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Comment by arturadib | Hacker News Reader

It's a bummer, not sure why this happened. I liked Gary, and saw him as the right man to shepherd Firefox OS from conception to production.

Searching for a new CEO is a huge distraction, particularly at this crucial time when they're trying to prove a major pivot and work out commercial deals with device makers.

I'm sending positive vibes to my former colleagues!

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OK, can someone explain this 'pivot'?

I'm typing this into a laptop running Kubuntu (in my kitchen) which is based on a mainframe operating system (I used to talk to a PDP11 via teletype half a lifetime ago).

Won't mobile phones be running Unix soon as well?

Aren't they already? What's iOS? Android?

Exactly my point. Is this 'pivot' basically the provision of a fat finger friendly interface to existing technology?

PS: I'm not against this, I'd really love to be able to dock a phone and use it for desktop tasks with a 1080p monitor and proper keyboard. Sort of the Rob Pike approach.

http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/

The PDP-11 wasn't a mainframe. It was a minicomputer, which is how Unix came to exist for it in the first place: A mainframe would have been too expensive for such a small project, but a PDP-11 minicomputer was within the budget.

Correction accepted. The mainframe was an IBM 360? and I talked to that one with punched cards. The PDP-11 was on a single rack I remember.

>The mainframe was an IBM 360?

Yes.

User interfaces matter. Optimization matters. Design matters. The same software that's ideal for a laptop or minicomputer isn't always ideal for a touch-screen mobile phone, whether they are both running "Unix" or not.

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