
For Mozilla and Google,  Group Hugs Are Getting Tricky - JournalistHack
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/26/technology/companies/26mozilla.html?_r=1&ref=technology
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blasdel
What the fuck are 250 paid employees doing at Mozilla?

There's fewer people than that at Apple, Google, Nokia, Palm, etc. _combined_
being paid to hack on WebKit or browsers using it!

That's the kind of bloated headcount I'd expect at Microsoft working on IE
team at its peak in the late nineties.

~~~
neilk
Please. 250 paid employees is _nothing_ , considering the number of projects
they are working on, the number of platforms and localizations they target,
and the speed of innovation they're putting out. Also, they have to do a lot
of their own toolchain and infrastructure, which some of those larger
companies have entire teams for.

I visited the main offices in 2008 - it was a pretty spartan affair, nice but
not luxurious. I was really impressed with everyone I met. They take this
"we're here to improve the web" stuff seriously. I'm not going to say that
there's no bloat, that might be expected given the comfortable income they
make from the partnership with Google. But every Mozilla employee I know is
pretty awesome and working on something that you probably care about.

~~~
whopa
Huh? They don't have that many projects, they only officially support 3
platforms, most of the localizations are done by volunteers, and there isn't a
whole lot of innovation going on.

The only real project is Firefox. There's some support projects like
addons.mozilla.org, but it's fairly badly run and slow moving. Most Mozilla
Labs projects are dead, Jetpack seems to be only one with legs. Weave is
taking forever and nowhere near production ready, and Ubiquity is a power user
feature than 95% of Firefox users won't use.

Most of the new stuff they're talking about is catching up to Chrome, catching
up in the mobile space, or already speced out HTML5 features. Hardly any
substantial innovation.

They've got a lot of fat really. The actual browser engineers on the ground do
want to improve the web, but they've got a lot of ancillary folks who don't
really do much, and a bunch of cultural baggage which prevents them from being
an effective open source project. It's still insanely hard to get any feedback
on feature suggestions, they still mostly do their own thing and largely
ignore the external developer community.

