Isn't closing down projects (that don't seem to be succeeding and are taking resources) exactly evidence of focus?
Eich wasn't fired. He quit because he felt Mozilla was put under too much pressure because of him. Ironic you should remark that given the point of the post you're replying to: he quit exactly because of the reason you are using as justification.
I wonder what will happen when it leaks out the new CEO voted for Trump/Hillary.
There are lots of people who believe that Persona, if properly integrated with browsers could have taken off. You can find old HN threads where people were begging them to do x y an z and it instead remained a neat but underutilized project.
FirefoxOS? Either commit to it or don't, but the way it was rolled out and abandoned after a few years didn't feel especially strategic.
Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Compared to what other companies are doing, Persona's source-code is open source [1] and you or others are free to continue that project if you think it makes a difference. As it happens Mozilla isn't under any obligation to you or anybody else to continue a project that is draining resources and given its open-source nature, if nobody picks it up, then I doubt its viability.
Firefox OS from an "open web" perspective, was primarily a vehicle to push for the standardization of web APIs needed for mobile devices. It has succeeded in doing that and many Firefox OS improvements are now incorporated into Firefox for Android. But given the complete dominance of Android on the low end, it would have been extremely foolish to continue it, as that would have been literally burning through cash. Consider that even Microsoft has failed spectacularly, given all their resources and experience in building operating systems.
> Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Wait, people are allowed to speak their own mind? Oh, the horror.
Thank you for keeping the Persona dream alive. It turns out that being open source wasn't sufficient for Persona to be able to be continued by a third party: we accidentally baked in some intractable centralization, and the code was too much of a mess. Moreover, I'm not sure that Persona's proposed architecture makes sense outside of a browser vendor.
"Let's get something straight first. I'm not a fan of excuses. Persona failed to achieve its goals, and I'd rather we own up to what it was good at, and what it failed at, learn from it, and keep fighting for better authentication on the internet because that's what matters."
1. In hindsight, I firmly believe that Persona's emphasis on browser integration was a red herring, and directly resulted in an architecture that was intractably centralized.
2. We committed massively to Firefox OS relative to our size and revenue.
With respect to your first point, is this a catch-22 that might ever be solved? The place that is best capable of providing the right UX for something like SSO/identity management/authentication does seem to be the browser, yet even if it isn't a red herring (as you seem to think) it certainly doesn't seem at this point to be a path that can lead to success (just off the top of my head: Persona, Microsoft's first "Passport" attempt in the Windows 9x era, Microsoft's CardSpace in the Vista era) because it's obviously not enough for a browser to support it if websites don't support it...
It's possible that the FIDO Alliance, with enough support from large enterprises, will be able to compel browsers into implementing something native. Otherwise, it feels like anything in this space will need to bootstrap itself by, first and foremost, working on the Web without special consideration by browsers.
I recall well all the meetings and arguments from the early days. The commitment to Firefox OS (née B2G) was late. It came after two years from B2G launch in late July 2011, until after Ben Adida left in July 2013. Mike Hanson took over for Ben on the identity team side; Fernando Jiménez Moreno from Telefónica (https://github.com/ferjm) did the B2G-side work.
Maybe that was right on time. I don't think so: Facebook Connect was even more entrenched, and Android installed base was climbing out of the Gingerbread 2.3 swamp. The commitment may have been massively massive once started, from your point of view. However, it was almost two years late precisely because we had to argue endlessly, from executive level down, against Ben's preferred non-Firefox/non-OS browserid adoption strategy: the JS shim library.
3. Can you give us more insight into how the Eich ordeal is looked at in retrospect at Mozilla? Would it happen again in a Peter Thiel kind of situation?
Respectfully, I'd rather not wade into that on HN. It's in the past, and there's a great deal of nuance that would be hard to convey here. I'm confident that Mozilla is in a good place today.
the way it was rolled out and abandoned after a few years didn't feel especially strategic
This doesn't "feel" like a very well substantiated argument either. It received little traction, users didn't like the performance of the devices at the price points needed to penetrate the market, key apps (hi WhatsApp!) had announced they would not port , and Google responded in force with Android One. It took enormous amounts of resources from Firefox development. Looks to me like they committed as far as they could without bringing the entire company under.
Ok, Eich wasn't fired, but he resigned because his own employees were calling for him to be fired.
Mozilla Foundation people (i.e. not his employees) actually. But anyway, I hope this argument works for the president too.
> This doesn't "feel" like a very well substantiated argument either. It received little traction, users didn't like the performance of the devices at the price points needed to penetrate the market
I had a toy firefox phone to play with that had potato level processing power. I was actually surprised by how smooth everything was, way better than android on way less hardware. Firefox seems to be the only browser optimized for portables.
Andreas Gal and I were among those calling for Persona to be integrated into Firefox ASAP, for scaling leverage against Metcalfe's Law. We had frustrating, protracted arguments about it with Ben Adida. I found resistance to the idea to be based on ill-concealed fear and loathing of dealing with the Firefox codebase, and (possibly as a consequence, not cause) explicit preference for doing a JS "shim" library and promoting it to web developers in competition with FBConnect.
That worked about as well as you would expect.
Eventually, Mark Mayo got Firefox Accounts going, but it was non-federated. In truth so was Persona: Mozilla ran the only IdP of note. Also, prior to Accounts, the protocol seemed to fork in anti-federated ways, but to me that was just teething pain, to be overcome by further evolution.
The fatal problems were threefold:
1. Facebook had huge scale and even in 2011 (browserid days) it had already won.
2. The Persona team was averse to integrating into Firefox, for whatever client population "interop readiness" pressure that might have put on servers (Metcalfe's Law is a barrier to new protocol adoption).
3. Users don't grok federated identity. Relying party? (That's the first party, the site to which you're browsing with clear intent and understanding of its identity -- assuming you haven't been phished.) Identity provider? (What's this sketchy popup I get every week or so asking me to re-login to some third party?) The whole federated Rp/Idp/browser three-body problem is confusing and looks like some kind of hack, not just phishing but popup malware.
The initial centralized or under-federated situation to me was not fatal, but could have become so if problems 1-3 didn't doom the whole effort.
Firefox OS indeed suffered from slow and half-hearted commitment from July 2011 on. Not even half-hearted: at first, it was a pirate ship. The CEO told another exec that in previous jobs, someone would have been fired for launching it via a post to mozilla.dev.platform (even though drafts of that post had been discussed and vetted by all execs who were paying attention).
Don't get me wrong, even with aggressive resourcing from mid-2011, Firefox OS might not have made it. But half-hearted, slow-rolled "investment" was worse than either "do" or "do not". No half measures, as Mike in "Breaking Bad" taught.
None of my employees called for me to be fired. You're confusing six Mozilla Foundation employees with people who worked for me in the (arm's length, for profit subsidiary) Mozilla Corporation. See http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/mozilla-employees-to... (which, typical of coverage at the time, fails to note those employees worked for an entirely separate org from the one I was CEO of).
Eich wasn't fired. He quit because he felt Mozilla was put under too much pressure because of him. Ironic you should remark that given the point of the post you're replying to: he quit exactly because of the reason you are using as justification.
I wonder what will happen when it leaks out the new CEO voted for Trump/Hillary.