I have more of a problem with who they laid off than the fact that they laid people off. I'm probably biased as an engineer, but IMO the people who actually create your products should be the last ones to be laid off, not the first. And if the company is struggling, highly paid execs should take a pay cut before you start laying off lower-paid engineers.

hey, firing people is hard work.

It's more the clear mismanagement of their finances on ill-considered products outside of their core offering that never go anywhere. Some of them appear to be nothing more than vanity projects that subsequently disappear having got no traction at all.

I still think they are/were in a great position to offer what is now office365 and google docs earlier on, with a position to offer both dedicated and cloud software options.

They had electron effectively a decade before electron with XULrunner and let it die on the vine.

There were opportunities for developer mindshare and for services adjacent to those tools they were already building... that they didn't do more for getting Thunderbird more competitive to Outlook to offering a better breed of messenger platform.

No, their management sat on fat cash, with fat paychecks and ill-conceived projects that lead to little in terms of mindshare or income longevity.

Managing is inherently risky –– we shouldn't expect managers to make no mistakes while at the same time expecting them to keep workers around in an unprofitable business would only serve to further harm the business

Sure, one can rant all one wants about management's lack of business acumen, but that's completely separate from the issue of the layoffs