You would figure that after a month and a half of news like this, it wouldn’t be reported on as much. However, it looks like layoffs are here to stay. The latest company to shed employees is Mozilla.
Mozilla, the not-for-profit company is letting go nearly 60 people. This is about 5% of its staff. Many of those losing their jobs today were a part of the product development team.
We’re scaling back investment in some product areas in order to focus on areas that we feel have the greatest chance of success. To do so, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate approximately 60 roles from across the company. We intend to re-prioritize resources towards products like Firefox Mobile, where there’s a significant opportunity to grow and establish a better model for the industry.”
Mozilla spokesperson
TechCrunch obtained an internal memo that shared some of Mozilla’s plans. The company is looking to lower investments on its VPN product, a thing that I use often for travel and recommend you do as well.
Another thing they are scaling back on is a took to scrub your information from data broker sites. If you didn’t know, they just announced that service last week!
In its social spaces, Mozilla is planning to reduce resources in its Mastodon instance along with shutting down its virtual world, Hubs.
Unfortunately, the one thing Mozilla wants to put more money behind is artificial intelligence.
In 2023, generative AI began rapidly shifting the industry landscape. Mozilla seized an opportunity to bring trustworthy AI into Firefox, largely driven by the Fakespot acquisition and the product integration work that followed.
Additionally, finding great content is still a critical use case for the internet. Therefore, as part of the changes today, we will be bringing together Pocket, Content and the AI/ML teams supporting content with the Firefox Organization.”
Excerpt from internal memo
This “reorganization” comes after Mozilla appointed a new CEO, Laura Chambers. She joined Mozilla’s board about three years ago and was an excecutive at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay.
Source: Engadget
