Mozilla's cloud services need to advance the state of the web in privacy, security, and usability in order to compete and keep the web open. We need a platform that has a user experience closer to mobile where building, signing up, using, and managing apps is easy. We need the cloud to integrate well with our mobile, desktop, and lifestyle devices. We need choice in how our data is used. We need to trust the services we use. To do this we should build a platform that lets us run our cloud apps (service instances) individually, in the cloud or on our own servers.
As technical people, today we can enjoy the benefits of owning some of our web identities and data by running our own services on our own servers. We can register our own domains, manage MX records, setup shared hosting or VPS, make our own blogs, host our own email, and even run our own Firefox Sync service because we own our servers, or at least the data. Even for the most dedicated of us its time consuming and complicated to setup and maintain. It