A few weeks ago, Mozilla announced that they were shutting down Pocket, the read-it-later service they acquired half a decade ago. The deployed the now-classic “After careful consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision…” language that has come to typify these sorts of moves from large companies. Plenty of ink has been spilled on the decision — and I rather doubt it was “difficult” at all for the people who actually made the decision — so I want to focus on something else: the reasons Mozilla offered for the decision.

Mozilla acquired Pocket and tried to build it into something quite different from what it had originally been. Rather than a way to save articles to read later, Pocket under Mozilla increasingly focused on, to quote again, “building content curation and recommendation capabilities so people everywhere can discover and access high quality web content”. But it seems it was precisely that part of Pocket that Mozilla has decided isn’t worth pursuing, because “the way people save and consume content on the web has evolved, so we’re channeling our resources into projects that better match browsing habits today. Discovery also continues to evolve…”

If you read between these lines, you’ll notice that there’s a direct connection. Mozilla acquired a small, useful tool and tried to turn it into… something. I don’t even know what, to be honest. The longer they ran Pocket, the more they shoved the reason people originally used it off to the side. “Home” became a tab filled with someone else’s recommendations and an algorithmic feed of content other people were reading, rather than the things you wanted to read. “Saves” became a secondary tab, and you had to click into that to see the articles you had saved or even to save a new article.

But saving articles was from the outset the raison d’etre for Pocket, and Mozilla tried to bury it in favor of something else that presumably they thought would be a larger and more successful “product” that matched the scale of the company that Mozilla is. “What began as a read-it-later app”, they assert, “evolved into something much bigger.” That was the whole problem: the mistake that led ultimately to this “difficult decision” by Mozilla. Pocket was a good tool. Its integration with Kobo, another excellent tool, made it that much more valuable to users like me. We didn’t need “something much bigger”. But by trying to turn Pocket into something much bigger, Mozilla actually killed it.

Don’t mistake me: there may be room for the kind of discovery-and-curation service Mozilla decided to try to make out of Pocket. But by trying to make Pocket into something “bigger”, Mozilla first undercut the thing that made it valuable to its original users. When their effort to make something “bigger” fell through, they had nothing left that was “big” enough to justify their continued investment — at least from the point of view of a large company looking for projects with a major contribution to their bottom line.

This is a classic failure mode with these kinds of acquisitions. The problem, I take it, is one of a mismatch of scales. Pocket and services like it are not Big Businesses. They do not support a massive base of users, monetized by attention and ads (“eyeballs”). They are, from everything I can see, what has sometimes pejoratively been called “lifestyle businesses”. But outside the world of Big Tech specifically and Big Business more generally, we just call a “lifestyle business” a business. Pocket as a tool, selling subscriptions for extra capabilities, was never going to print tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. But it also could have been a perfectly fine business without ever being that large!

The more general lesson I take from Pocket (as I have taken from so many such acquisitions-and-eventual-shutdown stories before it) is this: Not all businesses need to be large, with paths to continual growth. Quite the contrary. The expectations of scale, continual growth, or especially both together, become perverse and destructive when they become defaults and norms. Some few businesses will grow very large and will experience continued growth for long periods of time. Most, however, will not, and the attempt to do so will lead them away from serving their existing customers along the way, and just as importantly will usually fail. That is the explicit expectation of the venture capital model; but it is also the explicit expectation of the “portfolio of bets” approach to business ideas in most large companies. There are places that model makes sense, particularly in high-risk/high-reward research endeavors, but it is a profoundly unhealthy default for the world of ordinary tools.

Would we had the wisdom to embrace this reality: there would be a good deal more viable and useful software in the world, making a good living for its proprietors.