I'm a Mozilla employee, and though I wasn't directly on FirefoxOS I did work with and serve that team. Telefonica was by far the most engaged partner we had, they had good engineers and seemed genuinely committed to the success of the project. There were lots of disagreements on product direction, sometimes we were right and sometimes they we right. Ultimately we were both wrong - I don't think there was a winning product strategy. Not on the high end or the low end. In that situation everyone ends up with bad feelings.

It does make it hard to learn from the experience though. Maybe the lesson is about learning how to quit at the right time.

I want to second that.

I'm a Mozilla employee and I was very deeply involved in Firefox OS work.

On the engineering level, Telefonica was very helpful and working with them was actually a good experience. (can't say the same about all partners :().

Hindsight 20/20 is a powerful bias and it's easy now to talk about why FxOS wasn't meant to be.

All I can say, is that we tried our best and designed a pretty usable device in the end - just week ago I launched my Z3 with latest nightly of Firefox OS 3.0 (from April 2016) and damn, it's actually pretty nice and super smooth, and I'm speaking as a user of the Pixel.

I deeply believe that there's room for an open source operating system and that web stack is a good platform to base it on. The legacy of Firefox OS in form of tons of spec work and engine improvements (Firefox memory usage!) makes it much easier to do this now and I hope someone will.

I agree zbraniecki! And that's part of pain... we actually learnt a lot, enough to know how to do most things right now.

But anyone building a new mobile OS will be facing the elephant in the room: will you get the top 5 apps to run or be ported on your OS? Without that, no way you can succeed. For FxOS, the unwillingness of Whatsapp to build an official app was more damaging that all the other reasons I read about.

OSes are commodity vehicules for apps, which are rightly what users care about. This gives a lot of power to prominent apps, which are often silos themselves - so maybe the fight to give is to displace these!

Thanks for both your replies, yours and Ian's

I've also known Telefonica engineers and they are some of the best. Maybe my bitterness against the behemoth clouded my words and I apologize for that.

The problem, as Lance said, is their inability to execute anything that doesn't provide them a direct, noticeable impact on sales (said to me by a Telefonica exec)

What I'm truly sorry for is the fact that the Firefox OS flopped. As an engineer, I know that you can build an awesome product but the execs may trash it if it doesn't go in the expected direction. And, with Telefonica, that happens too often.

Just a note that I have a Firefox OS powered Panasonic TV and it does its job fine. I didn't know it was running Firefox OS until I powered it on for the first time after purchase and saw the logo.

It does have it's glitches (TV guide screen UI is very unresponsive) but I have few complaints. The Youtube app probably gets some usage as well as screen mirroring from Android/Windows PC.

You can all be correct here - the Telefonica people may have been excellent, but the Telefonica machine is unable to execute, simply by being so inefficient. Meanwhile the brand is damaged almost beyond repair.

"For those who don't know Telefónica, it's something akin to T-Mobile or AT&T [...] they had to change the name and branding of their phone division [...] because people hated them so much."

Comcast. The word you're looking for is Comcast.

More similar would be Verizon which was the despised GTE back in the 1980s.

Here in NYC, Verizon was the despised NYNEX.

A more recent example would be the merger of the despised Time Warner Cable with Charter, now renamed to Spectrum.