18 ms·

Regarding FirefoxOS, Mozilla erred in focusing their efforts on cheap, crappy phones¹ that were only available in places like Spain or India, and not getting fi

Regarding FirefoxOS, Mozilla erred in focusing their efforts on cheap, crappy phones¹ that were only available in places like Spain or India, and not getting first-tier phones into the hands of as many hackers as possible, as quickly as possible. By focusing on low-end phones and not Nexus- or Galaxy-class handsets, they lost sight of the fact that smartphones are aspirational devices. People want the best phones they can get, with high performance and high-resolution screens. They don't care about libre software or the Open Web if the devices on which it runs are perceived as inferior. (Everyone I know uses either an iPhone or a reasonably performant Android phone, and I don't run in wealthy or tech circles much these days.) Look at the runaway success of the iPhone. It wasn't cheap, but because it was clearly a quality device, both regular people and developers clamored for them. (Remember the hue and cry when Apple initially said they wouldn't provide a market for third-party apps?) If Mozilla really wanted to spur interest in FirefoxOS among developers, they should have set up kiosks at every Fry's Electronics in the greater S.F. Bay area (on the doorsteps of Apple, Google, Facebook) to sell decent, unlocked phones directly. People would have lined up to buy them just to hack on them. I would have seriously considered buying one as an alternative to a Nexus phone, if one had been available. 1: Ars Technical eviscerates a $35 FirefoxOS phone: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-3 http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/10/testing-a-3

filmgirlcw 10y ago
They could only get carrier support in select countries and that was what was helping pay for development of the platform. And trust me, even if they had had them available for developers in the Bay area, I don't think developers would have cared. The hard truth is the APIs just weren't robust enough to do anything beyond the same HTML5 apps we already saw across Android and iOS, and it ran like dogshit. The main problem with Firefox OS and also Canonical's Ubuntu phone was that they treated the lowend market of certain countries like second or third class citizens, assuming the cheap price would make up for the fact that there were no apps and the performance was terrible. What those companies didn't count on (but frankly should have), was that Android would just get cheaper and cheaper and the those countries would be fine with running two or three year old hardware (especially since apps frequently support old versions), rather than running a second-class OS. I would always ask Mozilla what they would do when Android simply got as cheap, and I never got an answer that was in any way encouraging. And the answer was, they would accept defeat and give up.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  I think it goes beyond both of these comments. So Plasma Mobile does support two high end phones, but only two and they're already outdated (Nexus 5 and OnePlusOne). Neither have an sd slot either. A friend of mine had a Firefox OS phone at one point that she got for free at a conference, and I just remember at the time it was very difficult to even purchase a low end model outside of Europe at the time. Part of it is carrier lock-in, but another huge factor is that you can't just install Firefox OS onto any old mobile device. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, you could install any Linux on any PC/x86 system. PC was and still is a solid standard. The mainline kernel does a really good job of supporting the PC, both old and new (with really old support getting dropped and forked into things like the Linux/386 project for people who still use 386/486 embedded systems). There is nothing similar for the ARM market. There is no standard. Almost no phones support Device Tree config (and definitely none of the flagships). With Windows and Linux, you install your base, you might need to install some drivers/modules and then you're done. ARM is a spec sold to SoC manufactures and then vendors attach whatever the fuck they want to whatever random pins. There's no unified boot loader. No standard way of determining devices. No standard platform. ARM isn't a platform. It's just an architecture. http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ There are plenty of x86 chips out there that aren't in PCs (The Wonderswan and the PS4 are both great examples of totally-not-a-PC), but they are the exceptions. Ubuntu Mobile could have changed all this with the Edge. We may have finally had some standardized phones for open source and alternative operating systems. As it stands, every rom you see out there has to be customized for the hacked-n-patched together kernels of each and every single phone. It's not always an issue of binary drivers and no standard Kernel ABI, as some of these vendors patch things deep in the kernel in totally hacky, non-upstreamble ways for their kludged together hardware. Combined with binary blobs, closed baseband firmware, etc. etc. it's just a mess. Currently there is no, convenient hackable mobile device platform, and that's keeping us from the same Linux revolution on embedded devices.
  - my123 10y ago
    Windows on ARM is standardized with UEFI+ACPI, but that's only because Microsoft didn't half-ass it.
komali2 10y ago
With respect, this seems very Bay Area short-sighted. Mozilla was open about targeting cheap, crappy phones, which my understanding makes up a very significant portion of the Android phone ecosystem. They were looking at those Spain, India, China markets, yes, and nailing those markets didn't really depend upon the opinions of comparatively extraordinarily rich Bay Area denizens or hackers. If you can afford a Galaxy s5 right now, even if you have to budget a bit, you are not the market that that OS was for (my understanding). Similar to that Facebook Internet thing - it wasn't for us, it was for people who can (and do) live two years off one of our paychecks. EDIT: I just read that review you linked and it suffers the same problem - a total lack of perspective. The only critical error I can see is the lack of internal battery to keep time synced, which will be a major setback for browsing because of authentication and whatnot. Other than that, the sorts of people spending 35$ on a phone do not care about the three different materials, the thickness, the shitty camera, etc. I've seen the most horrifying, hackneyed together internet connectivity solutions in China that to mock a 35$ phone for being "too thick" is to be just... out of touch.
- disordinary 10y ago
  It was the right strategy as well, target people just getting a smart phone, and those who were not invested in the app ecosystem.
- comex 10y ago
  It depends indirectly on their opinions, though: those markets (like everywhere else) get a significant proportion of their apps from Silicon Valley, and every missing app makes a new platform that much less competitive. Anyway, crappy hardware cares more about software efficiency. Firefox OS struggled massively with performance, to the point of absurdity; targeting low-end hardware with that is an idea that only ever made sense on paper. Supposedly it was just a temporary problem, optimizations were coming… eventually...
- criddell 10y ago
  So if their strategy was a good one, why did it fail?
ino 10y ago
> (Remember the hue and cry when Apple initially said they wouldn't provide a market for third-party apps?) No, I don't. But all my friends wanted an iPhone and they're not programmers. I think most people didn't know or even consider one could develop apps for phones at the time. Or why would someone want apps on a phone. Or even what an "app" is. They only knew "programs" on Windows. People bought what was available. There were starting to appear some apps for Nokia phones but it wasn't widely popular. It was also a hassle to download / update.
- disordinary 10y ago
  There was a huge outcry I remember it well, ironically Apple only wanted web apps which put it at a significant disadvantage to Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS, and Blackberry based phones. The wow factor of the UI and interface design more than made up for it though, but there is a famous interview where Balmer laughs at the iPhone because it was expensive, had no keyboard, and no applications whereas Microsoft was selling millions of Windows phones a year with all of those.
- stuaxo 10y ago
  As an app developer pre-iphone, people certainly didn't know what apps were. It was crazy how after apps came to the iphone suddenly people did know and there was even a little cachet to it.
- izacus 10y ago
  Then I guess you don't remember it all that well - even at the introduction people made fun out of the lack of 3rd party apps and consistently criticized it. Symbian smartphones were already pretty popular (at least her in EU). And to counter your anectode - pretty much none of my friends wanted an iPhone and they're not programmers either ;P
- ulfw 10y ago
  People very well knew what apps were and why they wanted them on a phone. Especially as phones were slow back in the day and had slow 2G networks (original iPhone), an app was a much more fluid experience than a touch-website. In fact people wrote apps for rooted iPhones before iOS came out with official app support and an Appstore.
disordinary 10y ago
They were simply too late to the market, but they had to do something, if they stick to the same course they will always have a very small slice of the mobile market as most people don't replace the browser on their mobile I'm surprised that Google and in particular Apple aren't coming under scrutiny from competition watchdogs as Microsoft did with IE in the early 2000s.
- MawNicker 10y ago
  It's not like it was before. JIT engines made the situation more complicated. The security problems are hard.
  - disordinary 10y ago
    Yeah, but on the other hand there are only a handful of companies that make Browsers, and even fewer that make browser engines. The vendors could pay Apple to audit the codebases and it would be worth it to be on the platform.
  - emn13 10y ago
    That's a pretty lame exuse: if anything, OS integrated JIT engines are likely to be less secure, and a more diverse engine ecosystem makes attacks less attractive. Witness how JIT engines don't cause many problems (and never really have caused many problems) on desktop. Which isn't to say they're immune from security risks, just that there are lots of other components that pose just as many risks (or more), which are not (or cannot) be avoided - not least of which the first-party JIT. Furthermore, many exploits don't care if their running on a JIT or on a scripting engine - that's an implementation detail. And if you really cared about security, you could design a verifiable native subset (as several systems have done) - webassembly shows that even slow standardization processes that need much more complicated cross-device compatibility can move meaningfully in that direction. Disallowing non-first party JITs completely for security reasons is at best delusional, but more likely intentionally anti-competitive. Minor security bonuses are just gravy.
    - comex 10y ago
amyjess 10y ago
> By focusing on low-end phones and not Nexus- or Galaxy-class handsets, they lost sight of the fact that smartphones are aspirational devices. Yeah, I remember when Firefox OS first came out, and when I heard of Mozilla's strategy of starting in the third world and then moving up, I knew Firefox OS was doomed. Why? Because it reminded me of something I heard about car platforms, years ago. Back in 2002, GM introduced a pair of cars in the European market both based on the same platform: the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3 (not the first generation of either nameplate, but the first to share a platform). GM made sure to introduce the Saab first. Why? Because Saab was a premium brand and Vauxhall wasn't. GM knew that "Saab built on Vauxhall technology" wouldn't fly -- people would see it as Saab degrading themselves by raiding a mid-level car for parts. On the other hand, "Vauxhall built on Saab technology" would go over very well -- people would see it as Vauxhall incorporating elements of a premium car. The moral of the story is: you don't release a budget model and work your way up; you release a premium model and then bring it downmarket to cultivate the image of bringing luxury technology to the masses.
- kriro 10y ago
  I think completely separating them and not marketing them as X build on Y would be the better move. At least according to positioning theory from marketing.
- arthurfm 10y ago
  > it reminded me of something I heard about car platforms, years ago. Back in 2002, GM introduced a pair of cars in the European market both based on the same platform: the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3. Your comment actually reminded me of an old Top Gear episode [1][2] where they described how Saab were instructed by GM to change only the body and the badges of a Vauxhall Cavalier when producing the Saab 900, but they ignored them and modified so much that the two cars only shared 1/3rd of the parts [2, 03:59]. The same thing happened again with the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3, but to an even greater extent. It certainly sounds like Saab didn't want to be associated with GM or Vauxhall or use any of their inferior technology or parts. [1] http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-part-12-series-18-episode-5 http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-p... [2] http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-part-22-series-18-episode-5 http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-p...
carlesfe 10y ago
I'm a Spaniard and can offer a bit of perspective: Firefox OS was doomed the day they partnered with Telefónica. It's a massive juggernaut which phagocytes every startup they touch, assimilate their talent, then destroy the rest. For those who don't know Telefónica, it's something akin to T-Mobile or AT&T (maybe even bigger, not sure). They had to change the name and branding of their phone division, a massive feat in both cash and brand recognition a few years ago to clean up their shitty reputation because people hated them so much. In the tech side that HN may be interested in, they earn money by winning government contracts and developing crappy tech like a regular consultancy. They have a very high tech R+D division which I'm sure does wonderful work but their projects don't seem to surface. In summary, if you see something "developed by Telefonica" it should turn your alarms on.
- apricot 10y ago
  "For those who don't know Telefónica, it's something akin to T-Mobile or AT&T [...] they had to change the name and branding of their phone division [...] because people hated them so much." Comcast. The word you're looking for is Comcast.
  - mynameishere 10y ago
    More similar would be Verizon which was the despised GTE back in the 1980s.
    - hendersoon 10y ago
      Here in NYC, Verizon was the despised NYNEX. A more recent example would be the merger of the despised Time Warner Cable with Charter, now renamed to Spectrum.
- ianbicking 10y ago
  I'm a Mozilla employee, and though I wasn't directly on FirefoxOS I did work with and serve that team. Telefonica was by far the most engaged partner we had, they had good engineers and seemed genuinely committed to the success of the project. There were lots of disagreements on product direction, sometimes we were right and sometimes they we right. Ultimately we were both wrong - I don't think there was a winning product strategy. Not on the high end or the low end. In that situation everyone ends up with bad feelings. It does make it hard to learn from the experience though. Maybe the lesson is about learning how to quit at the right time.
charred_toast 10y ago
this
aangjie 10y ago
As an Indian who bought the Firefox OS phone, I second the cheap phones strategy being what killed it. I remember it taking so long just to open an app and say search or even to open the marketplace, I gave up very often. Forget about developing for them. I think it is atleast partly because of the bad hardware, I don't know enough innards of the OS itself to say whether it was inefficient or not.
thyuioi 10y ago
Interestingly this is also the path Sailfish is taking. The launch of a fairly lowend device with Intex didn't see a rush of devs from IN (not surprising) but resulted in the forums and marketplace comment sections being flooded with incomprehensive and often abusive blabber. Hope they got paid well by Intex.
oddstorms 10y ago
Just because you don't care about freedom doesn't mean no one cares about freedom.
- cylinder714 10y ago
  (I'm writing this in Firefox Beta for Android, for what it's worth.) You misunderstand--I desperately wanted FirefoxOS phones to succeed, precisely because an Open Web and free software is important, and ultimately a phone that can run any arbitrary software or OS. I know FirefoxOS wasn't that, but it seemed to be a step in the right direction. But if a phone is a lousy application platform and if developers can't be enticed to hack on them, then the question of freedom is moot.
vacri 10y ago
> ...[ignore Spain and India, target SF]... Because what the globe needs is yet another company pandering to tech elites and ignoring the huge numbers of people out there of modest means? I mean seriously, Apple does all this stuff you're saying, pulling in devs with the shiny stuff, and targeting the SF yuppie... and this helps the people in Spain and India how? Not to mention that you're talking about the market segment already occupied by Android. Mozilla was trying to cater to those left behind. Mozilla's raison d'etre isn't to push libre software per se. It's to enable the masses; libre software is merely an asset in that mission.
- cylinder714 10y ago
  ...tech elites...SF yuppies... Read again what I wrote: the point was to get the phones into the hands of hackers, so they would write apps and create that ecosystem to ultimately benefit people elsewhere. (If there's a place with a more active hacker culture than the Bay Area, let's bring the phones there.) I agree with amyjess' point made elsewhere. A quality phone is the means by which you get people interested in a platform, particularly developers. I think that's what's happening with Android and iPhone, in that the first phones are expensive, but the cost is spiraling ever downward. I just would rather see a freer alternative succeed, and hoped FirefoxOS would be it.
  - vacri 10y ago
    The hackers in the bay area are more interested in shiny iphones than up'n'coming tools for the masses. You'd be better off doing it in Europe, where there is a stronger hacker culture towards doing stuff 'for everybody', plus much more familiarisation with i18n issues. In this bay area/startup bubble we live in, the default refrain is "I don't want to fiddle with the underlying machine", and that's not the kind of mindset you want for an underdog that is never going to be as polished as the market leader. > iPhone ... but the cost is spiraling ever downward The iPhone 1, the one that got people excited, was US$400. The iPhone 7 is US$650 (for the bottom model). Inflation in the US has not been 50%+ for the intervening decade.

filmgirlcw 10y ago

They could only get carrier support in select countries and that was what was helping pay for development of the platform. And trust me, even if they had had them available for developers in the Bay area, I don't think developers would have cared. The hard truth is the APIs just weren't robust enough to do anything beyond the same HTML5 apps we already saw across Android and iOS, and it ran like dogshit. The main problem with Firefox OS and also Canonical's Ubuntu phone was that they treated the lowend market of certain countries like second or third class citizens, assuming the cheap price would make up for the fact that there were no apps and the performance was terrible. What those companies didn't count on (but frankly should have), was that Android would just get cheaper and cheaper and the those countries would be fine with running two or three year old hardware (especially since apps frequently support old versions), rather than running a second-class OS. I would always ask Mozilla what they would do when Android simply got as cheap, and I never got an answer that was in any way encouraging. And the answer was, they would accept defeat and give up.

djsumdog 10y ago
I think it goes beyond both of these comments. So Plasma Mobile does support two high end phones, but only two and they're already outdated (Nexus 5 and OnePlusOne). Neither have an sd slot either. A friend of mine had a Firefox OS phone at one point that she got for free at a conference, and I just remember at the time it was very difficult to even purchase a low end model outside of Europe at the time. Part of it is carrier lock-in, but another huge factor is that you can't just install Firefox OS onto any old mobile device. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, you could install any Linux on any PC/x86 system. PC was and still is a solid standard. The mainline kernel does a really good job of supporting the PC, both old and new (with really old support getting dropped and forked into things like the Linux/386 project for people who still use 386/486 embedded systems). There is nothing similar for the ARM market. There is no standard. Almost no phones support Device Tree config (and definitely none of the flagships). With Windows and Linux, you install your base, you might need to install some drivers/modules and then you're done. ARM is a spec sold to SoC manufactures and then vendors attach whatever the fuck they want to whatever random pins. There's no unified boot loader. No standard way of determining devices. No standard platform. ARM isn't a platform. It's just an architecture. http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ http://penguindreams.org/blog/android-fragmentation/ There are plenty of x86 chips out there that aren't in PCs (The Wonderswan and the PS4 are both great examples of totally-not-a-PC), but they are the exceptions. Ubuntu Mobile could have changed all this with the Edge. We may have finally had some standardized phones for open source and alternative operating systems. As it stands, every rom you see out there has to be customized for the hacked-n-patched together kernels of each and every single phone. It's not always an issue of binary drivers and no standard Kernel ABI, as some of these vendors patch things deep in the kernel in totally hacky, non-upstreamble ways for their kludged together hardware. Combined with binary blobs, closed baseband firmware, etc. etc. it's just a mess. Currently there is no, convenient hackable mobile device platform, and that's keeping us from the same Linux revolution on embedded devices.
- my123 10y ago
  Windows on ARM is standardized with UEFI+ACPI, but that's only because Microsoft didn't half-ass it.

komali2 10y ago

With respect, this seems very Bay Area short-sighted. Mozilla was open about targeting cheap, crappy phones, which my understanding makes up a very significant portion of the Android phone ecosystem. They were looking at those Spain, India, China markets, yes, and nailing those markets didn't really depend upon the opinions of comparatively extraordinarily rich Bay Area denizens or hackers. If you can afford a Galaxy s5 right now, even if you have to budget a bit, you are not the market that that OS was for (my understanding). Similar to that Facebook Internet thing - it wasn't for us, it was for people who can (and do) live two years off one of our paychecks. EDIT: I just read that review you linked and it suffers the same problem - a total lack of perspective. The only critical error I can see is the lack of internal battery to keep time synced, which will be a major setback for browsing because of authentication and whatnot. Other than that, the sorts of people spending 35$ on a phone do not care about the three different materials, the thickness, the shitty camera, etc. I've seen the most horrifying, hackneyed together internet connectivity solutions in China that to mock a 35$ phone for being "too thick" is to be just... out of touch.

disordinary 10y ago
It was the right strategy as well, target people just getting a smart phone, and those who were not invested in the app ecosystem.
comex 10y ago
It depends indirectly on their opinions, though: those markets (like everywhere else) get a significant proportion of their apps from Silicon Valley, and every missing app makes a new platform that much less competitive. Anyway, crappy hardware cares more about software efficiency. Firefox OS struggled massively with performance, to the point of absurdity; targeting low-end hardware with that is an idea that only ever made sense on paper. Supposedly it was just a temporary problem, optimizations were coming… eventually...
criddell 10y ago
So if their strategy was a good one, why did it fail?

ino 10y ago

> (Remember the hue and cry when Apple initially said they wouldn't provide a market for third-party apps?) No, I don't. But all my friends wanted an iPhone and they're not programmers. I think most people didn't know or even consider one could develop apps for phones at the time. Or why would someone want apps on a phone. Or even what an "app" is. They only knew "programs" on Windows. People bought what was available. There were starting to appear some apps for Nokia phones but it wasn't widely popular. It was also a hassle to download / update.

disordinary 10y ago
There was a huge outcry I remember it well, ironically Apple only wanted web apps which put it at a significant disadvantage to Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm OS, and Blackberry based phones. The wow factor of the UI and interface design more than made up for it though, but there is a famous interview where Balmer laughs at the iPhone because it was expensive, had no keyboard, and no applications whereas Microsoft was selling millions of Windows phones a year with all of those.
stuaxo 10y ago
As an app developer pre-iphone, people certainly didn't know what apps were. It was crazy how after apps came to the iphone suddenly people did know and there was even a little cachet to it.
izacus 10y ago
Then I guess you don't remember it all that well - even at the introduction people made fun out of the lack of 3rd party apps and consistently criticized it. Symbian smartphones were already pretty popular (at least her in EU). And to counter your anectode - pretty much none of my friends wanted an iPhone and they're not programmers either ;P
ulfw 10y ago
People very well knew what apps were and why they wanted them on a phone. Especially as phones were slow back in the day and had slow 2G networks (original iPhone), an app was a much more fluid experience than a touch-website. In fact people wrote apps for rooted iPhones before iOS came out with official app support and an Appstore.

disordinary 10y ago

They were simply too late to the market, but they had to do something, if they stick to the same course they will always have a very small slice of the mobile market as most people don't replace the browser on their mobile I'm surprised that Google and in particular Apple aren't coming under scrutiny from competition watchdogs as Microsoft did with IE in the early 2000s.

MawNicker 10y ago
It's not like it was before. JIT engines made the situation more complicated. The security problems are hard.
- disordinary 10y ago
  Yeah, but on the other hand there are only a handful of companies that make Browsers, and even fewer that make browser engines. The vendors could pay Apple to audit the codebases and it would be worth it to be on the platform.
- emn13 10y ago
  That's a pretty lame exuse: if anything, OS integrated JIT engines are likely to be less secure, and a more diverse engine ecosystem makes attacks less attractive. Witness how JIT engines don't cause many problems (and never really have caused many problems) on desktop. Which isn't to say they're immune from security risks, just that there are lots of other components that pose just as many risks (or more), which are not (or cannot) be avoided - not least of which the first-party JIT. Furthermore, many exploits don't care if their running on a JIT or on a scripting engine - that's an implementation detail. And if you really cared about security, you could design a verifiable native subset (as several systems have done) - webassembly shows that even slow standardization processes that need much more complicated cross-device compatibility can move meaningfully in that direction. Disallowing non-first party JITs completely for security reasons is at best delusional, but more likely intentionally anti-competitive. Minor security bonuses are just gravy.
  - comex 10y ago

amyjess 10y ago

> By focusing on low-end phones and not Nexus- or Galaxy-class handsets, they lost sight of the fact that smartphones are aspirational devices. Yeah, I remember when Firefox OS first came out, and when I heard of Mozilla's strategy of starting in the third world and then moving up, I knew Firefox OS was doomed. Why? Because it reminded me of something I heard about car platforms, years ago. Back in 2002, GM introduced a pair of cars in the European market both based on the same platform: the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3 (not the first generation of either nameplate, but the first to share a platform). GM made sure to introduce the Saab first. Why? Because Saab was a premium brand and Vauxhall wasn't. GM knew that "Saab built on Vauxhall technology" wouldn't fly -- people would see it as Saab degrading themselves by raiding a mid-level car for parts. On the other hand, "Vauxhall built on Saab technology" would go over very well -- people would see it as Vauxhall incorporating elements of a premium car. The moral of the story is: you don't release a budget model and work your way up; you release a premium model and then bring it downmarket to cultivate the image of bringing luxury technology to the masses.

kriro 10y ago
I think completely separating them and not marketing them as X build on Y would be the better move. At least according to positioning theory from marketing.
arthurfm 10y ago
> it reminded me of something I heard about car platforms, years ago. Back in 2002, GM introduced a pair of cars in the European market both based on the same platform: the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3. Your comment actually reminded me of an old Top Gear episode [1][2] where they described how Saab were instructed by GM to change only the body and the badges of a Vauxhall Cavalier when producing the Saab 900, but they ignored them and modified so much that the two cars only shared 1/3rd of the parts [2, 03:59]. The same thing happened again with the Vauxhall Vectra and the Saab 9-3, but to an even greater extent. It certainly sounds like Saab didn't want to be associated with GM or Vauxhall or use any of their inferior technology or parts. [1] http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-part-12-series-18-episode-5 http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-p... [2] http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-part-22-series-18-episode-5 http://www.topgear.com/videos/jeremy-clarkson/tribute-saab-p...

carlesfe 10y ago

I'm a Spaniard and can offer a bit of perspective: Firefox OS was doomed the day they partnered with Telefónica. It's a massive juggernaut which phagocytes every startup they touch, assimilate their talent, then destroy the rest. For those who don't know Telefónica, it's something akin to T-Mobile or AT&T (maybe even bigger, not sure). They had to change the name and branding of their phone division, a massive feat in both cash and brand recognition a few years ago to clean up their shitty reputation because people hated them so much. In the tech side that HN may be interested in, they earn money by winning government contracts and developing crappy tech like a regular consultancy. They have a very high tech R+D division which I'm sure does wonderful work but their projects don't seem to surface. In summary, if you see something "developed by Telefonica" it should turn your alarms on.

apricot 10y ago
"For those who don't know Telefónica, it's something akin to T-Mobile or AT&T [...] they had to change the name and branding of their phone division [...] because people hated them so much." Comcast. The word you're looking for is Comcast.
- mynameishere 10y ago
  More similar would be Verizon which was the despised GTE back in the 1980s.
  - hendersoon 10y ago
    Here in NYC, Verizon was the despised NYNEX. A more recent example would be the merger of the despised Time Warner Cable with Charter, now renamed to Spectrum.
ianbicking 10y ago
I'm a Mozilla employee, and though I wasn't directly on FirefoxOS I did work with and serve that team. Telefonica was by far the most engaged partner we had, they had good engineers and seemed genuinely committed to the success of the project. There were lots of disagreements on product direction, sometimes we were right and sometimes they we right. Ultimately we were both wrong - I don't think there was a winning product strategy. Not on the high end or the low end. In that situation everyone ends up with bad feelings. It does make it hard to learn from the experience though. Maybe the lesson is about learning how to quit at the right time.

charred_toast 10y ago

this

aangjie 10y ago

As an Indian who bought the Firefox OS phone, I second the cheap phones strategy being what killed it. I remember it taking so long just to open an app and say search or even to open the marketplace, I gave up very often. Forget about developing for them. I think it is atleast partly because of the bad hardware, I don't know enough innards of the OS itself to say whether it was inefficient or not.

thyuioi 10y ago

Interestingly this is also the path Sailfish is taking. The launch of a fairly lowend device with Intex didn't see a rush of devs from IN (not surprising) but resulted in the forums and marketplace comment sections being flooded with incomprehensive and often abusive blabber. Hope they got paid well by Intex.

oddstorms 10y ago

Just because you don't care about freedom doesn't mean no one cares about freedom.

cylinder714 10y ago
(I'm writing this in Firefox Beta for Android, for what it's worth.) You misunderstand--I desperately wanted FirefoxOS phones to succeed, precisely because an Open Web and free software is important, and ultimately a phone that can run any arbitrary software or OS. I know FirefoxOS wasn't that, but it seemed to be a step in the right direction. But if a phone is a lousy application platform and if developers can't be enticed to hack on them, then the question of freedom is moot.

vacri 10y ago

> ...[ignore Spain and India, target SF]... Because what the globe needs is yet another company pandering to tech elites and ignoring the huge numbers of people out there of modest means? I mean seriously, Apple does all this stuff you're saying, pulling in devs with the shiny stuff, and targeting the SF yuppie... and this helps the people in Spain and India how? Not to mention that you're talking about the market segment already occupied by Android. Mozilla was trying to cater to those left behind. Mozilla's raison d'etre isn't to push libre software per se. It's to enable the masses; libre software is merely an asset in that mission.

cylinder714 10y ago
...tech elites...SF yuppies... Read again what I wrote: the point was to get the phones into the hands of hackers, so they would write apps and create that ecosystem to ultimately benefit people elsewhere. (If there's a place with a more active hacker culture than the Bay Area, let's bring the phones there.) I agree with amyjess' point made elsewhere. A quality phone is the means by which you get people interested in a platform, particularly developers. I think that's what's happening with Android and iPhone, in that the first phones are expensive, but the cost is spiraling ever downward. I just would rather see a freer alternative succeed, and hoped FirefoxOS would be it.
- vacri 10y ago
  The hackers in the bay area are more interested in shiny iphones than up'n'coming tools for the masses. You'd be better off doing it in Europe, where there is a stronger hacker culture towards doing stuff 'for everybody', plus much more familiarisation with i18n issues. In this bay area/startup bubble we live in, the default refrain is "I don't want to fiddle with the underlying machine", and that's not the kind of mindset you want for an underdog that is never going to be as polished as the market leader. > iPhone ... but the cost is spiraling ever downward The iPhone 1, the one that got people excited, was US$400. The iPhone 7 is US$650 (for the bottom model). Inflation in the US has not been 50%+ for the intervening decade.