Guest post by From the Jolla Blog:
Many of you have been rightfully asking, where did our tablet money go? Below is an analysis of it in a simple graph. Big part of the tablet project went to Sailfish OS software development (more than 50% of project costs). As I have said in earlier blogs, hardware is the easy part, software is the king (and the beast).
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Overall, as I also explained in a recent TechCrunch interview, the alternative OS is a really big and challenging agenda. But I still believe it is moving ahead, yet very slowly. The primary challenge for us is that our agenda might be somewhat forward leaning, and we need to wait until the world catches up with this vision that other OSs are heavily needed to create an alternative for Android. The interest for our agenda is just now emerging. I firmly believe that companies and consumers will soon realize that the world really needs options in mobile OSs. We’ve already had many interesting discussions with potential new partners about using Sailfish OS in their own projects. I’m looking forward to announcing the results of these talks soon.
I wonder how the story would have been different if Sailfish OS were free software and had a strong community to aid in software development.
If they delivered a documented tablet that would at least boot and come up with some graphics, you would have dozens or hundreds of people working with it, and likely causing a second round or more of tablet production.
A tablet doesn’t require carrier buy in or other phone wireless system things.
I buy easily rootable $15 Android phones on amazon and use them, and I don’t have to code anything I don’t want to, but can if I wan’t
The tablet could have been like the Raspberry Pi and the development feedback would have created the ecosystem for the phone.
The problem with them is that they are “Android” phones. Why aren’t they just phones where you can install any OS you want? Because they need some custom kernels, drivers remain closed, and it’s a major pain to deal with.
Edited 2015-11-25 21:32 UTC
The reason that Android is the “problem” is because it supports the hardware on so many phones and other OSes don’t. This is [only one of the reasons] why Nokia announced that running Android on their Lumia phones was a trivial process. It also runs on the Jolla phones and tablets and the BB handsets.
Certainly it would be better if other OSes were able to run on the wide range of hardware that Android does but they don’t. Getting open source drivers is almost entirely up to the hardware makers; they need to document the hardware or write the drivers themselves and open the code.
And yes, Google is one of those even though they just commission other companies to make the hardware that has the Goog name on it.
How did that work out for Open WebOS? Last I heard, they had it running on a Galaxy Nexus. Since then, nothing …
Edited 2015-11-25 21:38 UTC
Yeah, no.
An example is the Jolla phone itself.
What are the names of (or links to) the phones? I’ve been looking for a cheap way to introduce myself to the world of Android.
Firefox OS is growing…slowly, but it’s getting better and better. I’m testing version 2.6 on my Flame phone. I get 2 updates per day and I see progress. The apps are getting there too.
See http://merproject.org/meetings/mer-meeting/2015/mer-meeting.2015-11…
Jolla actually has a strong community, and it is loyal, focused and almost drama-free. Opensourcing wouldn’t hurt the platform though.
For example, there is a long-standing issue of SIP support in Jolla’s dialer – most pieces are already in place, so the amount of work required to complete the feature is rather small. If the platform was opensourced, third-party contribution that would bring the feature to beta quality would probably come in a day or so. This is not the only issue that would be already solved if Sailfish was fully opensource.
Another issue that is holding platform back (in my opinion) is that it pretends to be a walled garden – packages can’t install .service files, and developers of “apps” in Jolla’s “store” have nearly no control over their packages in repos. If Jolla accepted that it is a niche Linux distribution and give its community more control (as in Redhat^aEUR”Fedora relation) over platform, everyone would benefit.
Of course, none of this will make Jolla surpass iOS and Android in popularity, but I guess a lot more Linux users would want to use Sailfish-based devices.
We’ll see how strong, loyal, focused and almost drama-free the community is after the reality sinks in that many of them have pre-ordered a product that will never be delivered. And good luck getting refunds from a company that’s in bankruptcy court.
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a December delivery.
If I were one of those that pre-ordered, I’d be contacting my credit card company right about now for a charge-back.
It^A's normal that they are going out of bussiness. They only released a phone in 2013. Is it so difficult to release at least one phone each year? Some small companies do it, like BQ and they are not supermegahyper ex-Nokia genius engineers.
I am disappointed with this company. For what do they need so many people?
Jolla isn’t a hardware company.
correction: They aren’t a hardware company anymore now.
Not being able to deliver the hardware again and again and again that people actually already paid for and calling that a focus shift towards software is just avoiding reality.
And this is coming from a company that now says “hardware is the easy part”. Well, if that is the easy part and it is clear that they cannot do it that says it all, doesn’t it.
Jolla is a company that greatly relied on money from Nokia and goodwill from their backers. The Nokia money dried up, they aren’t finding new backers and they aren’t satisfying current backers
Hardware is surely not an easy part. By far. But software isn’t easy either.
I didn’t make up the quote, it is right there in the article and summary here on OS-News: “As I have said in earlier blogs, hardware is the easy part, software is the king (and the beast)”
Now if you read the comments there a bit you will immediately see that Jolla got enough money to manufacture the tablets and operate their company. However, they used that money to improve the OS and actually shipped those software updates to the phone but (for the most part) didn’t ship any hardware. This is called a piramid game, where you constantly need more backers to satisfy the current backers. I am not saying that Jolla that this intentional, but when they didn’t get the next layer of money the piramid scheme immediately became clear and everything crumbled.
In the mean time, the almost identical Nokia N1 tablet that actually did ship went nowhere.
So if the spokesperson says “hardware is the easy part” when their hardware has been delayed for a year now….that is bad
And when that same spokesperson says “software is the beast” and “the alternative OS is a really big and challenging agenda. But I still believe it is moving ahead, yet very slowly. The primary challenge for us is that our agenda might be somewhat forward leaning, and we need to wait until the world catches up with this vision that other OSs are heavily needed to create an alternative for Android.”…that means the software is never going to be ready. (because it was moving slowly when they had many people working on it already)
That hardware is not going to ship
That OS is not going to get OpenSourced
The only way for any Jolla-future is if they get somebody with deep pockets interested in their vision and can somehow actually use that money for their next thing (software) instead of their previous thing (hardware)
That might be correct if you just put modules together at a high level, but for example optimizing a standard cell layout is an NP-complete problem
Edited 2015-11-27 10:05 UTC
Jolla is not going out of business at this time. They are doing ‘chapter 11’ debt restructuring. Big difference.
~100 people is not a lot of people for a company trying to develop phone hardware and software, market and sell it to. I would bet that BQ has more than 100 employees…
Edited 2015-11-26 05:23 UTC
Distributors and suppliers, employees, investors, stock holders, bond holders, creditors… can all lose big during a restructuring. And a Chapter 11 restructuring can take months or years to complete.
Chapter 11 is only sometimes successful and if a company cannot become profitable during the restructuring phase, they are sent straight into liquidation, aka Chapter 7 bankruptcy. In this case even paid customers lose. Warranties, product updates, refunds for defective or undelivered products… all worthless.
The closest thing to Be, Inc. the mobile industry has seen.
Complete with a recent ‘focus shift’.
I don’t understand the obsession with Be in this site, or why so much is related to it. In the big scheme of things they were a non entity, with little to no impact in the market place (or the technology Zeitgeist)
This field is littered with failed start ups; having an idiotic business model, inability to execute, and screwing over of investors/early adopters/backers is not really that uncommon, if we look at the statistics is the common case actually.
Jolla was a waste of effort and time from the beginning IMO.
It was a popular operating system amongst users of a website that, at the time, had much more focus on operating systems. It left its mark. For anyone interested in operating systems as a subject, of a certain age, having access to the internet at a certain time, Be and BeOS have a larger significance than for someone like you, who probably has a narrower interest (ie. Windows or UNIX). That’s fine too, of course.
Often, the timing of things gives something a hold it may not necessarily have had otherwise.
(there’s even an attempt to recreate BeOS called Haiku – that indicates how much of an impact it had on some people).
“Spotlight” and “Smart Folders” in MacOS X are children of BeOS technologies, for example.
Edited 2015-11-27 11:23 UTC
True, BeOS was founded by ex Apple Engineers, when it went away, many of them went back to Apple and re did BeOs features in OSX. The 00’s were full of OSX updates that included old BeOS fearues. In retrospect, Apple was really smart in buying Next and not BeOS: they got the CEO they needed and ended up getting the best BeOS features anyways.
You must be repetitively new here. Former/occasional editor Eugenia was a writer for BeNews, Married Jean-Baptiste Queru a BeOS kernel developer. Others can correct me, but I believe the vision for this site was BeNews, but for all operating systems. I didn’t register or post back in those early days, but I loved the site even back then.
That makes sense. I never got the hard on some people have in this site for Be, given how inconsequential it was in the big scheme of things (even its supposed influence on OSX is microscopic at best).
Edited 2015-11-28 20:27 UTC
You should learn what BeOS was before judging it “inconsequential”. Please don’t look at it with a 2010’s eyes but in 90’s techical context. Just saying…
From delay to delay, to “the money was used to founding the software, and you will never see the hardware, now we are at chapter 11”.
Too many lie
Much more than “your PlayBook will received update….or not”
Edited 2015-11-26 07:26 UTC
Haha no… the only reason Jolla got this far is because they had private investors, and no matter what ESR tells you, private investors want to see a really convincing business model if you say you are open-source and client-side. Firefox has one, but they are just one…
That strong community might also be too busy hacking on Windows 10 Mobile now
http://www.xda-developers.com/windows-phone-internals-opens-the-cus…
Licence it off LG and get it on modern hardware. Still the best mobile OS ive ever used!
There is also FireFoxOS or Ubunti Mobile as open source OS they could use. They could also follow the JollaOS legacy and replace it with Windows Phone (again)