This was certainly the right decision. Mozilla and Google have much different goals, and it would have been silly for Mozilla to commit the necessary resources to this idea when the benefits to Mozilla and the customer are not guaranteed. Implementing this properly could take over a year and the end result may not even improve the product.
Google decided to go forward with this project because the corporation will greatly benefit if it succeeds. Mozilla does not have the correct payoff to take the risk.
I don't think anyone is claiming that the concept of "circles" is a radical innovation. It's quite natural, and similar (if not identical) ideas have been expressed many times before (from what I've heard about "circles" anyway).
What's news is that Google is putting its full weight behind the idea, including a slick implementation. And it might turn out to be a better alternative to Facebook, which would mean a big shift in the markets over the next few years.
The title's a little suggestive. It was an 'enhancement' bug request, and the response was that it should be implemented as an extension. Then it was marked WONTFIX. The assignee thought it sounded cool.
Haven't various sharing models that look very similar to Circles been around for some time?
I have LOTS of friend lists on Facebook. I have Close Friends, Family, Teacher/RA/Restricted, Strangers and then my cohorts broken down by class for various reasons. Now, sometimes Facebook extrapolates from privacy settings for a post and changes my global privacy setting which is annoying but it's trivial to keep an eye on it.
But basically, my geeky posts get my cohorts, my funny posts get posted openly and my rants about drug policy or whatever are blocked from my family.
This is the same organization that feels that producing a MSI installer for Windows or providing some other way to customize the installation/patching experience is a waste of time.
Not to repeat the same "then do it yourself" thing, but if it were really so important to so many corporations, wouldn't one of them have done it (or hired/sponsored someone to do it) by now? I'm just getting the impression that, for all the yelling, it's not that big a deal.
Yeah, sure. Expecting a third-party to maintain an installer is not a recipe for success. A few projects try to do that and provide some sort of group policy support -- but they're trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. It just doesn't work well.
Security updates are a bigger deal. Auto-update doesn't cut it with large networks with constrained bandwidth or where users don't have admin rights. When you use sane installers, that problem magically disappears.
My previous employer was willing to invest some $ to give back to Mozilla for just this purpose, but was unable to contact anyone at Moz who gave a crap.
My current employer gave up -- we automatically uninstall Firefox as it appears. Our primary browser is now Chrome -- 80% of intranet hits are Chrome today. Chrome addresses most of these issues, and my users are happy. (Except for the users of some Oracle app that uses IE6)
The Mozilla people are fat and happy because of the ad deal that they have with Google. When Google decides that they don't need Firefox anymore, the Moz folks will probably wish they hadn't given a virtual finger to all IT folks.
They also provide a patched version of Firefox that supports management via Group Policy and a tool that lets you generate a MSI of firefox bundled with extensions.
Google decided to go forward with this project because the corporation will greatly benefit if it succeeds. Mozilla does not have the correct payoff to take the risk.