> Seriously - go criticize her for her salary, or failure to execute ...
I am well aware of her tenure and good work at Mozilla (from public sources). The argument I was making was that the failure to execute is correlated with not understanding technology well enough. Certainly not claiming that's the only factor, but it might play a part in it.
How will you make expensive long-term bets otherwise? The proof is in the execution, or the mis-execution.
1. Mozilla retired Firefox OS in 2016/17. And in a couple of years, a fork of it (KaiOS, which shares 95% of the same code) gets pre-installed on upwards of 80 million (probably more) units. It could have been a lot more if the OS was better; it really had a shot at low-end phones and TVs.
2. If the team says they need to commit tens of millions of dollars and half a decade or more to create a new, safe programming language for browsers and a prototype - will the CEO approve? And if yes, wouldn't it have been entirely based on advise from others in the room?
3. The world needs an efficient browser engine for multi-core devices coming with bundled GPUs. Requires nearly a decade to get right - how does one commit to that unless the complexity (and not just the rewards) are fully understood?
4. The failure to sell the Servo vision (safety, multi-core) to device manufacturers ultimately rests on the CEO. Instead, the Servo team got axed.
Every technology company needs a CEO who deeply understands the technology.
