Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not shifting the goal posts, you are but I'm going to bow out at this point. If you want to have a constructive dialog with someone who has been a Mozilla user since day #1 and continues to be so - it's the browser I write this on - today and will likely be one long after Mozilla the company may no longer exist then you're welcome to that.

But posting Rust as a product and claiming FireFox is not successful is simply not on the level.

FireFox has been amazingly resilient given the onslaught aimed at it, the fact that it still has the marketshare it does is a success in its own right. That that marketshare is dwindling should surprise noone, least of all those working at Mozilla.

As for your experience: that is how most products are developed. But Mozilla is not - at present - a company with more than one successful product. Not from my perspective, and likely not from any of the other frequent users of its flagship product.

Firefox is a successful product. One that is failing. I never claimed it can't be turned around, I was pushing back on the idea that it's self evident that is the solution to Mozilla's problems. (When in fact, that's what Mozilla has been mostly focused on this whole time from a budgetary perspective, and yet here we are.)

I should have never said Rust was a product, you're focusing on a word I used you didn't like and have made it a gotcha that let it derail us away from your original claims. I was using it as an example of Mozilla creating something successful other than Firefox. You claimed Mozilla is a one trick pony and is incapable of making anything else successful other than Firefox. This is objectively false. Firefox only generated revenue in the first place due to an ad deal, which is held up by legal concerns. You also completely ignored the other example I gave, the product I worked on and ran the team for, which is also generating revenue for the company. (Revenue which, I might add, is not backed by advertising dollars nor legal blowback.)

Take care.

No one will probably see this so deep in the comment tree, but I appreciate your level-headedness throughout this exchange, and I agree with your point that a winning high level strategy for Mozilla is not self-evidently obvious.

And for what it's worth, I used Hubs a little, and it was pretty neat - thanks. Unfortunately I was never able to gain traction on using it more regularly, as the nerdiness level of a 3D/VR environment was too high for my social circle.

Nice discussion... (saw this via http://repo.memkits.org/hn-reader/?id=24120336 )

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