give people alternatives to conventional Big Tech.”
Well to begin with, Mozilla should create a set of paid privacy-oriented products that anyone can setup on their phone to attain a basic level of privacy protection: the Firefox browser (exists), a VPN (available in a small set of countries), an DNS-sinkhole adblocker, a password manager and a second-factor authenticator app. They’ll need great documentation and guides about how to set this up – in this regard the Mozilla community is a great asset.
[1] See the reporter Kashmir Hill’s 2019 attempt to go a month and a half without services from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft.
(Part 2 – It gets even bigger)