This comment on Hacker News, via Michael Tsai:
It was making 100s of millions of dollars per year from the default search provider deal, for over a decade. It could have saved most of that money, spending it only on 50 to 100 browser engineers. Branching out to MDN and websocket or webrtc libraries would also make sense. But the rest of the crap, the marketing, the rebranding, the Pocket purchase and integration, Firefox OS, the voice recognition and AI stuff (and notice the announcement, they’re keeping the AI division, really need that part apparently), stuff that nobody remembers, that’s all a waste of money that could be saved by the non-profit foundation to just support the low-level engine keeping the open web viable.
As we had seen earlier, no part of the Mozilla blog post announcing the layoffs and the new direction actually describes what the focus will be. It’s far too abstract, other than a reference to making more money. The future is no different than the past.