Whatever war Mozilla dives into next, I really hope it's a winnable one, because free software can't afford to have execs who keep on making dumb mistakes. I was telling anyone who would listen from day one that both Firefox OS and Ubuntu Phone were doomed to failure.

All it took to make that prediction was a basic understanding of network effects and the history of client platform businesses.

Jumping into the mobile market after Google and Apple had carved it up was insanity. As a consumer, changing the platform you use to access your apps and services carries a high switching cost--most likely you'll lose some of those apps and services and be forced to find replacements.

Customers don't like to make that switch because it's hard, and it's exceedingly hard to think of cases where it's happened. Microsoft established its dominance over the APIs for building IBM PC software in the 1980s and is still the only game in town. It established its dominance over the formats for business documents in the 1990s and is still the only game in town (nearly - Google Docs is at around 20%). Facebook established its dominance over the social graph by the end of the aughts and, you guessed it, is still the only game in town.

Now the web platform is an interesting case because Mozilla and Google really did succeed in wresting that away from Microsoft, but this situation was special for two reasons: one, because Microsoft stopped investing in its browser for more than half a decade (discouraged in part by government action), and two, because the web platform was largely standardized so most sites that worked with IE worked with other browsers. But it was still a tough fight.

Perhaps winning that battle made Mozilla overconfident and contributed to their belief that they could lay a claim to the mobile platform as well. But it was almost impossible from the beginning because there were no users left to win. Once people have settled on a platform they just don't want to leave it. Mozilla did identify the necessary strategy: you have to go after people who aren't yet locked in, and it was their intent to do that in emerging markets. But there really weren't that many people left who were ready to own phones yet didn't, and this time they were facing incumbents who weren't asleep at the wheel.

So, they lost, and underinvested in the desktop browser market in the process, and lost market share there too.

When your management team makes bets it can't win and loses its core market in the process, it's just called bad management. Anyone who was involved in these decisions and is still at Mozilla should be sacked. I think Andreas is wrong about the desktop browser market being lost because in 2017 a website will still render just as well in Firefox as it does in Chrome. In 2022 that might not be the case.

As an aside, with a $400M annual budget and a big win against Microsoft back in the day under their belt, I can see how hubris could have gotten the better of Mozilla. But what I cannot see is how Mark Shuttleworth went and did the same thing: fighting an unwinnable platform war against Apple and Google. He is a smart guy. The decision to do Ubuntu Phone boggled my mind from day one.

If I were at Mozilla I would focus on the desktop browser and I would aim to win there. It's where they have the best shot. If they lose and Google comes to truly dominate the market then Google will use every dirty trick they can to lock it down, control it, and turn it into profits, they are a corporation. If they're going to try to fight some other battle, it should be for a blue ocean, preferably one they can leverage their existing position into.