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Mozilla: Following In Sun's Faltering Footsteps?
snydeq writes: The trajectory of Mozilla, from the trail-blazing technologies to the travails of being left in the dust, may be seen as paralleling that of the now-defunct Unix systems giant Sun. The article claims, "Mozilla has become the modern-day Sun Microsystems: While known for churning out showstopping innovation, its bread-and-butter technology now struggles." It goes on to mention Firefox's waning market share, questions over tooling for the platform, Firefox's absence on mobile devices, developers' lack of standard tools (e.g., 'Gecko-flavored JavaScript'), and relatively slow development of Firefox OS, in comparison with mobile incumbents.
Firefox is still my favorite Windows browser. IE still sucks, and Chrome chews up so much memory that it is useless after a few hours. On Mac, I prefer Safari, although I keep Firefox around for those rare sites that don't support Safari.
So I think they're still doing a good job on the desktop/laptop browser market. I just hope that their struggles in the mobile market don't impact the desktop.
No sig? Sigh...
Sun died a slow death following 1970's midwest business principals in a 2000's world. Even its open source efforts, although noble, were crippled by managements tunnel vision. Sun was practically predicated on the phrase "cash money millionaires" and everything, absolutely everything was licensed and contracted in perpetuity. The allure of Linux combined with chipset advances and the culture, in my opinion, are what killed Sun.
the help was no help either. Suns doc portal online was a festering carbunkle with a search feature and their community of greybeards on IRC were nothing less than violent toward anyone who dared to question the OS without having studiously memorized the entire canon of SUN scriptures. Being gobbled up by Oracle/whatever was an inevitability.
now, does Mozilla fit that profile? maybe yes, maybe who cares. theyre already the realmedia player of the browser world with a video chat system and an inline tile targeted advertising program. They validate your searches with google by default, and often times new releases steamroll your configuration options like download path. They arguably havent worked toward their stated mission since 2006 but that isnt the point. Mozillas license alone gives the community so much power over its direction that its path and principle arent relevant. One profoundly stupid move is all it takes before a massive fork, and there have been forks. iceweasel itself is proof the mozilla brand is only as effective as its adherence to principal.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you care about privacy, ability to remove tracking, block ads and customize your web experience - Firefox is unbeatable. No other browser has ability to allow extensions to do so much (quite by design, I am sure - as the other 3 major browser makers are driven specifically by desire to mine information and sell your clicks to advertisers). As such, I don't see a viable replacement to Firefox in foreseeable future.
I suspect that the "big 3" would very much like Firefox to become a failure, if only because it would make their click-tracking ad-inserting behavior-recording job so much easier.
Thank you, FF, Ghostery, AdBlock Edge, Cookie Controller, Ref Control, UA Control and, of course, Greasemonkey, (without whom Google would be still tracking my ever click :) )
What killed Sun wasn't just aimless dicking around, it was the endless cycle of purchasing companies that had stuff they were missing, then laying off all of the top-paid employees — the ones who understood the products they'd just bought. Then they failed at an iteration of their Ultrasparc processor, it took them so long that by the time it came to market it would have been old and slow, so they skipped it. They never recovered in the land of single-thread performance, instead optimizing for the kind of workload which was already at the time increasingly being handled by cheap x86 clusters. This was an obvious road to destruction, and many of us pointed this out at the time, not that anyone expected Sun to listen to the people in the trenches by that time when they had proven conclusively that they were interested in no such thing.
Solaris provided only two innovative features probably ever: containers and ZFS. Both were too little too late to save Sun, and ZFS got open-sourced anyway, eliminating any potential competitive advantage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sun's attitude always was "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Which was largely true, until they weren't cool anymore. But at that point the company was so big and entrenched that they'd lost sight of that. It was no longer "If we make cool things, people will buy them." Instead it was "If we keep making the things we've been making all along, people will buy them." The people in charge no longer understood that the engine of their success was constant innovation, and sat back and rested on their success. Assuming they ever understood that in the first place. It's entirely possible that Sun's success was entirely accidental. The gimmicks they started using to try to attract talent exposed their lack of understanding. It was not "Work for us and you'll get to design some of the coolest, bleeding edge technology in the world." It was "Work for us and we'll have a circus at work while we flail around aimlessly (And make you fill in a 12 page form to unlock version control.)"
Google's now in that position of making cool stuff that people will buy and use because it's cool. Their current leadership also seems to understand that they need to keep innovating to remain in the position they are now. Every so often you see some jackass writing about how Google needs to stop spending so much on "Useless R&D." I would suggest that you avoid taking stock advice from those people. Anywhoo, given that Google seems to understand that innovation is the key to success, the question is, can Mozilla keep up with them? Mozilla should have the advantage that they're able to focus on the one thing they do and do that really well. But to make serious advances in market share, they'd have to significantly stand out from the competition. I'm not entirely sure I can see that happening.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Last time I checked, Sun was a corporation selling pro-level branded hardware and insanely expensive services (like they all do), being bought out by Oracle and Mozilla was a FOSS orgranisation watching over branding and provided guidance to a set of web- and mobile-centric FOSS projects.
Those two things couldn't be more wider apart.
As for Mozillas market and mindshare being eaten by Google: That is due to Google releasing the awesome Chrome browser, because the web is too important an income vector to them, so they decided to pull it inhouse and cut out the policy middleman. Mozilla itself is ten git commits away from switching from Gecko to Blink, and the devs could probalby do this in a weekend. Probalby have been doing it privately already just for the kicks. So no big deal, it's all free and replacable anyway.
The one big thing that Mozilla has going for them is their branding, and as far as I can tell that is going pretty well. Right now, anything standing between a totalitarian Googlezied control of the web and freedom loving citizens is Mozilla - at least in most peoples perception and if they continue playing their cards right, relyably drumming the hip and flashy but yet still underdog/freedom theme, they'll continue to do just fine.
IMHO Firefox OS was a bit of a stretch, but if they manage to keep things simple and intuitive in that ecosystem, having a mobile plattform that puts web-technology front and center could be just exactly the right thing a continuingly fragmented mobile space needs.
As for the browser: Google-independant "Hello" voicechat by Telefonica, Search by Yahoo, neat, google-independant environment syncing, etc. All these things aren't too bad. In fact they're all pretty interesting to me. And I am an IT opinion leader, as we all are. That should have Apple and Google raising their eyebrows.
What we need is a replacement for the Google online suite of apps, and if Mozilla can manage to pull yet another underdog of the industry in to help build that, we have a free-free competitor to all the Google stuff. Desperately needed!
Meantime, Mozilla IMHO is doing just fine making neat celebrative movies and playing to the hippster independant "we are different and free" crowd. That's what made apple big. Apple, however, is a PLC, dependant on profit. Google is too. Mozilla, OTOH, is mostly a FOSS organisation. They can all go on vacation 10 years and then come back and everything will still be the same for them. What does that have to do with revenue and eval problems Sun had back when Oracle scooped them up? ... Nothing.
I see Mozilla as a hip web-zentric play of the old and bland EFF & GNU organisations with a solid focus on branding (very smart btw.). They'll do just fine if they don't spread themselves to thin and wait for the big boys get all paniky about profits somewhere down the line.
I've got FF in everyday use and will continue to use it. If they build an independant contacts application for mobile and web alongside a calendar and perhaps some simple docs management, preferably all of it encrypted, I'll be on board from day one.
Google doesn't have to get *that* big or know everything.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
At the time Opera was spyware/adware and was treated like plague blankets so for all intents and purposes it might as well have been Moz because nobody was shelling out $30 USD just to get Opera decrapified.
It is just too bad somebody at Moz is pulling an Elop and fucking the company for Google, because ever since they have turned Moz into a shitty ersatz Chrome their share has just nosedived, even those that are hooked on the extensions going to one of the alternate like PaleMoon,Waterfox, IceDragon,etc. I personally tossed FF from my software collection I give my customers, I now give 'em Seamonkey if they remember Netscape and PaleMoon if they don't. I mean if all I'm going to get from FF is an ersatz Chrome, why not just run Chrome?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.