5 ms·

Did you forget about the Firefox OS for mobile phones?

sametmax 9y ago
Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? And without grave mistakes ? Seriously get a reality check.
- trapperkeeper74 9y ago
  It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
  - thecrazyone 9y ago
    wow, this! This is in fact m status message on Whatsapp since I learnt when recounted by Brene Brown
- int_19h 9y ago
  The question you should rather be asking is, who in this bloody comment thread didn't expect Firefox OS to fail, back when it was first announced?
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    I thought Firefox OS could've found a niche on low-end phones. There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI, Mozilla wasn't even the first to try it (the Palm Pre got there first). Also, there are tons of phone apps that are just websites in an application wrapper, so it's not like they had to start from scratch to build up their app ecosystem. Lastly, whilst Mozilla has stopped funding it, a fork of it lives on as a smart TV OS for a major TV manufacturer, so it did find a niche, just not the intended one.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      > There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        As I said before, I saw Firefox OS's primary niche being low-end phones. In that market, many people barely care about the OS being run. They could've easily racked up some decent sales in this area without many of their customers caring about the long term benefits. In some ways, Firefox OS was a case of unfortunate timing, part of me wonders if it would've been better to have a longer incubation period to make the platform better before announcing it, but another part of me thinks that they had to release it when they did, before the vacuum that Symbian had left behind was completely filled by Android.
        Brakenshire 9y ago
        Google closed off the market with Android One. In another world they couldn't get it together, or weren't interested in low margin competition. Firefox OS was a reasonable bet, it could have paid off, even if the technology was manifestly limited at the time. I actually wish they'd kept it going as an ongoing experiment, with a very low budget, once they'd done the work to get it running on a device like the Nexus 5, you'd have thought improvements would flow almost automatically from the work on the browser.
      - ido 9y ago
        It was also a really bad implementation. I developed for the firefox os reference phone before the launch - it was atrociously slow. Think low end android phone (of the time!) running software that was 10x slower than android's. It's really hard to describe how slow it was if you didn't personally use a firefox os phone. There were times when it felt significantly slower than a 386 running windows 3.11.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    Same for phoenix. This is nonsense.
  - IanCal 9y ago
    If I could have invested in half the tech things I've seen which I thought were bloody stupid ideas, I'd be a rich man.
    - wruza 9y ago
      Half is actually good chance, why didn't you invest in all of them?
      - IanCal 9y ago
        1. I'm not a venture capitalist and startups don't/can't generally accept small investments. 2. I thought they were bloody stupid ideas. I'm not convinced that investing in ideas I think are stupid because things I have previously thought were stupid did well is a sound strategy. All it shows is I'm bad at predicting what will do well, so it makes more sense for me to invest broadly across as many markets as possible.
        fasquoika 9y ago
        Your comment reminded me of this xkcd. https://xkcd.com/1497/ https://xkcd.com/1497/
  - glogla 9y ago
    FirefoxOS was a way out of Apple's proprietary walled garden and of being Google's product and information slave. Maybe it was unrealistic to expect it to work out - one relatively small company fighting with Google and Apple - but I guess some people are optimists and want to believe that the world can be made into something else than corporate dystopia or whatever.
    - Kimm0n0 9y ago
      Maybe some of the hardware makers should have thrown some resources at the project.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        What's in it for them that justifies the expense?
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      Firefox OS was the out of reality belief from mozilla that computer were dead in a handful of years to be replaced by mobile, combined with the absolute nonsense that they could compete without hardware manufacturer support. Wanting to believe in something is a thing, neglecting your core product and users to bet on a personal belief is something else.
- coldtea 9y ago
  >Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? Considering this is HN, and not Slashdot, probably several readers...
trapperkeeper74 9y ago
It seemed risky but innovation demands taking risks. Mozilla could use another “product” category than mainly just a browser.
glogla 9y ago
I don't get people complaining about FirefoxOS. It didn't work out because at that time, the phone hardware wasn't ready, and because they didn't have the political power and economies of scale. But at least they tried. Everyone else just gave up and either accepted Apple's overpriced walled garden or handed over their deepest secrets to Google.
- abritinthebay 9y ago
  The reasons it did not work were obvious when they announced it however. It was never going to work, and didn’t. Should never had a cent spent on it.
  - AsyncAwait 9y ago
    It was worth a shot certainly, no company ever didn't undertake projects that didn't pan out in the end, at least somebody tried to break the smartphone duopoly. I can imagine the money being spent on much worse things.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  It was not about the hardware. It was their goals, and their partners. First off their goals, effectively OLPC the phone. A cheap "smartphone" built on web tech that allowed the owner to modify the software as he saw fit. This then clashed with the partners they found, carriers that had zero interest in owner-modifiable phones. It was doomed from the start, but it allowed some execs to pat themselves on the back and tell their fellow gallery dwellers that they had done something for the third world...

Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? And without grave mistakes ? Seriously get a reality check.

trapperkeeper74 9y ago
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt
- thecrazyone 9y ago
  wow, this! This is in fact m status message on Whatsapp since I learnt when recounted by Brene Brown
int_19h 9y ago
The question you should rather be asking is, who in this bloody comment thread didn't expect Firefox OS to fail, back when it was first announced?
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  I thought Firefox OS could've found a niche on low-end phones. There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI, Mozilla wasn't even the first to try it (the Palm Pre got there first). Also, there are tons of phone apps that are just websites in an application wrapper, so it's not like they had to start from scratch to build up their app ecosystem. Lastly, whilst Mozilla has stopped funding it, a fork of it lives on as a smart TV OS for a major TV manufacturer, so it did find a niche, just not the intended one.
  - int_19h 9y ago
    > There's still nothing fundamentally wrong with a phone OS that uses web technologies for its UI There isn't, of course. But that wasn't why it failed. It failed because it didn't answer any questions that weren't already answered, except for some (like "more privacy") that too few people wanted an answer to, to have a market. And that part, unfortunately, was utterly predictable.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      As I said before, I saw Firefox OS's primary niche being low-end phones. In that market, many people barely care about the OS being run. They could've easily racked up some decent sales in this area without many of their customers caring about the long term benefits. In some ways, Firefox OS was a case of unfortunate timing, part of me wonders if it would've been better to have a longer incubation period to make the platform better before announcing it, but another part of me thinks that they had to release it when they did, before the vacuum that Symbian had left behind was completely filled by Android.
      - Brakenshire 9y ago
        Google closed off the market with Android One. In another world they couldn't get it together, or weren't interested in low margin competition. Firefox OS was a reasonable bet, it could have paid off, even if the technology was manifestly limited at the time. I actually wish they'd kept it going as an ongoing experiment, with a very low budget, once they'd done the work to get it running on a device like the Nexus 5, you'd have thought improvements would flow almost automatically from the work on the browser.
    - ido 9y ago
      It was also a really bad implementation. I developed for the firefox os reference phone before the launch - it was atrociously slow. Think low end android phone (of the time!) running software that was 10x slower than android's. It's really hard to describe how slow it was if you didn't personally use a firefox os phone. There were times when it felt significantly slower than a 386 running windows 3.11.
- sametmax 9y ago
  Same for phoenix. This is nonsense.
- IanCal 9y ago
  If I could have invested in half the tech things I've seen which I thought were bloody stupid ideas, I'd be a rich man.
  - wruza 9y ago
    Half is actually good chance, why didn't you invest in all of them?
    - IanCal 9y ago
      1. I'm not a venture capitalist and startups don't/can't generally accept small investments. 2. I thought they were bloody stupid ideas. I'm not convinced that investing in ideas I think are stupid because things I have previously thought were stupid did well is a sound strategy. All it shows is I'm bad at predicting what will do well, so it makes more sense for me to invest broadly across as many markets as possible.
      - fasquoika 9y ago
        Your comment reminded me of this xkcd. https://xkcd.com/1497/ https://xkcd.com/1497/
- glogla 9y ago
  FirefoxOS was a way out of Apple's proprietary walled garden and of being Google's product and information slave. Maybe it was unrealistic to expect it to work out - one relatively small company fighting with Google and Apple - but I guess some people are optimists and want to believe that the world can be made into something else than corporate dystopia or whatever.
  - Kimm0n0 9y ago
    Maybe some of the hardware makers should have thrown some resources at the project.
    - int_19h 9y ago
      What's in it for them that justifies the expense?
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    Firefox OS was the out of reality belief from mozilla that computer were dead in a handful of years to be replaced by mobile, combined with the absolute nonsense that they could compete without hardware manufacturer support. Wanting to believe in something is a thing, neglecting your core product and users to bet on a personal belief is something else.
coldtea 9y ago
>Like you can't make mistakes in business, come on ! Who in this bloody comment thread did something as spectacular as mozilla ? As useful ? As hard ? Considering this is HN, and not Slashdot, probably several readers...

trapperkeeper74 9y ago

It seemed risky but innovation demands taking risks. Mozilla could use another “product” category than mainly just a browser.

glogla 9y ago

I don't get people complaining about FirefoxOS. It didn't work out because at that time, the phone hardware wasn't ready, and because they didn't have the political power and economies of scale. But at least they tried. Everyone else just gave up and either accepted Apple's overpriced walled garden or handed over their deepest secrets to Google.

abritinthebay 9y ago
The reasons it did not work were obvious when they announced it however. It was never going to work, and didn’t. Should never had a cent spent on it.
- AsyncAwait 9y ago
  It was worth a shot certainly, no company ever didn't undertake projects that didn't pan out in the end, at least somebody tried to break the smartphone duopoly. I can imagine the money being spent on much worse things.
digi_owl 9y ago
It was not about the hardware. It was their goals, and their partners. First off their goals, effectively OLPC the phone. A cheap "smartphone" built on web tech that allowed the owner to modify the software as he saw fit. This then clashed with the partners they found, carriers that had zero interest in owner-modifiable phones. It was doomed from the start, but it allowed some execs to pat themselves on the back and tell their fellow gallery dwellers that they had done something for the third world...