"But I think it's always difficult when a product that you're using and accustomed to changes"
About this Quote
The line has the soothing, corporate candor of someone trying to make change feel like weather: inevitable, mildly inconvenient, and not anyone's fault. Mitchell Baker, long associated with Mozilla and the messy idealism of the open web, frames disruption in the soft language of user habit. "Product" keeps it clinical and transactional, even if the thing in question is often a browser people treat like infrastructure. "Using and accustomed to" quietly admits what tech leaders sometimes dodge: adoption is less about features than muscle memory. People don't just choose tools; they build routines around them, and routines resent being touched.
The intent reads as de-escalation. It's a preemptive empathy statement aimed at frustrated users, a way of saying: your annoyance is legitimate, but it's also predictable. The subtext, though, is a subtle shifting of responsibility. If change is "always difficult", then backlash becomes a natural reaction rather than a verdict on the quality of the decision. That phrasing can inoculate the changer against accountability: the problem isn't the redesign or policy shift, it's the human condition.
Context matters because Baker sits at the intersection of mission-driven rhetoric and product realities: privacy, defaults, UI overhauls, monetization pressures, even governance debates. Her lawyerly clarity shows up in the careful generalization: no promise to roll anything back, no admission of error, just recognition of friction. It's a sentence designed to keep the conversation in the realm of feelings, not specifics, buying the organization time to proceed while sounding, plausibly, like it listens.
The intent reads as de-escalation. It's a preemptive empathy statement aimed at frustrated users, a way of saying: your annoyance is legitimate, but it's also predictable. The subtext, though, is a subtle shifting of responsibility. If change is "always difficult", then backlash becomes a natural reaction rather than a verdict on the quality of the decision. That phrasing can inoculate the changer against accountability: the problem isn't the redesign or policy shift, it's the human condition.
Context matters because Baker sits at the intersection of mission-driven rhetoric and product realities: privacy, defaults, UI overhauls, monetization pressures, even governance debates. Her lawyerly clarity shows up in the careful generalization: no promise to roll anything back, no admission of error, just recognition of friction. It's a sentence designed to keep the conversation in the realm of feelings, not specifics, buying the organization time to proceed while sounding, plausibly, like it listens.
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| Topic | Change |
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