It has been eleven months since the firestorm over Mozilla co-founder and just-promoted CEO Brendan Eich ended in his resignation. Eich's "offense" had nothing to do with how he planned to run the business. What led to his departure shortly after he was named CEO was that six years earlier he had given $1,000 to those who supported the California Proposition 8 ballot measure prohibiting same-sex marriage in that state. Proposition 8 won the approval of a majority of the Golden State voters in November 2008.
Those who remained at the firm, which produces the Firefox web browser and the Thunderbird email program, appear to have convinced themselves that they had to do what they did to stay in the good graces of users, who they must have figured almost universally accept politically correct precepts and sanctions against those who won't bow to them. How's that working out? The answer is "not well."
In a development reminiscent of what happened at Ford Motor Company during the mid-2000s, Mozilla has seen its market share plummet.
As was the case with Ford, whose in-your-face politically correct stances led to a two-year national boycott by the American Family Association, no one in the press seems to want to bring up the possibility that a significant number of Firefox users might have turned into former users over the company's heavyhanded orchestration of Eich's departure.
Here's an example of coverage at Computerworld which chronicles the recent steep decline in Firefox market share while completely ignoring the possibility that there has been a user backlash (HT Instapundit):
An incredibly shrinking Firefox faces endangered species status
Desktop browser continues to bleed user share; combined desktop + mobile share falls under 10%
Mozilla's Firefox is in danger of making the endangered species list for browsers.
Just two weeks after Mozilla's top Firefox executive said that rumors of its demise were "dead wrong," the iconic browser dropped another three-tenths of a percentage point in analytics firm Net Applications' tracking, ending February with 11.6%.
... Firefox has fallen on hard times.
In the last 12 months, Firefox's user share -- an estimate of the portion of all those who reach the Internet via a desktop browser -- has plummeted by 34%. Since Firefox crested at 25.1% in April 2010, Firefox has lost 13.5 percentage points, or 54% of its peak share.
To be clear, the browser's market share has been declining for five years. However, in reverse-engineering the figures listed above, one finds that the plunge in the past 12 months has been from 17.6 percent to the 11.6 percent Computerworld writer Greg Keizer cited (11.6 percent divided by 66 percent — 1 minus 34 percent — is 17.6 percent). So in just one year, Firefox lost about 44 percent (6 points) of its five-year share loss of 13.5 points (25.1 percent minus 11.6 percent). In other words, the decline has seriously accelerated in the past year.
Is it too much to expect a tech author like Keizer to at least wonder about a possible correlation between Firefox's freefall and Mozilla's ouster of Eich, with its chilling implications for free speech and participation in the political process? Absolutely not, because he covered Eich's resignation in detail last year.
Getting back to Keizer's current writeup:
At Firefox's 12-month average rate of decline, Mozilla's desktop browser will slip under the 10% bar in June, joining other third-tier applications like Apple's Safari (with just a 4.8% user share in February) and Opera Software's Opera (1.1%). If the trend continues, Firefox on the desktop could drop below 8% as soon as October.
... Firefox's total user share -- an amalgamation of desktop and mobile -- was 9.5% for February, its lowest level since Computerworld began tracking the metric nearly six years ago, and 3.4 percentage points lower than in July 2014, the last time Computerworld analyzed the data.
... Two weeks ago, Johnathan Nightingale, vice president of Firefox, argued that the browser had a "fierce momentum," citing Mozilla's internal data. Nightingale said that January's desktop download numbers had been "the best they've been in years" and claimed that Mozilla's own numbers showed a tick upward that had not yet been confirmed by third-party measurements.
... third-party measurements, the only available because browser makers don't disclose the number of active users on a regular basis, do not back up (CEO Chris) Beard's claim that Firefox experienced "positive growth" in 2014.
Mozilla has also said it will develop an iOS version of Firefox that will run on Apple's iPhone and iPad, but the project has not yet produced a browser suitable for public testing.
Thus, what appears to be at work here is not just a user backlash, but a failure to keep up with technology. It's not at all unreasonable to contend that the powers that be at Mozilla are overly distracted by formulating PC stances on political issues and imposing an internal PC culture to the point that they have forgotten that it's what they do for PC (i.e., personal computer — and tablet and phone) users that pays the bills and keeps them in business.
If user abandonment and falling behind technologically are indeed the two factors bringing Mozilla down, the firm's way back will be far more difficult than Ford's.
In March 2008, the nation's second largest U.S.-based car company resolved its problems with the American Family Association, which then ended its boycott. Given that it was heading into the teeth of the recession, Ford appears to have moved just in time. In direct contrast to its two Detroit rivals, both of which had to run to the government to continue to exist, Ford recovered fabulously once it decided to eschew politics in the interest of focusing entirely on making better products. If Firefox's market share drops too far, it will become very difficult to win back those who left and to woo new users.
It seems highly unlikely that Mozilla's corporate culture will ever allow the kind of course reversal seen at Ford, especially because to have any credibility whatsoever it would have to include a forthright admission that Eich's ouster was a bad and vindictive move.
If the firm fails, it won't get any brownie points in liquidation for having ousted Eich. Additionally, as was the case with Ford, the press will never acknowledge that a customer backlash occurred.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
