[rchaud]

> If the future of the web relies on developers groveling at the feet of a manager,

I see a lot of this 'devs v suits' type language used on HN, with the implication being that the developers are principled stewards of technology suffering under the cosh of KPI-obsessed MBAs.

What causes this? The majority of product managers I've met have technical backgrounds, and they have also had to cut corners to keep their product roadmaps on track.

[52-6F-62]

From what I've seen, it doesn't matter if they have a technical background. Hubris operates the same way in people—it serves to blind them of all but their own ambitions as they lose a more complete picture of reality in favour of expressing their egos.

At least in cases that line up. I doubt it's so universal. I've seen something quite similar happen first hand. To the point that I'm pretty beside myself about it. Hard to understand if you don't just assign it to them steamrolling anything but their ego. It's the only way you could just let core functions in your core product falter and not have a plan for it.

That said, I don't think that applies to excluding Firefox in this particular case. It doesn't sound permanent, and it sounds like it just hinges on FF catching up their available APIs to suit.

[willseth]

Not only that, but developers have at least as much incentive to push to avoid cross platform implementations. More work, more complexity, bugs, maintenance, etc., and many (most?) do all of their dev and testing on Chrome anyway.

Web monoculture simply has a set of labor/$ incentives builtin. It's the default, and it's hard (and probably getting harder) to appreciate the long term system-wide risk that accumulates by allowing one company to control web standards.

I don't see it as a dev vs. suits issue at all. If anything, in my experience it's people who remember Internet Explorer and people who don't.