FirefoxOS? Either commit to it or don't, but the way it was rolled out and abandoned after a few years didn't feel especially strategic.
Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Firefox OS from an "open web" perspective, was primarily a vehicle to push for the standardization of web APIs needed for mobile devices. It has succeeded in doing that and many Firefox OS improvements are now incorporated into Firefox for Android. But given the complete dominance of Android on the low end, it would have been extremely foolish to continue it, as that would have been literally burning through cash. Consider that even Microsoft has failed spectacularly, given all their resources and experience in building operating systems.
> Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Wait, people are allowed to speak their own mind? Oh, the horror.
I just gave a keynote on this exact subject at linux.conf.au; video should be online in a few hours somewhere under https://www.youtube.com/user/linuxconfau2017/videos?shelf_id.... The title is "Designing for Failure."
"Let's get something straight first. I'm not a fan of excuses. Persona failed to achieve its goals, and I'd rather we own up to what it was good at, and what it failed at, learn from it, and keep fighting for better authentication on the internet because that's what matters."
2. We committed massively to Firefox OS relative to our size and revenue.
I recall well all the meetings and arguments from the early days. The commitment to Firefox OS (née B2G) was late. It came after two years from B2G launch in late July 2011, until after Ben Adida left in July 2013. Mike Hanson took over for Ben on the identity team side; Fernando Jiménez Moreno from Telefónica (https://github.com/ferjm) did the B2G-side work.
Maybe that was right on time. I don't think so: Facebook Connect was even more entrenched, and Android installed base was climbing out of the Gingerbread 2.3 swamp. The commitment may have been massively massive once started, from your point of view. However, it was almost two years late precisely because we had to argue endlessly, from executive level down, against Ben's preferred non-Firefox/non-OS browserid adoption strategy: the JS shim library.
This doesn't "feel" like a very well substantiated argument either. It received little traction, users didn't like the performance of the devices at the price points needed to penetrate the market, key apps (hi WhatsApp!) had announced they would not port , and Google responded in force with Android One. It took enormous amounts of resources from Firefox development. Looks to me like they committed as far as they could without bringing the entire company under.
Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Mozilla Foundation people (i.e. not his employees) actually. But anyway, I hope this argument works for the president too.
I had a toy firefox phone to play with that had potato level processing power. I was actually surprised by how smooth everything was, way better than android on way less hardware. Firefox seems to be the only browser optimized for portables.
There was also the issue of at least one major website soft-blocking Firefox users in protest.
That worked about as well as you would expect.
Eventually, Mark Mayo got Firefox Accounts going, but it was non-federated. In truth so was Persona: Mozilla ran the only IdP of note. Also, prior to Accounts, the protocol seemed to fork in anti-federated ways, but to me that was just teething pain, to be overcome by further evolution.
The fatal problems were threefold:
1. Facebook had huge scale and even in 2011 (browserid days) it had already won.
2. The Persona team was averse to integrating into Firefox, for whatever client population "interop readiness" pressure that might have put on servers (Metcalfe's Law is a barrier to new protocol adoption).
3. Users don't grok federated identity. Relying party? (That's the first party, the site to which you're browsing with clear intent and understanding of its identity -- assuming you haven't been phished.) Identity provider? (What's this sketchy popup I get every week or so asking me to re-login to some third party?) The whole federated Rp/Idp/browser three-body problem is confusing and looks like some kind of hack, not just phishing but popup malware.
The initial centralized or under-federated situation to me was not fatal, but could have become so if problems 1-3 didn't doom the whole effort.
Firefox OS indeed suffered from slow and half-hearted commitment from July 2011 on. Not even half-hearted: at first, it was a pirate ship. The CEO told another exec that in previous jobs, someone would have been fired for launching it via a post to mozilla.dev.platform (even though drafts of that post had been discussed and vetted by all execs who were paying attention).
Don't get me wrong, even with aggressive resourcing from mid-2011, Firefox OS might not have made it. But half-hearted, slow-rolled "investment" was worse than either "do" or "do not". No half measures, as Mike in "Breaking Bad" taught.
None of my employees called for me to be fired. You're confusing six Mozilla Foundation employees with people who worked for me in the (arm's length, for profit subsidiary) Mozilla Corporation. See http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/mozilla-employees-to... (which, typical of coverage at the time, fails to note those employees worked for an entirely separate org from the one I was CEO of).