> But it was a competitive environment where they needed to nail absolutely everything first time and just couldn't pull it off. They didn't need to and couldn

> But it was a competitive environment where they needed to nail absolutely everything first time and just couldn't pull it off. They didn't need to and couldn't have expected to. The real problem was that to get to a successful product, you needed to be willing to lose money for a long time. Android and iPhone were years ahead in terms of polish and optimization, and were not exactly sitting still. Firefox OS was going to be bad for a long time before it could ever be good, and did not have the luxury of its competitors being in the same state any longer (people don't remember how bad Android used to be). These are necessary growing pains for any incredibly complex system: mythical-man-month stuff that should be familiar to anyone in software development. At the time, Mozilla had just renegotiated their search deal for $900 million over 3 years [0], with guaranteed payments that did not depend on actual search traffic. That was a lot more money than the project had ever seen before, and meant there was a limited window in which Mozilla could neglect the desktop browser in the hopes that the mobile OS would take off. In hindsight it proved to be too limited. When Firefox OS was finally killed, management told us [1] something along the lines of, "The growth expectations we had going in to the project turned out to be unrealistic." I think it is okay to stop doing something when it is not working. This is just the inverse of Charlie Munger's advice to, "Figure out what works and do it." One wonders what could have been done with more realistic expectations, though. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/12/firefox-google-uncertainty-ends-with-three-year-extension-of-search-deal/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/12/firef... [1] I was also there, although outside of fixing a few media-handling bugs, I never worked on B2G directly.