What's the point?

Posted Mar 9, 2012 13:27 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

It's partners like Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Qualcomm (and a number of others that can't be talked about in public yet) who are planning to sell hardware or devices running a Boot to Gecko stack.

Sure. And they will use Android-capable SOCs to do that. Creating some kind of low-spec SOC just for B2G makes no sense at this point.

I trust them when they are enthusiastic about this stack and say there's a good chance it will be successful.

I don't. The problem they face with Android is the fact that it threatens to turn telecoms to “dumb pipes”. Note that about half of revenue in mobile industry comes from voice calls: telecoms will do whatever it takes to protect that. And free, user-controllable handsets threaten their control over these revenues. Thus they want some alternative where they can control the handsets and make sure things like Skype will at least be charged “appropriately”. Mozilla is popular yet it does not have enough resources to threaten their control thus they like it. But I'm doubt they are all that sure B2G will fly: for them it's “yet another bet” - one among dozen or so other bets which are in play. In any case they will cripple the platform to make sure end-user have very little control over the handset: this is what the telecoms usually do, after all.