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.
@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?
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