There is a #phenomenon where a person successful in one area decides to focus their #energies on an unrelated area, to the detriment of their more successful work

There is a #phenomenon where a person successful in one area decides to focus their #energies on an unrelated area, to the detriment of their more successful work.

Michael Jordan, a #basketball wizard, decided to try to become a professional #baseball player. He (to use a technical term) #sucked at it.

After the incredible success of the single "Jump" from the 1984 #album, Eddie van Halen became obsessed with adding more synthesizer to Van Halen's music. The reality he never accepted: nobody ever went to a #concert to watch Eddie van Halen play #keyboards.

Why do I bring this up? Because it's the closest thing I can think of to explain the way that Mozilla has behaved for years. #Mozilla had #Firefox, a great, freedom-and-privacy-respecting web #browser used by millions of people. Instead of focusing on that, they pissed away engineering time, money, and #users by chasing #irrelevant crap.

Nobody ever used Firefox or supported Mozilla to build an encrypted file transfer service.
Or to become just another player in the VPN market.
Or to build a VR browser.
Or a reading list manager.
Or an IoT device manager.
Or a Macromedia / Adobe Flash clone.
Or authentication service.
Or geolocation service.
#AI #junk.
Voice recognition.
Journalism.
Built-in #ads.
Search engine.

Van Halen continued to be #successful despite Eddie's #synthesizer obsession, not because of it.

If Mozilla continues, it will be despite their #distractions, not because of them.

#VanHalen #Jump #why