True story: I had a one-slide internal presentation I made at Moz, that read "people will say and do and believe literally any crazy bullshit if the only alternative they can see is to feel powerless over something they care about."
One keenly-felt personal failure of my time there was that l could never convince the org that this is not just a truth, but a strategy. So now, people who care a lot about Mozilla have been made to feel powerless a lot in the last decade.
I have a suspicion that idea of "surprise and delight" has poisoned the world of technical comms, especially when it comes to "products" that people depend on, especially when it comes to the infrastructure of people's lives.
There's no world where anyone is delighted if their plumbing, or oven, or cane or wheelchair or elevator or blender or brakes or or or surprises them. None. Consistency and reliability is everything.
The failure mode of "surprise and delight" is "startled and terrified."
I have, but I think that software covers such a span of utility that it's not the right analogy. The tool definitely has room to evolve and improve, but the bedrock principles under it don't have the same degree of freedom.
@wlonk @mhoye I was not familiar and don't quite understand how that maps on here. Is the idea that plumbing, ovens, elevators are "commodities" in the sense of that "the market treats their instances as equivalent or nearly so with no regard to who produced them", whereas (some) software artifacts are "products", meaning "Non-commodity items", in the sense that they have "many aspects of product differentiation, such as the brand, the user interface and the perceived quality"? And does "commoditization curve" refer to what "occurs as a goods or services market loses differentiation across its supply base, often by the diffusion of the intellectual capital necessary to acquire or produce it efficiently"? (quotes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity)
Is the upshot of what you're suggesting that much software is still being treated as a product when it should have transitioned into a commodity by now? Or somehow the opposite?
@wlonk IIUC @mhoye 's point (which really resonates with me), a core problem here is the attempt to productize infrastructure.
Given that,
> In general, infrastructure has been defined as "the physical components of interrelated systems providing commodities and services essential to enable, sustain, or enhance societal living conditions" and maintain the surrounding environment. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrastructure)
The attempt to commoditize or productize infrastructure confuses the order of things and the function of infra, since infra is a condition of possibility for the availability of commodities and the production of products. The productization of infra seems directly counter what a rational socio-economic order would pursue, afaiu, which is rather (as much as possible) the infrastructuralization of commodities: i.e., taking things from manual toil, to supply limited exchange (e.g., via markets), and finally offering them as effectively guaranteed and on demand.
@mhoye So is "the failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole'" a corollary of this, or is this a corollary of that?
I would happily be surprised by something simply working extremely well and not annoying me :-)
@mhoye I've never worked there or have any first hand knowledge, so their decisions have confused me, I can't quite figure out what the executives and staff at Mozilla motivation and incentives are. I thought maybe there was some toxic holdovers from Netscape and Silicon Valley startup bro culture. There are some very misaligned incentives between what people who use Mozilla tech want and what Mozilla wants to be, and misalignment with the web industry which is why Mozilla tech never became the preferred open source reference implementation of the web platform, but Chromium did.
Who are Mozilla executives trying to impress with these decisions, who is this all for?
@raven667 @mhoye Having worked there briefly (2008-2010) I offer this incomplete insight:
- The executives are desperate to find a stable revenue stream other than search engine kickbacks.
- They have tried a whole bunch of possibilities, usually pretty well aligned with whatever the rest of "tech" sees as the current shiny new thing.
- They never give any of these possibilities more than a couple of years to pan out, even if it's blatantly obvious that they would need more time than that to ramp up.
One of the challenges of telling any history of Mozilla is how many of the projects we see as having been abandoned too soon by Mozilla have way more complicated backstories. Persona solved a bunch of problems we're still trying to solve today, but Persona also just... never got any real uptake. The orgs that would have needed to adopt it were never willing to surrender their own primacy - "log in with [whoever]" - as authorities over authentication.
@mhoye @zwol @raven667 Mozilla seemingly never understood that Persona adoption would always have been a slow grass-root thing, for exactly the reasons you mentioned.
(Adds to the Mozilla-being-out-of-touch topic probably.)
For me, personally, I had already planned adding support it, but they cancelled it faster than I managed to deploy it.
(Not everyone continuously rewrites their web stack.)
@mhoye @zwol @raven667 If they are concerned about their survival they should stop starting new side-projects altogether.
Them starting-then-cancelling projects is way worse than never starting them:
Every time they do that, fewer people will give them a chance in the future, because why should people commit, if Mozilla obviously won't?
@mhoye While I suspect your intended definition of "people" here is Firefox users, I strongly suspect the same wisdom applies to Firefox developers as well.
In the last few days, I've seen some Mozilla employees do incredible mental gymnastics to paint their employer in the best possible light (probably because their salary depends on it) while (probably) being just as powerless to affect top-level organizational policy as the users.
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