"Still, Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure

"Still, Firefox OS could have a big impact on the Web even if it never gains significant market share. By pushing the Web forward, Mozilla is helping to ensure that mobile websites will continue to be relevant even as developers create hundreds of thousands of proprietary apps. Firefox could lose the battle for the smartphone OS market but still win the war for open standards." I think this is the big point. Mozilla doesn't have to win. We're all winning from it's push. It's like when you compare a startup to an open source project. If the startup fails, it's a complete failure. If an open source project doesn't succeed in becoming popular, we still have it's legacy bare open on which to build on. The majority of startups failing don't contribute anything to humanity. The majority of open code does, in their small, incremental ways.