Hi all, Let's be perfectly clear here: the decision to integrate (and continue shipping) Pocket in Firefox did not, and does not, have anything to do with money. I can understand how people can fear the worst, so I'd like to set the record straight as much as I can.
On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 4:08 PM, Benjamin Kerensa <[email protected]> wrote: > Would you agree though that while you were not paid to integrate > that it was probably known that there was a revenue sharing deal > going into this and that roughly translates to incentivizing > the integration? > Frankly, I don't know if revenue sharing was widely discussed, but I would be somewhat surprised. I know that the focus of the Firefox team was entirely on getting a great feature into the product, and the idea to bundle Pocket instead of Reading List came from that product team. That we negotiated a revenue sharing arrangement was more about getting to share in what a for-profit entity would potentially gain from inclusion. (Much like our various search deals!) It wasn't a priority or driving factor at all. I'm sure someone on the Firefox Team didn't wake up one morning > and say "Great Scotts we are missing Pocket in Firefox!" and AFAIK > this was not on any long term roadmap. > If you look at the history (as Adam just linked), we'd been working on Reading List as a Firefox feature/service for months, with various pieces landed across products and deployed on our infrastructure, even shipped in a beta. There was considerable research that suggested that this was a core use-case for browser users that we were not meeting ourselves, which is why we were making significant investments into the feature. The decision to partner with Pocket instead of building our own service was a shift in strategy, based on the belief that they offered a significantly better feature and service than we were going to be able to deliver in a timely fashion, and (as a bonus) at significantly less cost to Mozilla. So I can only assume that this was a money versus something that > Mozilla that users wanted. Even if your other assumptions were correct, revenue sharing requires generating revenue, which really requires a lot of usage (especially in a freemium business model like Pocket's). If users didn't want the feature, it'd be silly to ship it, let alone try to profit from it after the cost of making the deal, building, shipping and promoting the product, and maintaining the code long term. The _only_ way for us to even theoretically profit from an integration like this is for it to be successful with users, which means we have to give users something they want and need. Happily, we're actually doing all of this for the right reasons, and with no revenue pressure. -- Mike _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
