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> With respect, this seems very Bay Area short-sighted. Mozilla was open about targeting cheap, crappy phones, which my understanding makes up a very significan
by jldugger 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 Mozilla was targeting the market for cheap, crappy phones, they were also targeting the search market on cheap, crappy phones. Unfortunately Yahoo, Bing and Google, the companies who comprise nearly all of Mozilla's revenues, need access to extraordinarily rich markets to justify their bids. It's not clear to me that they'd be substantially better off if the Mozilla phone was considered a success.
- komali2 10y agoI think the idea would be something along the lines of scale, and locking down an untargeted market. A sort of long-term plan, maybe hoping to corner a huge (greater than 1 billion) population of folks whose families might one day be targetable by ads for purchasing things and are already inside the ecosystem, or merely pulling a 1$ profit off a 35$ dollar phone... times 1.2 billion sales. I mean pie in the sky but I don't think "these people are poor" means there isn't money to be made. There's also government social welfare contracts to consider, or good faith agreements with a government that allows you to corner a more profitable market (you provided five hundred thousand affordable phones to our people, so we'll let you lay fiber through our country / get through our Great Firewall / whatever).
- jldugger 10y ago> I mean pie in the sky but I don't think "these people are poor" means there isn't money to be made. Yea, but you don't "bet the company" on it if the opportunity is smaller.