I have been directed towards this forum as the appropriate place to share a concern and request action.
Mozilla is currently appealing for donations on its Google homepage, even though we see that it had a net income (what commercial companies would call "Net Profit") of US$21.6 million in 2011 (source: Wikipedia), 600+ employees (source: Wikipedia) to develop its small handful of applications and a huge, expensive headquarters in the heart of silicon valley, just down the road from Google's HQ (source: Google Maps). I do not see the incentive for the Public to give private donations to an organisation with this kind of balance sheet, particularly in view of the other governance issues. Mozilla is often very slow to respond to the changing marketplace, in spite of the support and input from a large and supportive user base. The result is very clear: a fall of 28% in its own market share of its Flagship Firefox product in the past five years (source: gs.statcounter.com: 1-(Nov08 18.15/Nov13 25.23)). In purely anecdotal terms, almost all my IT colleagues have migrated to Google Chrome browser - event with significant privacy misgivings - because of features, speed and reliability. Mozilla's response to loss of market share seems to have been to throw all development resources at Firefox, and leave its other products to whither on the vine. Furthermore it seems to have taken for granted the immense dedication from add-on developers who have been in no small part responsible for Mozilla's early user-base and financial success. I offer this case as an example: Mozilla Thunderbird aimed to be an alternative to Microsoft Outlook. It could never hope to achieve that without the Calendar functionality provided by Lightning, and yet the maximum funding the project has ever received from Mozilla is a solitary developer, long since withdrawn. I hardly need to make the point that IT markets develop and the whole industry plays follow-my-leader in providing popular functionality. One of the effects of the rise of smart-phones and tablets is that importing .ics files to add calendar appointments has become a web standard. An application which users allow to open their .ics files wins a similar prize in their area to a browser accorded "Default Browser" status. But *seven years* after such a feature request was added, the absence even of Mozilla's support for the Lightning project means even the functionality itself is not even in the developers' shortlist. It's a poor state of affairs when an organisation fails to support the major pillars of its own success, throws all its magnificent resources at one product which continues to haemorrhage support for reasons migrating users are happy to provide; and then requests public donations to support a bloated and unresponsive organisation with no plan to meet their needs. Is there any willingness to address this issue? _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
