[lifthrasiir]

I wouldn't be this cynical if everyone said the same thing to the Firefox OS back then. It turned out that Firefox OS did have much potential to countries with less mobile penetration, as observed from KaiOS's success in India.

Was the Firefox OS less future-focused than Servo? I don't think so, and given that Servo actually did survive long enough to give back to the mainline Gecko (in the form of WebRender and so on). It might or might not make actual sense to conclude that as the ROI shrinks, but it is always easier to claim the decision was wrong after that decision.

[toyg]

Well, many claimed that back when decisions were being taken. They could have scrapped FFOS much sooner than they did.

> Firefox OS did have much potential to countries with less mobile penetration, as observed from KaiOS's success in India.

Such "success" is inevitably fleeting. Eventually a "developing" market develops to demand more established and desirable products. Nokia had those markets under lock and key for a long time, back when EU/US had already moved on to iPhone-like products; but then consumers inevitably gravitated towards the fashionable.

[acdha]

> Nokia had those markets under lock and key for a long time, back when EU/US had already moved on to iPhone-like products; but then consumers inevitably gravitated towards the fashionable.

“fashionable” is the wrong word: it should be “functional”. Those old Nokia phones were very good at being phones but that's it — maybe a minimal messaging app, but anyone who used one knows just how limited those old mobile OSes were.

I think FirefoxOS was an interesting idea but there are really important thresholds you need to be able to hit and that was the critical error they made. There was no plausible way to grow the low-end feature phone market into a large enough business to get there when competing with cheap knock-off Android devices. If they'd started years earlier or gotten a major vendor on-board, maybe, but at their funding levels there was no way to make the numbers work and it was pretty clear at the time that this was a low-probability gamble.

[thematrixturtle]

Not if the platform can leverage its position to move upmarket, as Japanese, Korean and now Chinese manufacturers have.