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Absolutely right. Dan Callahan's statement on why: "with Mozilla Labs somewhat sudden dissolution, we were unexpectedly asked to demonstrate traction and comme

Absolutely right. Dan Callahan's statement on why: "with Mozilla Labs somewhat sudden dissolution, we were unexpectedly asked to demonstrate traction and commercial adoption that simply wasn't there." Commercial adoption? What does that even mean in the context of MoCo? What does MoCo sell? And 24 months? Makes no sense, even for MoCo. Google is consistently a small player in the Cloud Computing Platform space. Their response: "we're not going away." MoCo has scores of millions in the bank. I'm still baffled.

derefr 11y ago
I think that for Persona in particular, "commercial adoption" would probably have meant "random startups deploying Persona as their customers' identity provider." The idea being that a government/nonprofit/enterprise can be convinced to adopt any old ridiculous thing if you say the right things about it, but "the market" (i.e. a critical mass of SMBs) will only adopt your product if it's giving them a higher ROI than the alternative.
- nickbauman 11y ago
  Yeah I don't buy that either. Was there an ROI case made about the iPhone? I don't think so. There's no similar ROI case anyone could make for Firefox, either.
  - derefr 11y ago
    The original iPhone wasn't a platform (didn't have "apps"), remember; it had value without third party support. Persona, meanwhile, has no value apart from its adoption. Obviously, it doesn't need adoption to "survive", but it does need adoption to succeed in its goals: rescuing users from stupid hack-job login systems. I would compare it more to Chrome: Google made Chrome with the goal of getting the web to work better for some people, so they could more easily consume Google's various services. You could say that Chrome's bottom line was "increased Google service adoption": if Chrome renders faster and provides more HTML5 features, then Google gets more and happier customers for their products. Mozilla doesn't have "services" that Persona is a loss-leader for, but there's still that same ROI calculation of whether Persona is achieving its goals, and measuring adoption rate is a good proxy for that. The important thing, that Mozilla failed to do, was to actually understand what an adoption curve for something like Persona should look like, and what things affect it. They needed to heavily advertise it (to developers, not to users!) over about two years, and then start looking at the adoption curve.

derefr 11y ago

I think that for Persona in particular, "commercial adoption" would probably have meant "random startups deploying Persona as their customers' identity provider." The idea being that a government/nonprofit/enterprise can be convinced to adopt any old ridiculous thing if you say the right things about it, but "the market" (i.e. a critical mass of SMBs) will only adopt your product if it's giving them a higher ROI than the alternative.

nickbauman 11y ago
Yeah I don't buy that either. Was there an ROI case made about the iPhone? I don't think so. There's no similar ROI case anyone could make for Firefox, either.
- derefr 11y ago
  The original iPhone wasn't a platform (didn't have "apps"), remember; it had value without third party support. Persona, meanwhile, has no value apart from its adoption. Obviously, it doesn't need adoption to "survive", but it does need adoption to succeed in its goals: rescuing users from stupid hack-job login systems. I would compare it more to Chrome: Google made Chrome with the goal of getting the web to work better for some people, so they could more easily consume Google's various services. You could say that Chrome's bottom line was "increased Google service adoption": if Chrome renders faster and provides more HTML5 features, then Google gets more and happier customers for their products. Mozilla doesn't have "services" that Persona is a loss-leader for, but there's still that same ROI calculation of whether Persona is achieving its goals, and measuring adoption rate is a good proxy for that. The important thing, that Mozilla failed to do, was to actually understand what an adoption curve for something like Persona should look like, and what things affect it. They needed to heavily advertise it (to developers, not to users!) over about two years, and then start looking at the adoption curve.