“The experiment is over. We save the contents of this page so that others can use the information for their own benefit, ”such a sad message was posted to Connected_Devices / Projects on the Mozilla Wiki site.

On Thursday, February 2, 2017, a non-profit organization told employees in the Connected Devices division about the dissolution of this development team. Reportedly, as a result, approximately 50 people will be transferred to other departments or laid off, including the dismissal of Mozilla Senior Vice President Ari Jaaksi, who was responsible for this area. Bertrand Nevo (Bertrand Neveux), director of products for the division of Connected Devices, also informed about the withdrawal.

What did the division Connected Devices

Four projects are listed in the list of current Connected Devices projects:
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• Project Lighthouse is a product for people with visual impairments, so that they can get full access to everyday things and lead a more independent and rich life.
• Project Magnet - Personal user-agent for handling ambient content.
  
  
  Architecture Magnet is one of four projects that the Mozilla Connected Devices division has been working on.
  
  
• Project SensorWeb - Personal crowdsourcing system for monitoring real-time air quality PM2.5.
• Connected Devices Platform is an open and free platform for the Internet of things, based on the values ​​of Mozilla.

Among the previously closed projects of this division are smart kitchen , smart displays , the Tablet project and the voice interface for the Internet of Things Project Vaani (something like Amazon Alexa was conceived, only on open technologies).

Judging by the description of these projects, none of them enjoyed particular popularity in the community, that is, none of them "took off." The Firefox OS project is not listed at all in the list of projects of this division. In this sense, from a business point of view, the closure of a unit was quite logical. Although Mozilla is a non - profit organization, top managers are still extremely concerned about the efficient allocation of funds, because the lion's share of Mozilla's expenses is the salaries of developers. At the end of 2016, about 1,000 people received wages at Mozilla.

Mozilla confirmed the staff cuts: “We shifted our internal interests to the possibilities of the Internet of things,” the statement said. It would seem that this is an illogical statement given the fact that Mozilla closes the division of Connected Devices, which dealt specifically with projects of the Internet of things. But no, there is a logic in the statement of top managers: after all, these studies "will be integrated into the growing interests in the field of developing technologies" (Emerging Technologies divisions).

In other words, the unit was engaged in too important technologies, so it was disbanded, and the employees were dismissed. Everything is logical, isn't it?

Some of the 50 short-listed employees of Connected Devices have been reassigned to other departments, including the Emerging Technology division of Shaun White . Specifically, before staff cuts, Mozilla opened a number of new positions for which employees of the closed division of Connected Devices can apply.

The closure of the Connected Devices division is not the first organizational reform lately. In July 2016, Mozilla stopped working on a project for the operating system Firefox OS . After five years of development, a promising project that could compete with Chrome OS has been closed. In September 2016, they announced the transfer of the project to the open source community and clearing it of any associations with Mozilla.

Despite all of the above, the Mozilla non-profit organization is doing well from a financial point of view. Its partners in search agreements Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex list hundreds of millions of dollars for getting to the first line of the list of search engines in Firefox. Mozilla's revenue for 2015 was $ 421 million.