You probably forgot to consider how much money / effort have Google wasted on projects that did not pan out. Their flagship products, like Hangouts, still have long-standing issues.
Nobody is perfect, and making a good and desirable product is hard.
Nobody is perfect, and making a good and desirable product is hard.
Mozilla has revenue of $420M p.a - I don't know what they spent on Firefox OS but it would have been a big bet (hundreds of millions?). At the same time their Firefox marketshare was reduced.
Plus, I think that view - that FF marketshare was reduced, therefore they weren't investing in it enough - is shortsighted. The improvements that have been landing on FF lately are the result of work being done for a long time. And you can't just dump more money into a project and expect it to be finished sooner - see The Mythical Man-Month.
2011 to 2014, that's 4 years. Enough for firefox OS to gobble hundred millions of dollars.
Edit: Although, thinking about it, it's really ironic how the Google project inspired by Firefly got canceled way too early.
If I launched an app that got over a hundred million downloads and had many millions of monthly users I certainly wouldn't call that a failure!