Re:Mozilla names new CEO as it pivots to data privacy
by ksec on Saturday February 10, 2024 @06:20AM
(#39325326)
The idea of Mobile WebOS wasn't bad on itself, but execution at Mozilla, both management direction and workload just wasn't up to the speed of Google Android or Apple iOS. They were targeting Smartphone of $35, thinking in the future most of the smartphone sold, the entry level phone will be at that price range. Falling into the same fallacy as Bill Gates, all hardware will eventually cost next to nothing, software is expensive. [Note] Bill said that in 00s and Mozilla thought of it in early 10s. So somewhat 20-30 years later Silicon Valley still has zero understanding of how Hardware and Supply Chains works.
Not only did that $35 dollars phone never happened, average selling price of iPhone was $700+ selling at hundreds of millions of unit every year. Mozilla later had to revise the target to $50 phone which was still wrong. It just shows software people simply dont get it.
And they had the vision of running the OS, preferably with Javascript only. Writing all modules in JS if possible. It was the early days before asm.js or WASM. And they spend a lot of time battling this. One engineers even wrote the culture was so JS-focused no one dare to ask why some of these aren't written in C++.
All that combine with rapid pace of development in Smartphone software. They lost out and it is now forked into KaiOS. Which is doing surprisingly well without Mozilla.
Mozilla kind of feels like Xerox in many ways. A lot of great "ideas" came out of it. But they never manage to capture much value.
[Note] It does seems counterintuitive, but 20 years later may be ChatGPT / LLM will make software cheaper faster than hardware getting cost reduction.
Not only did that $35 dollars phone never happened, average selling price of iPhone was $700+ selling at hundreds of millions of unit every year. Mozilla later had to revise the target to $50 phone which was still wrong. It just shows software people simply dont get it.
And they had the vision of running the OS, preferably with Javascript only. Writing all modules in JS if possible. It was the early days before asm.js or WASM. And they spend a lot of time battling this. One engineers even wrote the culture was so JS-focused no one dare to ask why some of these aren't written in C++.
All that combine with rapid pace of development in Smartphone software. They lost out and it is now forked into KaiOS. Which is doing surprisingly well without Mozilla.
Mozilla kind of feels like Xerox in many ways. A lot of great "ideas" came out of it. But they never manage to capture much value.
[Note] It does seems counterintuitive, but 20 years later may be ChatGPT / LLM will make software cheaper faster than hardware getting cost reduction.