To rephrase a game reviewer, it seems there is a stupid epidemic in Mozilla.
I don't understand the point of "branding" Mozilla. Why waste time and money on changing pictures, when I doubt this will change anything? It sounds a lot like rebranding Yahoo.
I'm not sure the new branding accomplishes the goal, but it is a worthy one. If it helps persuade more people to support/use Mozilla's projects, it's a win.
Folks that care about the org wasting money, not keeping the retro dinosaur, folks that think branding is a waste - they probably already support Mozilla. No one's gonna switch to Chrome over this. Maybe if it's shown Mozilla is really actually wasting money like and mismanaging things, it might hurt their open source participation. Or if they publicly got super political.
Rebranding, when done correctly, can be a great way to regroup and focus on what's important about your business. You really need to stop looking at it as just a new design, and look at what philosophy it exudes. This constant visual reminder of what the company's mission is resonates downward much better than a mission statement, and how clients/customers interact with you.
This is of course if your rebrand was a success, and that's a very very difficult task dependent on all sorts of internal factors, that even the largest companies get wrong (see Gap, Uber, Pepsi). Don't listen to me though:
I don't see how this compares to Yahoo, as Mozilla hasn't been a very strong brand to start with (as opposed to Firefox). I think the idea is to try to better establish it as a geeky brand next to the more consumer-oriented Firefox.
Also, in case you're referring to the Yahoo -> Altaba rebrand rather than a former Yahoo logo change: Mozilla is keeping its name. This is just about the logo.
Being a non profit, their numbers are out there for anyone to examine. Go ahead and compare their development costs with their other costs - the board of directors in particular.
(not a popular opinion on HN, so goodbye useless digital karma).
I don't understand the point of "branding" Mozilla. Why waste time and money on changing pictures, when I doubt this will change anything? It sounds a lot like rebranding Yahoo.