I haven't said this bc it seemed obvious but since I was snarky yesterday: My assumption is that Mozilla is real into AI (and real not into most other things) right now is bc the potential remedies in the Google monopoly suit are an extremely real exis...
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@kissane even without the portent of doom, Moz has looooooong wanted to diversify, so often jumps onto various tech bandwagons. Seeing AI as somehow different (especially if you assume some sort of sinister intent, as I've seen implied today) is deeply ahistorical.
Sadly, while the thoughtfulness of those efforts and quality of the efforts has varied, the outcomes are pretty much always the same. The last time they (we?) did a pivot or expansion and it worked was... Firefox 1.0
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unimplemented!("free the imagination")replied to Erin Kissane last edited by
@kissane tbh, and maybe because I love me a good tell all, I am itching to reach the book that recaps the journey of Mozilla from Netscape to now because WHAT A journey
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Erin Kissanereplied to unimplemented!("free the imagination") last edited by
@jalcine I would pay CASH MONEY for that
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@luis_in_brief I mean, "and Moz has been looking for ways to diversify for a loooong time" is in the exact post you're responding to, so we agree there.
What looks different to me about now is a.) the intensity of their focus/investment and b.) the degree to which they're aligning with VC land over intense objections from the ethical tech zone the foundation side has aimed to play well with. (I wasn't an insider even when I was at MoFo, so maybe that's wrong but obvi I think it's right!)
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@kissane @luis_in_brief A sub-point in all of this (from an outsider perspective) has been the extent to which the ecumenical internet-not-web phrasing of the manifesto has allowed this all to happen while taking eyes off the web's much-needed potential to disrupt proprietary gatekeepers, particularly on mobile.
FF could have done to Android and iOS what it did to Windows, if only MoFo thought that was the job.
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@kissane oh of course. The law of perverse incentives strikes again. More competition is not always better!
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@kissane oh, yeah, we're vigorously agreed; that first part about diversification was sort of a subtoot of someone else's (very wrong) toot that's been bugging me all day. Sorry if it came out as negging you!
Re VC-aligned/ethics-mis-aligned: that's a reasonable distinction from past (mis)adventures. No longer as plugged in as I used to be, so hard for me to read where it falls on the spectrum of "we're playing in a new sandbox" to "we're desperate" to "we've drunk the e/acc koolaid".
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@slightlyoff @kissane can you elaborate on what you mean here, and how it is different from FFoxOS?
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@luis_in_brief Oh no worries, zero irritation here!
The goofiest thing to me is that there is actually SO MUCH room for doing work in ethical genAI and ML more broadly and lots of people are doing it, but their experiments so far (the ones I've seen, at least) feel like part of a hermetically sealed world that accepts some really questionable assumptions as invitabilities.
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@kevinriggle I mean, the Moz funding system has been such a weird fragile thing for so long.
It's wild to me how much life can flourish in what is essential a brief lil loophole.
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Alex Russellreplied to Luis Villa last edited by [email protected]
@luis_in_brief @kissane FFOS had the right strategic insight (that a world where mobile is native-dominated means the eventual end of the web), but was saddled with an lack of carrier/opco/hardware dynamics clue. That is, it tried to make the fight a hardware purchase fight, rather than winning incremental JTBD for the web on devices folks already owned.
Engine choice would have been necessary to really contest that, and Mozilla leadership never connected the dots.
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Alex Russellreplied to Luis Villa last edited by [email protected]
@luis_in_brief @kissane FFOS had the right strategic insight (that a world where mobile is native-dominated means the eventual end of the web), but was saddled with an lack of carrier/opco/hardware dynamics clue. That is, it tried to make the fight a hardware purchase fight, rather than winning incremental JTBD for the web on devices folks already owned.
Engine choice would have been necessary to really contest that, and Mozilla leadership never connected the dots.
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@tedmielczarek et. al. ported gecko to iOS at least twice, but leadership never made it a press/PR/regulatory/legislative issue, despite the existential nature of the threat.
When FFOS collapsed, folks who appreciated the problem enough to try left, and the rump went into a desktop-centric, Apple-enabling crouch.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane It's a black mark that @owa is doing much, much more for the web on 3/4ths of the world's client computers than Mozilla has this decade.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane @owa Seriously, go look at the Mozilla Policy blog and see how much energy has been expended on, e.g., net neutrality vs. real browser choice.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane @owa Mozilla hasn't even had a proper go at the scourge of IABs which are suppressing earned market share!
The market share doom loop is accelerated when users you "win" don't actually get the benefits of your product. This is a place where the villains (Google, FB, Apple) are easy to describe in those terms. And yet.
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@luis_in_brief @kissane @owa This kind of malign neglect makes sense if your founding principles treat the web as just another application that routes packets across the internet, which is what you *actually* care about.
But if the web were viewed as a singular human asset...well...you might be willing to fight for it.
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@slightlyoff @luis_in_brief @kissane FxOS was saddled commercially by the lack of support for a very short list of apps. Just the lack of a specific messaging app was a death sentence in many markets.
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@slightlyoff @kissane @luis_in_brief I suspect the Internet-not-Web phrasing was to include Thunderbird.
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@dbaron @kissane @luis_in_brief Also my assumption (see also: the rest of the seamonkey suite). The lesson for me is that missions have consequences.