UPDATE: folks seem to be more vocal/expressive on Facebook. Won’t pursue them to limit their choice of favorite communication channel, but keeping all the related thoughts in one place might be better. If you have some thoughts, please consider adding your comment here. 
Foreword
I’m writing this with the hope that it may help identify our challenges and overcome them. This is a personal reflection of observations I’ve made over the course past few years. This isn’t a rant (and shouldn’t be identified as such).
What I’m about to write isn’t a product of a random thought provoking afternoon. It brewed itself over the course of years, and I’ve kept them with me, considering it may be callous & inconsiderate to share them. Thinking, if I keep my eyes closed and mouth shut real hard, the problems might just go away, with so many genuinely good people around. Considering, my realizations might just be an oversight and misjudgment of the situations.
Apparently, they weren’t; and I’ll be glad to be proven wrong.
Mozilla is struggling
If we start with that, I think most/all of us will be at the same page, without too much of disagreement.
How did that happen, may be a topic for a debate. But one thing for sure, that it wasn’t random mismanagement or chaos, but a thorough and careful streak of bad choices made along the way.
The struggle isn’t only in one front. It’s everywhere. May it be mindshare, participation, innovation, market share et al. (unsure about the financial part - may be the only place we aren’t struggling as hard - or may even be).
Hard to associate with
And incrementally so.
I fell in love with Mozilla project in late 2005 in a cyber cafe at my nearest city, from the browser’s about page leading to the website. The open-source non-profit do-good for the web philosophy, a stern challenge against commercial-corporate-control of the web and winning at it, a hive-mind of brilliant people - all of it and more, made me a follower. Made me a Mozillian.
And after some years, that feeling started to wear off. Somehow we failed to keep up with our own pace. Especially the last half-a-decade of retardation and bad decisions later, now comes a time when I question myself, “if I was introduced to Mozilla now, would I be equally interested?”
Inspiring and talented people (staff or volunteer) are leaving Mozilla left right and center. Those who are here for a long time and don’t wanna be a ship-rat, are evaluating how much attachments with the project are in order. That’s sad.
Let’s look at some incidents
Non-exhaustive list and In reverse chronological order:
General direction in 2015-16
Leadership is constantly getting rebased. New decisions are thrown out frequently, which often clashes with the goals undertaken at one workweeks, even before reaching the next workweek.
Faster paced evolution are to be welcomed, but this doesn’t look like one. This seems more like a result of incompetent strategies & poor decision making at work.
Impact of Firefox OS
1. Internal conflicts in communities: Each community suffering internal conflicts in recent past, are the ones which had a FxOS device release in that country, and started having those conflicts around the very same time during their own release. Purely coincidental? Don’t think so.
2. Targeting the mass crowd: there’s nothing wrong with having a goal to reach to the mass crowd, in fact it’s philanthropic. But starting there is a strategy that’s destined to fail. The mass crowd don’t make their own decisions, they depend on the suggestions and influence of the geeks and nerds and gadget gurus to choose their phones.
3. Distribution channels, controls over OEMs, regional marketing strats: we carefully made sure we take the wrong way, even in cases where there are just 2 ways and even when a decision-making by coin-flip has 50% chance of doing the right thing. I’m skipping details here. This in itself is another whole discussion.
4. Local communities involvement: mostly to smile and wave, and have quite literally zero impact on the regional strategy, execution and success.
Retiring Persona (BrowserID)
One of the best in class authentication mechanism for humans… gone! Had tremendous opportunity of standardization, interop & mass-implementation if persuaded and given the care it deserved. Wonder how the death of BrowserID makes the web a better place.
Orphaning Thunderbird
After about 5 years of being an orphan, Thunderbird still thrives as one of the most used mail-clients. With proper innovation, integration with social networking, integration with real-time communications, integration with project management tools/calendars/ToDos and the likes - this could have been a sensational product. We never stopped to give it a second thought.
Will it get any better?
Just in case it appears in wrong sense - the incidents mentioned before weren’t the bad decisions, they were the products of bad decisions - is what I’m trying to mean. I’m not addressing some cherry-picked incidents, but the very setup that’s consistently making this happen. There’s a key difference (albeit not vivid, unless given enough thoughts).
I’m not very positive that my this effort/writeup will actually be heard, discussed, or taken into consideration for having any material value. In fact I have less confidence for anything such.
Sometimes it feels like our dino has died, but its body cells are still unaware of it, continuing with their chores - creating discourse threads, posting blogs, writing tweets etc. with some leftover but genuine hopes that everything will be alright.