Mozilla has made the announcement that they are pulling out of their connected devices journey and shutting the division down. Sadly, this affects all of those employees working within those ranks. As much as 50 people will be cut loose from the company in this new maneuver as Mozilla shrinks back down to just software.
Famous for their FireFox browser and other applications such as Thunderbird, a wonderful alternative to Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla has always been among the top options in the never ending browser war. Although they seem to have found themselves trailing if anything anymore, they still remain up there and will more than likely be there for years to come if they turn things around.
However, who’s to say what their chances are now of making any effort to climb back up those ranks. Back when Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were the biggest threats competition-wise, Mozilla had the edge when it came to innovation and speed. When Google Chrome came to be, this put an end to that as it quickly worked its way into the top spot. Since then, Netscape is a memory the newer generation may have never even heard of and even Microsoft has improved their browser to the point of moving beyond Firefox.
Sadly, in the realm of hardware and integration, they just couldn’t break the ice and go anywhere. They were trying hard to expand outside of the browser to do so much more, but it never took off. Mostly due to declining interest in the browser itself. It’s hard to expand and sell to a community that is already losing interest. It’s like trying to capitalize on a dying trend. Looking at analytics, you can find that a majority of internet traffic is now coming from Internet Explorer, Edge, Chrome and Safari. What helped fuel this change is mobility and an ever increasing trend of accessing the internet from these devices. In that category, the only names you hear about are Microsoft, Apple and Google (Android). Mozilla has little to no impact on the mobile world.
Hopefully, they can find a way to turn things around and bring light back to the browser that used to be so popular. I am sure they can pull it off, but it is going to take a complete mental reboot and realization of where they are at. Maybe they just weren’t meant for the world of hardware and integration. Or maybe just not yet. Maybe, they need to find there way in using a different approach. If they found a way of integrating their Thunderbird mail client into the mobile world, it could possibly create some interest from that direction. From there, maybe they could expand out into some of the other projects. Or, they could try making a move on the enterprise world and think cloud and other forms of larger volume installations of such.
If they can build their image back to where it was, maybe one day they will make another attempt at things and pull it off.
