Mozilla – The promise

Mozilla must live up to its promise to survive in mobile.  

• Not content with just smartphones, it looks as if Mozilla is also moving into the cut throat tablet market.
• June 3^rd is the date for a joint press event between Mozilla and Foxconn where a new device seems certain to be announced.
• The two companies are expected to formally announce a partnership and to jointly launch a tablet.
• In all likelihood it will be in the 7inch category and will run the Firefox OS.
• At this point it is unclear whether this product will be a reference product or whether Foxconn is about to launch a brand of its own and compete with its customers.
• I suspect that the offering from Foxconn will be very like the Firefox OS phones currently made by Geeksphone.
• It was these products that were shown at Mobile World Congress in February when the platform was launched.
• These products are not intended for sale to consumers but for developers to aid them when they are building apps for the platform.
• I suspect that the tablet will be similar in its intent and that Foxconn is not about to launch its own brand. Not yet anyway.
• Whether Mozilla produces a tablet or a phone is irrelevant.
•  All that matters is that the products live up to the promise that was made when the platform launched. (see here)
• This promise is to deliver mid-high to high smartphone performance at a mid to high feature phone price.
• In tablet terms this would be something like Galaxy-tab performance at an Amazon Kindle price point.
• In the devices and demonstrations that I have seen to date, Mozilla is very far from delivering on this promise and I suspect that the tablet will fare little better.
• Without an ecosystem of any meaningful size, Mozilla has to be better than Android and Windows Phone otherwise no one is going to notice.
• It does not matter how many operators support the platform because if the users don’t want the devices, then they will simply gather dust on the shelves.
• You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
• This is why Mozilla must deliver on the promise or else be relegated to the ranks of the also ran.