[beefman]

Thanks for the info. I don't think anyone's accusing the Persona team of being half-hearted. Execution was great! But I will accuse Mozilla leadership of being tragically poor. It's nice to think about "sustainability" in a post-web world, but sustainability for Mozilla must start with Firefox. Mozilla is Firefox. And Mozilla has the billions to make it rock. So when resources are diverted away while there's still work to do, you should see red flags and look for better focus right away. When Apple was the iPod, we made damn sure it was the best possible iPod before anything else.

[cbtacy]

"And Mozilla has the billions to make it rock."

Really? What do you base that statement on?

[beefman]

They have a contract with Google that guarantees them $1B over 3 years.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-paying-mozilla-300-mill...

[yeukhon]

1B is very little. I would focus on your other point:

So when resources are diverted away while there's still work to do, you should see red flags and look for better focus right away.

[dllthomas]

I'm not sure 1B is very little - it's thousands of programmer-years. It is weird to characterize 1B over 3 years as "billions" unless there are substantial funds coming from other sources.

[tedmielczarek]

That's the vast majority of Mozilla's income, you can check the publicly-available financials. It's small potatoes compared to the companies Mozilla competes against: Google, Apple, Microsoft.