Guest post by The only MeeGo device to ever be released, the Nokia N9, has been updated to MeeGo/Harmattan 1.3. Among the improvements are improved performance, updated applications, improved NFC support, improved copy/paste, and more. In other news, the team behind MeeGo and Maemo is now leaving Nokia, probably making this the last update for the N9.
What a shame. What a damn shame, mr. Elop.
ok, now we can say for sure that MeeGo/Maemo is not nokia’s plan B.
Plan B is Windows Phone 8.
There is no plan C.
Plan B = close the doors and the company goes bye bye.
That was plan A and B (or are the foreseen consequences) or?
Edited 2012-07-05 12:40 UTC
OSAlert, where everyone is an Arm chair CEO
Yeah – why express an opinion on anything? Clearly no one could ever no better idea of how to do something than the person or persons doing it.
Thom – will you please close the comments section down? It obviously serves no useful function…
who made apps for N9, they failed to release pr1.3 for N950.
The only reason I didn’t get an N9 is that is was already dropped 6 months before release here. I have also never owned a Nokia phone, that’s how good i thought it was.
If they’d given the N9 more time who knows what would have happened? For me now it’s all about boot2gecko/Firefox OS.
Firefox OS was very slow on my Galaxy S2 but give it another 6 months and I’ll try it again on my Galaxy Nexus. If anything can give Android a run for it’s money it will the the completely open platform rather than the closed ones.
Edited 2012-07-04 22:42 UTC
Replicant OS and F-Droid repository (or “appstore” in modern parlance) will probably end up more viable as completely open alternatives?
I’d hope so, those are great examples of projects that are more important than people realise. I would love to see Cyanogenmod use Fdroid as their official software market/repository.
Focusing on closed and proprietary software is slowing more open projects down, the easy example is WP7 killing this great device.
I did look at the N9, but only because I don’t really want Android and played with a Lumia and really liked the hardware. WP7 was my alternative (yeah, Microsoft, you screwed up that option, didn’t you?) Looks like Android or another iPhone now. Needs to be Jelly bean if Android though.
Anyway, N9 – sorry, it has a shockingly bad reliability. If you Google N9, it doesn’t take too long to find numerous horror stories and a total lack of any real support form Nokia. Glad it got a new firmware, but as lovely as the hardware looked and as slick as the OS seems, it’s a total dead end. Not being interested in bleeding edge ROMS (hello Android hardware with no 4.0+ support) or stuff that “kind of” works (hello Zaurus/Qtopia, hello N800/N810/Maemo, hello Android/Cyanogen), I’m not going to jump on that band wagon. I want a reliable OS that I just install and then forget about.
What I want is a phone running an OS that the manufacturer will allow me to update regularly and as soon as the OS has been updated (ala iOS and WebOS) with the open ness/sideloading of Android and the kinds of features that you find in all of the major current OS versions (acceptable quality apps, apps form major players, maps, browser, voice recognition, decent storage quota, cloud back-up, app store, music store.) Too much to ask? Android has 75% of that, iOS has 75% of that. If iOS sideloaded or Android had no lock in, I might be happy.
It’s a shame.
A big thank you to the N9 team, for the update and for soldering on as long as you did. Meego-Harmattan remains, in my mind, the most elegant phone OS ever produced.
Way to go. Elop wanted to “differentiate” from competitors by dropping all in-house developed OSs. See you, Maemo, hope you’ll live on somehow. A big “thank you” to the developers who made it possible and to a company that was once visionary and innovative, although lately it frequently failed to deliver complete, competitive products in time.
Elop and the BOD share the heavy responsibility of destroying an immense knowledge heritage. It sends chills up my spine to think that so little – and insanely well-paid – action was needed in order to transform a healthy company, although far from being in perfect shape, into the complete disaster it is today, 20k (or is it 30k) layoffs later.
What a pity.
Nokia wasn’t healthy for a good few years already, and some people predicted the downfall …we just didn’t always want to listen. How it all happens fairly rapidly, recently, is mostly an unravelling of long-present downward spiral (which just didn’t manifest itself much outwardly, for a long time)
And about those layoffs, largely also in Nokia manufacturing plants …we decided we don’t want to pay for something made in ~Western fabs, not more than for toys made in East Asia. Which would tend to push profit margins and stock down (ultimately, leading to closure of many W fabs, and even using Compal ones for example)
It was the market-leader bigger then it’s 2 closed competitors together(!), when Elop took over. Nokia was generating healthy profits and the profits where growing!
Now, a bit more then a year later, Nokia is down to its all time low, rated junk, generates billion $ loses, is down to way below 10% marketshare and is in deep cash problems.
No, it is a classic management failure. In our history there never ever was a company that lost so fast so much. No single company across ALL industries (not only mobile or tech) ever died that fast. This is a all-time world-record. You cannot reach that with doing nothing. You need to apply and execute a series of fatal actions to make that active happen.
Its not like they only moved there factories or development somewhere else. They did not. They closed factories, research and development WITHOUT any replacement.
Maybe its correct that today to continue to compete you need to produce in Asia like Apple does and like, btw, Nokia did with the Lumia too. The N9 was made in Finnland and sold, compared with the Lumia, which was made in cheap factories in Asia (resulting in the famous and ueber-expensive Lumia 900 bug), with profit for Nokia.
But they did not. They stopped research and development! As WinPhone reseller you may not need research and development but then you will stay a reseller and not more. That is what Nokia just did. They downgraded themself from the mobile market-leader to a mass-product (noone likes to buy) reseller in a little over a year under Elop’s management!
Edited 2012-07-05 10:40 UTC
It was the “market leader” in number of shipped units… not that good with profit margins for quite some time, also when taking into account specific device segments of course (because it obviously doesn’t make sense to compare S30 and iOS devices); insisting to look at some slice of a time period when profits were growing still didn’t make their absolute value look good.
And a “market leader” in funds spent on R&D (and no, excluding the network division – looking only at consumer OS, handsets, services, and such), with horrible proportions of that amount to returns; suggesting highly dysfunctional structure that was around for a long time before Elop.
But yeah, blame Canada
– or the Canadian, in this case… But seriously, it’s not that Elop didn’t make gross errors (for one, isn’t “Eloped” the new & stronger variant of Osbourne effect?) or even pursued debatable goals (still, remember he would be specifically brought in to do them by the board, largest shareholders), and it’s not that Nokia wasn’t a major player (still is) – but this B&W narrative, as if Nokia wasn’t in deep trouble prior to him, is getting old.
It was a long running management failure, at many levels (we know of few Nokia divisions essentially infighting each other, you think lowly employees weren’t involved in pushing their pet darling to the detriment of other projects?)
(BTW those who predicted the downfall for a long time – there’s for example Eldar Murtazin from mobile-review.com …and notice, on the main page, that he doesn’t have a problem with also calling Elop a traitor in his #176 EN editorial; didn’t have a problem to praise some device from Nokia if it deserved it)
Right, as if Nokia didn’t have their own activities in China… (that includes not only their own manufacturing – which can’t be just moved so fast, so of course they’ll depend on 3rd parties – but also quite sizeable, quite new R&D center – one which, IIRC, undergoes expansion recently)
When you compare to Apple then even Microsoft is not good in profit margins.
Fact is Nokia made hundred millions of profit every single quarter, year after year. Then Elop took over and a year later they make billions of lose first time in company history. The situation is that worse that nobody believes Nokia can recover. They are rated junk now and have serious cash-problems.
Read again. They made huge profits year by year for more then a decade. Elop took over and within months its billions of lose.
Now the all in one question: How is that better then your unfunded personal “does not look good” impression?
Nokia invested 50 billion in research. That gave them patents which are estimated at 10 billion *AND* successful products that made them the market-leader *AND* billions of dollars of profit resulting from that.
Or do you compare with Apple again? If you do, not forget that it is Apple who pays Nokia 600 million every year cause of that Nokia patent-tressure. And not forget that Nokia was selling more then Apple and Samsung together when Elop took over. Its just now, a year later, that Nokia is a WinPhone-Zombie selling in 4 months what Android sells on 2 days. It is now, a year later, that Nokia lost more then 90% of its value in one year only!!!
Alright. That is why Nokia was number #1 so long till Elop took over?
Not alone, that is correct. All those who where in charge, BOD and management, that supported the CEO where making the errors together. But at the end its the CEO which is responsible. He gets the millions if everything wents well and is the one to blame when it doesn’t. For Nokia it does not went well or do you like to argue against that?
No. The Elop-effect is if you combine the Osborn and the Ratner effect at the same time. Elop was the first one testing the fatal effect with the burning memo and killing Nokia within a world record time.
You have to differ. Nokia may had the problem that there leadership was in danger. Others like Apple and Samsung where growing faster and hence the distance shrink. But they did not had the problem to fight to survive! They did not had to fire 1/5 employees, sell assets like patents and divisions and they where not in danger to turn from a global player into a bankrupted emergency case. There is a huge difference between those definitions of “problems”. Elop indeed is responsible that Nokia is official rated JUNK now.
I tell you a secret. Its like that in every larger cooperation. Just read those stack-management article that was on osNews some days ago and keep in mind that inside Nokia things where not as bad like they are inside of e.g. Microsoft and yet the first one dies and the second survives.
You need again to differ. Everybody saw that Nokia is loosing ground. That they may in danger to lose there leadership-position some day. But no one predicted that Nokia is going to die in just 1-2 years!
Just look how the forecasts for Nokia where before Elop took over. The common believe was that Nokia may lose 5% marketshare till 2013, not that they are dead that time!
I think you mean Vietnam? That is not where Lumias are manufactored. Nokia does not use there own factories for Lumia. I am not aware of Nokia factories in China but maybe I am mistaken. In nay case that’s not where the Lumias are produced. First time in Nokia history Nokia does not use its own factories for its products. Rumors are that it allows Microsoft to easily take over when Nokia aborts Lumia…
A new Nokia R&D in china? Never ever. Not to my knowledge. I doubt that and think you maybe confuse Nokia with something else. Please give sources.
Edited 2012-07-05 13:40 UTC
This is what I actually wrote: “… not that good with profit margins for quite some time, also when taking into account specific device segments of course (because it obviously doesn’t make sense to compare S30 and iOS devices)”
(additional emphasis added)
…but hey, go ahead at slice my whole post like you did just above, jumping on carefully selected quotes just so you can feel good in proving a point.
Fact is, those hundreds of millions weren’t huge at all when compared to revenue – Nokia was balancing not too far from losses (for such big company, which such big money turnover) for many years, performing closer (in returns per investment, R&D and such) to manufacturers which were sinking or sunk (well, before those did that), than to really successful ones. Those aren’t my personal impressions but their financial performance…
I point out the dysfunctions and you seem to be willing to just brush them off, in each instance, with the sacred cow of market share (in devices sold) and (overall marginal, really) profits.
Sure, even such profits could keep Nokia afloat by itself, absolutely – but unfortunately that’s not how modern market place works (overall, the whole corporate, shareholders culture – you might not like it, I might not like it, but that won’t make it go away)
Nokia has a long history of selling divisions BTW, it reinvented itself many times over after stumbling here and there. Maybe it’s just another stage.
So, yes, that’s a new variant…
So, it was bad like that (still, how are you so certain of lower severity than within MS?), but it’s still the Canadian …OK.
Actually, the specific source I linked predicted pretty much just that, a very rapid downfall…
As if Nokia doesn’t make anything except Lumias? Nokia has major activities in China, probably one of few factories not in the danger of closure …it’s telling that you apparently haven’t even heard about them.
Very telling… see, it’s clear that I follow what goes around Nokia, and you just don’t, you repeat popular mythos.
Sources are at nokia.com and (particularly with regards to R&D centre) at conversations.nokia.com (which I like to follow regularly for a long time) – do a google site search there or smth…
R.I.P. Maemo.
— owner of the grossly underpowered N800
And so they have become a pure hardware OEM dependant on MS software.
Something that strikes me as odd is that people usually points market saturation as a reason for Nokia to not go with Android… which seems reasonable, but then companies like HTC were thriving in that market years ago when the OS was about as young as WP is now.
The difference is Nokia is not thriving at all in these early WP days, and I don’t think their headstart guarantees that someone else like Samsung won’t storm into the WP8 market later on, suffocating every other company and driving Nokia into the ground.
And that’s assuming that WP8 will eventually take off, which isn’t a given either.
Edited 2012-07-05 00:00 UTC
That’s not strictly correct, there are still internal S40 (even made more ~modern recently, with touch variant) and S30…
Exactly. Symbian Belle may not compete with Android 4.x or iOS5 in the glamour department but in phone functionality it holds itself against Android 2.x and other low end devices. Nokia has shown a roadmap for Symbian extending as far as 2014 (Carla, Donna) and the official position is that Symbian will be supported at least up to 2016.
Symbian may not be hip (was it ever?) but it is a solid and reliable workhorse. I can see Nokia surviving on Symbian in the low-end market and attempt new shots from there, much like Samsung did.
EDIT: formatting.
Edited 2012-07-05 08:22 UTC
Ah, that’s nice then. I thought that after the “burning platform” speech they were burning all bridges.
Symbian Belle, formally known as Symbian^3, is not S40. S40 is another Nokia OS that did not got killed from Elop yet – but its coming I am sure.
Symbian development got already outsourced a while ago. The Pureview was never supposed to appear in markets like the US. Elop made clear in his burning memo and continued to make clear that Symbian is dead. They may continue to sell devices and “support” them in a similar way they did with the N9 for some more years. But do not believe Symbian can recover. The ecosystem is dead already. Partners and the horde of developers left. Elop killed it. Symbian is losing rapidly what is why Nokia is moving so fast down cause they killed there work horse, there cash cow, the product that made them to the marked-leader and was the mobile OS #1 when Elop took over and killed it.
For that they need to shutdown the expensive WinPhone strategy. That try burns more money then Nokia is able to generate with its low-end products.
But the opposite is happening. Elop made clear that from now on the whole company will focus on WinPhone! Yes, not on other things like S40, like maps or like networks. No, on WinPhone!
Edited 2012-07-05 10:59 UTC
And any experience with it will probably mostly just turn more people away from Nokia… (like the 5800 generation of “modern touchscreen phones” most famously did)
The ecosystem was dead before Elop, comparably to the platforms which took over. It was losing rapidly before Elop. BTW, it never had more than 20-something % of what Nokia sold – so no, it’s not solely responsible for their downward spiral, it wasn’t their “work horse, there cash cow, the product that made them to the marked-leader and was the mobile OS #1”
Dude, world-wide I tell ya!
http://c2499022.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/wp-content/upload…
Ah, so you can’t see the difference between “smartphone” and “phone”, good to know …the latter is what kept (and keeps) Nokia afloat.
(plus, the chart you linked is about completely different thing than the total sales of Nokia and segmentation within them)
Edited 2012-07-05 14:13 UTC
Huh? I never mentioned Symbian… which, BTW, is outsourced to Accenture for a ~year.
And apparently it’s now “Nokia Belle” – I guess to distance themselves from the stigma the Symbian trademark got.
(an action which, BTW, would be at the very least approved by the “saboteur” Elop)
For the moment. Kill one platform at a time
When killing Meltimi yesterday he also announced the plan to go with Lumia 60x future down the dumbphone segment. Guess what that means for the inhouse against WP competing S40 tomorrow?
Elop made clear that WinPhone is there only strategy. Just some weeks ago it was “There is no plan B”. Either WinPhone or no phone. That includes also S40.
That’s more of conspiracy talk. No smartphone OS can go as low as S40 does, at least for quite some time – Elop knows it and, apparently, pushes for continuing S40 development (new recent variants of that OS, many new phones; likewise with S30)
> Elop … pushes for continuing S40 development
Did you compare if he used the same words he used last year when pushing Meltimi? Maybe not cause Elop named Meltimi the future of Nokia and he never used that to describe S40. So, maybe S40 is indeed on the save side for a while.
Frankly, I don’t care too much about what he (or any CEO for that matter) claims – simple facts are, the development of S40 is clearly quite active (even accelerated), many devices are showing up, all under Elop.
Plus, you are repeating some stupid rumours you’ve heard somewhere. Meltemi wasn’t even ever really made official …hell, it’s possible (if unlikely) it hardly existed (at least not beyond, say, ~personal wishes of some faction within Nokia, aborted recently)
Edited 2012-07-05 14:26 UTC
You are very unpolite claiming I repeat rumours rather then asking for sources. Conversation closed.
You can’t weasel out like that from the simple fact of really no official Meltemi announcements, which makes all existing sources… rumours.
(probably the closest to official would be the recent firm news about its abandonment, but that’s not exactly announcement either and certainly doesn’t include what you claimed Elop said)
Last event in the MS campaign to kill Meego. Nokia is good as dead now.
You think Maemo / Meego effort was keeping them alive, or had high likelihood of doing so? (enough for MS to care about it?)
Edited 2012-07-05 01:37 UTC
It had good potential. If something could give them future – it was Meego. Of course no one could guarantee it, but Nokia killed their own future, with help of MS money ending up in right pockets of course.
Edited 2012-07-05 02:00 UTC
So many ~internal OS projects dying or hardly getting off the ground (old & new BB, Symbian – in few variants: MOAP, UIQ, S60, S80, S90 – & Maemo, PalmOS and WebOS, even Bada), some also with “good potential”
…there really doesn’t seem to be much place left for such efforts of not-software companies, not with the shared Android all the rage, and also iOS (well, this one’s fairly internal, but Apple is a world of their own and with their rules). There is possibly even barely a place for Windows Phone – but, if there’s any chance of a major player outside of iOS and Android, that’s most likely MS.
Or is that part of the conspiracy? (other than that, yes, there’s lots of MS money going to Nokia accounts)
Now, sure, Meego seems very nice (even with cute bonus) – but why would it give them future, why such another dilution of efforts and funds had good potential to succeed as a product in such market landscape?
Nokia was going to use Qt in both Meego and Symbian so they were going to create an unified ecosystem ranging from the high-end to the low-end. This would help them to cut development costs dramatically and to attract new developers and convert symbian ones to Meego. It makes more sense than WP+Symbian.
But less sense than Android + iOS…
Overall – yes, wishes again …but you don’t address why it should work out in the market landscape, and you even ignore what actually happened – Qt (which I mentioned, really…) _was_ available for some time already on Symbian, the most widespread smartphone platform on the planet at the time, and with a “clear” (then) commitment of expanding the reach of apps to Meego. Yet, somehow, it didn’t bring the flurry of dev activity.
Meanwhile, that doesn’t seem to be much of an issue “even” for WP – what, 100k+ apps already?
(Symbian is not “low-end” BTW – indeed, perhaps its main problem, dilution of efforts it brings, is how there would be hardly any place left between “top” S40 handsets and entry-level WP ones)
Qt supports both of them well. I think that’s the point the dude above made. Nokia could easily offer more platforms while keeping there ecosystem working across all of them. That way they could change strategy even more often (lol) without killing of there whole ecosystems everytime.
Edited 2012-07-05 14:07 UTC
You must have a very curious definition of “well” …but then, also fantasising – there was hardly any Nokia ecosystem in the first place (in comparison to the present major players), even the failing WP seems already much more successful in attracting devs.
Conversation closed.
Well I suppose it’s good you display your immaturity like that, pompously “closing” conversations when your views can’t stand to cold facts…
Edited 2012-07-05 14:58 UTC
Sounds absolutely great on paper. Was never going to happen.
Qt is probably one of Nokia’s largest wastes of cash.
MS might be bold in pcs but their efforts were at best meager on the mobile devices front.
Their desktop monopoly didn’t help, neither did their PDA near monopoly.
Nokia had already bate them in 10 years ago blocking WM world domination with Symbian alliance. Now Google has replaced them in this role.
Edited 2012-07-05 10:22 UTC
I can’t pose as an objective observer but in my book Maemo 6 truped all those efforts:
1. WebOs – poor hardware, no existing software library , no ecosystem elements (like maps, music), no real IDE, lack of experience in mobile marketing, lack of international sales.
2. Bada – poor user experience, not really scalable, poor SDK
3. BB10 – 1.5 year later.
Nokia had most elements to get it going + carrier relationships + sales + brand + beautiful UI and Hardware + beefy China Mobile partnership that itself would keep it afloat. The OS is scalable both ways (N9 class hw can be dirt cheap nowadays).
I believe it was definitely a the most real danger to MS plans on mobile esp. that now it’s evident that WP7 was just an empty shell compared to real oses like IOS, Android and Maemo.
Edited 2012-07-05 10:33 UTC
Are you sure? The N9 has 1GB RAM for a start, so it’s not entry level by any measure. Maemo was slow on low spec/low memory footprint devices (as seen by all the devices up to the N900.)
I meant the CPU, it’s just an old 1ghz TI with a s*tty GPU, sth. along 1st gen WP devices.
1GB ram could be a more tough matter, but given that Maemo supports swap I believe they could trim it.
Swap on flash storage is not a very good idea. Write levelling benefits are lost. Anecdotally, I killed a few cards in my time using a swap when I had a Zaurus sl5500 and was compiling code with gcc on board. Also quite slow unless you are using a really good quality unit, usually one soldered to motherboard rather than removable.
I think too and so did lots of the analysts back then. That MeeGo would find a permanent place among the top ecosystems was not a question. The question was only how well it would do against Android and iphone.
I think Microsoft saw the danger that yet another mobile ecosystem that even is compatible with Android to a certain degree, would emerge, land and find its place.
I think it played definitively a role during the negotiations with Nokia. They would not only win a needed WP-partner but would also kill of a competing system the same time. Well, in fact even two competing systems if you assume that Elop also sold the Symbian-kill[1] to Microsoft.
[1] What is auto-included if your partnership means exclusive focus on WP then it also means everything else is gone. Today we are more or less sure that the exclusiveness was part of the deal. That’s the only explanation.
Edited 2012-07-05 11:13 UTC
And how many of those “analysts” (perhaps the first four letters say it all…) said pretty much the same thing about WebOS, Bada, Windows Phone?
How many claimed that iOS or Android would struggle?
If you do not like “ana (the first four letters) then you may like “rating”? Yes, yes. Very immoral, dirty, pervert. But hey, we are adults (or not?)!
Sooooo…. rating. Moody’s, Finch and S&P where believing that too else Nokia would have been downgraded before already (but not to junk which is Elop’s very own unforgetten acheivement!).
If that’s to pervert for you, and I could understand that, then we could also compare the partner-ecosystem MeeGo had? Or we could look which telco’s/carriers?etc where announcing support? Or we could investigate all the reviews, consumer-satisfactions of the N9? But then looking at others satisfaction is not as satisfiable then g’d old “ana …
So now you even think that ” is a letter?… more telling.
Not “immoral, dirty, pervert” BTW – just apt, perhaps. But of course, you are free to go from that to displaying an adolescent-type fixation – that’s even more telling.
Overall, it never ceases to amaze me how generally disliked can be bankers, investors, and such (the kind of people who largely brought the present Nokia situation – people who didn’t value much the long-term performance of Nokia, people who brought in Elop) …until those who usually dislike them want to prove some point.
There was hardly any Meego ecosystem worth speaking of, carriers didn’t care, and reviews (or reliability…) of N9 were mixed – surrounding it all in mythos didn’t have a chance to change its long-term prospects in the marketplace.
Looks pretty much like Maemo… especially since there’s more to ecosystem than maps and music (and BTW, Nokia efforts with the latter also faltered, Maemo maps app was neglected, and lack of in-house maps doesn’t seem to harm most manufacturers). IDE situation one way or the other didn’t seem to make a difference for devs (but BTW, they happily embraced Android even though the development for it was a bit awkward), and Nokia marketing efforts don’t seem to work out too well for some time now (despite massive funds)
Bada is also closer analogy than you make it to be (and it doesn’t have particularly poor user experience, it’s essentially a more basic Touchwiz, which scales all across Samsung’s spectrum of devices). But the best…
Yeah, pretty much like with Maemo / Meego, at minimum.
And what does it change WRT its potential market performance? (anyway, Android and WP also go pretty low, even lower, when it comes to hw)
Seriously, this is the kind of magical thinking I point out. The Android and iOS were (and are) a real danger (and that Nokia will go with the former), Meego was hardly on the radar.
You yourself write in the post just above that Android took over.
>Looks pretty much like Maemo… especially since >there’s more to ecosystem than maps and music
Does it? I think I outlined the differences quite clear.
Want to know other ecosystem elements? Here you are:
– payment (including carrier billing that nobody else had)
– advertising
– app store ( biggest when you remove Google and Apple, absolutely biggest in non-english speaking countries).
As for the looks, well you don’t want to compare Nokia industrial design skill HP, do you? True, HP phones weren’t
>IDE situation one way or the other didn’t seem to make a difference for devs –
as long as some basic standards are met you’re right, however I don’t think I have seen any decent JS ide that could live up to C++ and Java standards. As for Bada I can’t really say. Their C++ library seems to be quite old fashioned.
>And what does it change WRT its potential market performance? (anyway, Android and WP also go pretty low, even lower, when it comes to hw)
WP7 downscalling comes at price of basic functionality.
Remember that in general QT ecosystem included Symbian who would cover low ends that WP (and Android) will not touch for a long time.
> The Android and iOS were (and are) a real danger (and that Nokia will go with the former), Meego was hardly on the radar.
Of course it’s not, it haven’t even started.
IOS and Android are and will dominate for years to come. I was talking about the race for 3rd ecosystem. Nokia made a big mistake to treat N900 as an experiment. However, by the time N9 arrived (initially Q1 2011) they could have a shot.
> Seriously, this is the kind of magical thinking I point out.
What amount of magic thinking made Elop bet the farm on MS stopgap, smartphone like OS, that was obsoleted 0.5 year after their decision? What amount of it made so called analysts predict 20% market share for it by now?
Edited 2012-07-05 20:04 UTC
You really don’t see how closely they can share description?…
Plus, you’re thinking in terms of old ecosystems …if they would make such difference nowadays, Nokia would be most likely successful as well with WinPhone, and wouldn’t decline so much with mass-market feature phones.
Most telling that you again mention advertising – sure, Nokia had traditionally insane ad budgets, very “cute” commercials, but the returns from that were comparably poor (plus, ad agencies did most of heavy lifting anyway). Ads didn’t help WebOS, too.
And yeah, Nokia appstore has big reach, great …but otherwise it’s, again, closer to what WebOS had when it comes to uptake. Nothing close even to the “failure” of WinPhone marketplace.
With IDE I was talking there in more general terms, noting how it doesn’t seem to matter much (not like Maemo was very encouraging to devs, with its constant flux) – certainly didn’t harm Android (despite some quirks of doing development there), and didn’t help WP (despite fabulous dev experience) WRT success in the market.
WTH? So first, you mention how there were prolonged efforts to establish Qt (not QuickTime) ecosystem, with its quite long support on Symbian and “solid” promise of smooth Meego transition in the future… (which BTW gave very meagre results, hardly any adoption – but of course you still beliebe that Meego would change everything, right?)
…but just below you manage to make a 180 degree turn and claim “it haven’t even started” when it suits you?
Yeah, this is more the kind of magical thinking that I point out.
And BTW, it’s a logical fallacy to defend it by pointing at possible separate instance, that of Elop (but if you really think his actions weren’t mostly ~intentional …then yeah, more of it)
Edited 2012-07-12 00:18 UTC
They were busy killing themselves back in 2007. They has an RFID based tracking technology that we were going to use, including buying loads (potentially hundreds) of handsets and a license fee payable to them yearly. We went on a course to learn the API and everything. They killed it 2 month later with no real explanation. Not even the developers at Nokia who we’d been talking to on a semi regular basis seemed to know why or have had much fore warning. Nokia is a company with no idea how to treat customers well, be they corporate of end users.
Don’t even start me on Maemo and the N8x0 platform.
Don’t you thing Rich Green had this all sorted out by the Feb 11? They had their mess and internal infighting (2 qt toolkits anyone) but just before the original N9 release date (2011 Q1) their SW strategy looked solid as never before.
No. That’s what they tried to tell people publicly. In reality, on the developer lever, it was already a crapshoot. When developers are unhappy and leave or are canned, knowledge walks out of the door. Very hard to recover from that.
Not the experiences I made. What developers are you referring too?
The ecosystem is essentially nonexistent and Nokia never had the money to bootstrap it. Going with Windows Phone was its best option.
Also, most of the N9/MeeGo defenders have never used it. They don’t know how it quickly turned into a slow piece of shit after a while. It had promise, sure, but Nokia didn’t have time.
The majority of the developers that were working on projects for the Maemo platform. Be they employed by Nokia or independent. Every successive release of Maemo stalled the ecosystem, because Nokia broke the ABI. Even the Diabolo release broke the ABI enough that the prior apps were very hit or miss.
Qt revitalised the market slightly, but Nokia just tended to leave developers who had invested time and effort in to the current platform with a whole new layer of woe at each OS release.
So it seems as I have written in the “Plan B” comments, my internal contacts were right.
http://www.osnews.com/thread?525008
MeeGo is an OS that made sense and that sold. In the short term they could bear it but in the long term it was a dangerous product because it could become success and success is not Nokia’s strategy. Nokia wants to fail.
I cannot believe it! The best Nokia phone ever made, is dead…
I own it and I was very happy to receive an update when none were foreseen!
Damn Elop.
Right, this maybe carry no real world weight whatsoever but a poster on the story linked page (http://mynokiablog.com/2012/07/03/bittersweet-n9-gets-pr-1-3-commun…) by the name of Prasenjit Bist says amongst other things “Its sad ppl r leavin but wats new it was all pre decided and a phased manner in which ppl are fired it was all decided last year isn^aEURTMt it. And yes a few people and a small team still will be there^aEUR| Nokia^aEURTMs board is looking and elop no .onger has the freakin loose run^aEUR|” .I know his language is informal and it’s pure hearsay, but it rings like-it-could-be true… .my gossip mongering for the day.
I’m sorry. just read rest of the comments on that thread – I think i jumped too easily………
Goodbye to another batch of the people responsible for the best mobile devices ever created, running the best mobile operating systems ever created.
Too bad the best products are rarely the victorious products.
The loss of Maemo/Meego is so big to someone like me that it generates an actual feeling of sadness. People will probably look back on Maemo/Meego and realize how it could have been a way out of their sterile, walled gardens.
f–king stupid Finnish people ruined everything.
Edited 2012-07-06 00:11 UTC