Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?

[pxa270]

I know it's popular at the moment to lay all the blame at Elop or at Nokia management (current or past). But maybe the truth is really that MeeGo was just to late and not good enough?

The impression that I get from various threads here and elsewhere is that at the moment MeeGo is still nowhere near ready, and an end-user ready release is at least another 6 months away. Now in the alternative world were Nokia did decide to ride it out with MeeGo, by the time it's finally market ready (autumn? winter?), was it actually going to be better for mass market end users than the iPhone 5 or the Samsung and HTC Android 3.x devices it would be competing against? Somehow I doubt it.

Of course, I don't believe that Nokia WP7 devices are anywhere near ready yet, and they may take even longer to get on the market. So it's not like I'm endorsing this move. All I'm saying is, maybe Nokia's fate was already sealed a long time ago. Maybe the only way they could have turned the tide was if they had reacted faster, developed faster, delivered faster than they could.

[Elfforkusu]

I think you'll find that platforms that never have a product released for them invariably fail.

[extendedping]

was android perfect upon its release? how is it doing today?

[cBeam]

That's the point, I assume that Meego is too late and too weak at the moment. I assumed that Elop was brought in to fix the SW development problems Nokia has. I assumed Nokia has an execution problem and a new CEO is capable to fix that. I bought into the strategy Qt/Symbian/Meego.

Elop has been with Nokia for how long, 5 months now?

And now he kills their existing smart phone business (based on low to mid range Symbian), and concedes the high end.

And Nokia's first WP7 phone will be out late 2011. Sell in numbers 2012??? Good luck...

I am not a Nokia insider, but let me tell you something: I believe that a lot of Nokia employees will be fed up with this new direction. Nokia is also said to lay off thousands of employees. Does anyone believe that under these circumstances Nokia's execution will be improved?

[cesman]

When the iphone was release, it changed the landscape. In 2 years, Android had become the platform. Has WP7 done anything that makes anyone think it has the capacity to do what the iphone and Android has done/are doing? WP7 has less features than systems older than it.

Nokia has stated that 2011/12 are to be transitive years. So at best, it will be 2013 before they show something wizbang that might change the landscape. You're telling me, they could take the same amount of time and do Meego right?

Nokia has more devices out there than anyone. They had a plan to get apps on a lot of those devices and their future devices. They pissed it all away by moving to WP7. I suppose Nokia is banking on most if not all their users switching with them. Well based on what I've seen since their announcement, it certainly doesn't look that way.

[ossipena]

is meego too late as wp7 which will be properly featured in 2013 by nokia?

[gerbick]

MeeGo was going to be late, regardless. Folks are too unwilling to admit that.

So instead, spread anger about WP7 - which, is easier to do since it's not full-featured as of yet nor is it a successful seller at the moment either.

Pick the easiest to do, run with that. That's what is happening on these boards. Easier to blame Elop than face the fact that nothing is shown a ****ing year later after the initial MeeGo announcement that can be purchased rather soon.

[extendedping]

That's the point, I assume that Meego is too late and too weak at the moment. I assumed that Elop was brought in to fix the SW development problems Nokia has. I assumed Nokia has an execution problem and a new CEO is capable to fix that. I bought into the strategy Qt/Symbian/Meego.

Elop has been with Nokia for how long, 5 months now?

And now he kills their existing smart phone business (based on low to mid range Symbian), and concedes the high end.

And Nokia's first WP7 phone will be out late 2011. Sell in numbers 2012??? Good luck...

I am not a Nokia insider, but let me tell you something: I believe that a lot of Nokia employees will be fed up with this new direction. Nokia is also said to lay off thousands of employees. Does anyone believe that under these circumstances Nokia's execution will be improved?

Depends on what you mean by "Nokia's execution"...

[extendedping]

MeeGo was going to be late, regardless. Folks are too unwilling to admit that.

So instead, spread anger about WP7 - which, is easier to do since it's not full-featured as of yet nor is it a successful seller at the moment either.

Pick the easiest to do, run with that. That's what is happening on these boards. Easier to blame Elop than face the fact that nothing is shown a ****ing year later after the initial MeeGo announcement that can be purchased rather soon.

I read somewhere recently that Nokia had 10 guys working on meego...Elop could have hired 10 x the developers....sounds more like a msft flunky is invading it's competition and then letting it die.

Anyone who can't put 2 and 2 on this one must have fallen off the fruit truck comming into town.

[Elfforkusu]

To follow up on my snarky response, I don't think you can say either way about Meego. Maybe it would have failed, maybe it would have succeeded. But it never got the chance to step onto the field.

[dylanemcgregor]

I read somewhere recently that Nokia had 10 guys working on meego...Elop could have hired 10 x the developers...

It is called Brooks Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks%27s_law)

[jsa]

MeeGo was going to be late, regardless. Folks are too unwilling to admit that.

So instead, spread anger about WP7 - which, is easier to do since it's not full-featured as of yet nor is it a successful seller at the moment either.

Pick the easiest to do, run with that. That's what is happening on these boards. Easier to blame Elop than face the fact that nothing is shown a ****ing year later after the initial MeeGo announcement that can be purchased rather soon.

For me the biggest insanity in this isn't about WP7 being bad, or some ideological openness question. It's the seemingly disproportionate ratio between what Nokia is giving up (past, present and future) and what they are gaining.

[ericsson]

I read somewhere recently that Nokia had 10 guys working on meego...Elop could have hired 10 x the developers....sounds more like a msft flunky is invading it's competition and then letting it die.

Anyone who can't put 2 and 2 on this one must have fallen off the fruit truck comming into town.

We will never know what really has happened until someone deep inside Nokia start writing about it. This will probably happen sooner than later when people start to leave Nokia.

But one thing is for sure, what went wrong happened several years ago. Elop and MS is just the end of it.

[pxa270]

As I stated in my opening post, I don't believe WP7 is actually an improvement on the previous path.

All I wanted to say is, on these boards it's tempting to blame Elop/WP7/Microsoft/Nokia management for the failure of the project. But maybe the prosaic truth is simply that MeeGo failed because developers couldn't get something good enough finished quickly enough.

[cBeam]

But one thing is for sure, what went wrong happened several years ago. Elop and MS is just the end of it.

You're probably right. But this also means that Elop is a weak leader.

Steve Jobs did not sell off Apple. He re-innovated.

[nocain]

So meego can be considered too late but a beta version of WP7 that just came out in November is not huh? Really the last update of WP7 just released a week ago added what should have been in at launch, a bunch of crap is still missing from it to be added in the next update and the development sdk is still missing a bunch of core API things to come later in the year

[Sopwith]

MeeGo was going to be late, regardless. Folks are too unwilling to admit that...

I really don't know, gerbick, and you may be right. But with scraping it like this we will NEVER know.

I feel no need to become an apologist for Nokia's management. I thought things were messy when Meego was announced a year ago, but there is no match to the mess we're going to see the two years to come. What with WP7 completely undercooked (no multitasking, no copy/paste), and at the same time need to write all hardware drivers to put it on Nokia's devices. Will WP7 run well on the low range phones that currently use Symbian?

As I said, I am no expert at all, but my gut feeling tells me Nokia's problems aren't just going to go away with a new OS.

[mikecomputing]

MeeGo was going to be late, regardless. Folks are too unwilling to admit that.

So instead, spread anger about WP7 - which, is easier to do since it's not full-featured as of yet nor is it a successful seller at the moment either.

Pick the easiest to do, run with that. That's what is happening on these boards. Easier to blame Elop than face the fact that nothing is shown a ****ing year later after the initial MeeGo announcement that can be purchased rather soon.


Well some is maybe because of this :-(

http://thenokiablog.com/2011/02/12/meego-device-rejected/

[mikecomputing]

We will never know what really has happened until someone deep inside Nokia start writing about it. This will probably happen sooner than later when people start to leave Nokia.

But one thing is for sure, what went wrong happened several years ago. Elop and MS is just the end of it.

No its not the end of it. The problems will continue... The one who scares me most is what will happen to Qt :-(

[gerbick]

I read somewhere recently that Nokia had 10 guys working on meego...Elop could have hired 10 x the developers....sounds more like a msft flunky is invading it's competition and then letting it die.

Anyone who can't put 2 and 2 on this one must have fallen off the fruit truck comming into town.

I truly doubt it was 10 folks only working on MeeGo; however if that's the case, that was Nokia's pre-Elop decision.

If Elop didn't see the value in MeeGo, then that was the board's inability to convey that. They were supposed to show all aspects of their operations, including future iterations of OS's and how that would be advantageous to their next set of projects going forward.

That... somehow didn't happen.

So what happened? He talked about what he knew... a MS OS. And the board didn't fight against it well enough to stop it. We can all wonder why, but it's just what happened. Speculate on your own - there's tons of theories.

The MSFT flunky that invaded Nokia was invited by Nokia's board of directors.

[pxa270]

So meego can be considered too late but a beta version of WP7 that just came out in November is not huh?
Funny how any critic of MeeGo is now automatically assumed to be a supporter of WP7 (despite the fact that I made it clear in my opening post that I believe WP7 actually makes things worse).

And FWIW, I believe that WP7 was far too late too, and that that's one of the bigger reasons for its lack of success so far.

[nocain]

Also WP7 is not backward compatible with 6.5, nor does the sdk resemble anything from 6.5 nor are the dev tools the same.

All Microsoft did was release into production an incomplete sdk and a new incomplete mobile os to get some early adopters to point out what is missing and broken... In other words they did what they usually do release beta use consumers to beta test try to get a drop on the market, fix and make product complete in the following 12-18 months after release.

[mikecomputing]

Funny how any critic of MeeGo is now automatically assumed to be a supporter of WP7 (despite the fact that I made it clear in my opening post that I believe WP7 actually makes things worse).

And FWIW, I believe that WP7 was far too late too, and that that's one of the bigger reasons for its lack of success so far.

There is no problem wih WP7. With help of Nokia it will success.

Reason is simple: In a year Microsoft will be as hyped as Android and Iphone is today in media because its "something new".

Microsoft has PLENTY of money too feed the media.

Nokia will loose at the end when all other mobilemanufactors go WP7 2012 also. SO the most stupid thing Nokia did (except going WP7) was that they didnt even get the rights to be the only WP7 manufactors. Stockholders knows this and thats why the stock falled 12 percent. At the same time stocks at Microsoft raced.

Simply the plan for Microsoft is world domination as always. And as always they will succes because people are stupid enought buy everything that is most hyped atm. Just take a look at the PC market. You can buy any non Microsoft computer today. Not even a keyboard without selfish Microsoft shitty logotype and that makes me wanna puke!

Personally I dont give a **** what happens to Nokia but its more bad for Trolltech engineeers (that is Qt) and Meego engineers ofcourse and open source.

[gerbick]

I really don't know, gerbick, and you may be right. But with scraping it like this we will NEVER know.

True, we'll not know fully... but here it stands we're faced with nothing shown a year later on any hardware that we've not seen before (read: Not on the N900)

As I said, I am no expert at all, but my gut feeling tells me Nokia's problems aren't just going to go away with a new OS.

100% agree. Sadly, I was feeling that way when MeeGo was announced. This is all déjà vu.

[ericsson]

For me the biggest insanity in this isn't about WP7 being bad, or some ideological openness question. It's the seemingly disproportionate ratio between what Nokia is giving up (past, present and future) and what they are gaining.

This really is very similar to what happened to Sony Ericsson. They had Symbian and UIQ with more or less full control over UIQ at least. But UIQ reached a dead end (and at that point, so did Symbian as well), and eventually SE reached a point where they had to simply stop throwing money out the door. Thanks to Android they are still alive - for now.

Nokia could also go the Android route, but chose to go Windows Mobile. In the long run this will be better than Android, if they succeed. How bad it is going to be for Nokia until it becomes better, is entirely a result of how well they handle Symbian the next couple of years, but I guess MS has promised to step in with cash as well?

In the end, I don't think Nokia had much Choice. It was either Android or WP. Lucky for Nokia, MS was in a tight spot as well, so they had some leverage in the negotiations.

We should also remember that what Nokia and MS are saying now, is not necessarily what is going to happen. I still find it hard to believe that Nokia will let Symbian die just like that, and my bet is that we will see Symbian devices for a long time some way or the other.

[Rugoz]

n the end, I don't think Nokia had much Choice. It was either Android or WP.


Bull. Look at the average blokes in the shops. They don't need 200'000 apps. They want a nice UI and good basic apps. Many people I know realised they don't need many apps on their android devices, just the basics.

So Nokia would have been able to keep their market share with something better than symbian.

And especially something uniquely Nokia, that is how you keep customers. Actually its the reason why nokia until now still sold more symbian devices than all others android devices.
It is also how apple survived in times of crisis.

[alcalde]

For me the biggest insanity in this isn't about WP7 being bad, or some ideological openness question. It's the seemingly disproportionate ratio between what Nokia is giving up (past, present and future) and what they are gaining.

They haven't given up anything. It was already gone. Major markets viewed Symbian the way they viewed station wagons... as outdated. Smart phones are the future and new buyers were not going to buy Symbian. Android is appearing on cheaper and cheaper phones, and Symbian can't compete against Android. It's done. Game over.

You can mourn a loved one, but if you leave them around for too long after they're gone they're only going to stink up the place. Elop brought a shovel and he's finally burying the corpse. Now, Nokia can move on with their lives.

[alcalde]

You're probably right. But this also means that Elop is a weak leader.

Steve Jobs did not sell off Apple. He re-innovated.

Did I miss the sale of Nokia? Apple entered new markets. Nokia isn't in a position to do that, so Elop did the only thing he could do to fix problems NOW before the company entered a death spiral. What do you think Nokia should have done if MeeGo wasn't an option? Ask everybody to work harder and just kinda think of something better really quick isn't an option either. MS offers full customization; Google doesn't. And your decision is to do what, and why?

People are either complaining about the decision without offering an alternative, or they're in denial of the stated facts and offering implausible alternatives.

[patlak]

The question is: What will make me wait for Nokia and not buy a WP7 device now? I don't wanna buy it now, and won't buy it in a year.

Good luck Mr. Flop.

[Rugoz]

Did I miss the sale of Nokia? Apple entered new markets. Nokia isn't in a position to do that, so Elop did the only thing he could do to fix problems NOW before the company entered a death spiral. What do you think Nokia should have done if MeeGo wasn't an option?.

Meego was an option. We've seen android, WebOS, QNX from RIM. Do you think Nokia is too stupid to put together a decent OS?

And Apple did not resurge by entering new markets, they just made more desirable products. The iPhone came in 2007, before that Apple was already going strong again.

[alcalde]

So meego can be considered too late but a beta version of WP7 that just came out in November is not huh? Really the last update of WP7 just released a week ago added what should have been in at launch, a bunch of crap is still missing from it to be added in the next update and the development sdk is still missing a bunch of core API things to come later in the year

And ten billion Microsofties are working on it right now... not ten or fifteen Nokia employees. Microsoft started over from scratch and managed to produce WP7 and the first update. Despite the comments here, WP7 generally got very good reviews and the fellow who runs Nokia Insights called it the most stable phone OS he's ever used. Microsoft also has Zune this and XBox that to tie into WP7 and they'll certainly deliver better desktop integration. Does MeeGo even have an interface yet? Putting your chips on the idea that the world's biggest software producer can churn out an OS quicker than you can is not an unwise bet.

[paai]

I do not understand the discussion here. Probably because I never tried Meego. Maemo was good enough for me.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Maemo just like Android an user shell on top of Linux? And the same for Meego? I bought an Archos last week, and Android drove me mad until I got a terminal and started exploring the filesystem and I felt a lot more confident from there, just like when I got the xterm on the N900.

Nokia got itself a winner when they put the N900 on the market. Sadly enough they never followed it up, but pulled the rug from under it by starting on Meego when Maemo could have profited by strong support and development.

Ah, well, water under the bridge. Right now, the N900 does everything I expected from it, and even if no more updates and improvements come along, I still expect it to function satisfactory the nezt few years.

Paai

[Rugoz]

Microsoft also has Zune this and XBox that to tie into WP7


Zune? lol, even ovi music reaches more people than zune, its likely nokia is gonna provide the music stuff for wp7. XBox live? Nice, does Apple need it for lots of quality games? Nope.

[maluka]

What I find curious is how an unknown banking analyst, clueless about MeeGo, was able to conveniently write an open letter to Nokia and Microsoft (http://www.winrumors.com/analyst-calls-for-nokia-to-adopt-windows-phone-7/) urging Nokia to adopt WP7 and his thoughts on MeeGo: "Get rid of your own proprietary high-end solution (MEEGO) – it’s the biggest joke in the tech industry right now and will put you even further behind Apple and Google.". This piece was published and all over the web (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110202/analyst-meegos-a-joke-nokia-needs-windows-phone-7/?mod=ATD_rss).

In the days before the announcement there was also a piece about Nokia's huge R&D spending (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110203/not-seeing-much-return-on-that-massive-rd-spend-are-you-nokia/) that suddenly showed up also out of thin air. There are far too many coincidences in the lead up to this event. He decided to go with WP7 long before the day before the announcement as he has said.

[ericsson]

You're probably right. But this also means that Elop is a weak leader.

Steve Jobs did not sell off Apple. He re-innovated.

It looks like Elop was simply hired in to make the deal with Microsoft and do the dirtywork firing people in Finland. Judging by that Memo he wrote, he doesn't strike me having too much knowledge about what is going on. Steve Jobs is a true technological visionary, Elop is a bureaucrat. Too bad that Steve Jobs also is an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate.

[pxa270]

In the days before the announcement there was also a piece about Nokia's huge R&D spending (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110203/not-seeing-much-return-on-that-massive-rd-spend-are-you-nokia/) that suddenly showed up also out of thin air.
Hold you conspiracy theories here. Nokia's large R&D spending has been noted a number of times in the financial press in the past, see e.g.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/24/palm-nokia-merger-intelligent-investing-rumors.html,
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/nokia-investors-lose-patience-3-years-after-iphone-update2-.html,
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-05-06/nokia-investors-lose-patience-3-years-after-iphone-update2-.html

The first link is quite enlightening: Nokia spends over 8bln on R&D, which was several times the entire market value of Palm (2.4bln in 2009, just after WebOS release, eventually purchased by HP for 1.2bln). And Palm developed WebOS pretty much from scratch and shipped an end product in less than one and a half year time.

[jsa]

People are either complaining about the decision without offering an alternative, or they're in denial of the stated facts and offering implausible alternatives.

There was a plausible alternative offered, that was the old strategy. Are you familiar with it? Even if you are, I'll just have to disagree with you.

This will not speed up anything. They probably won't have WP7 devices out any faster than they would've had MeeGo phones. Their market share is going to tank even more now that Symbian is officially a dead end. And they just flushed years worth of work down the drain pretty much when it was finally about to bear fruit.

With this deal they're going to benefit others in the WP7 ecosystem much more than themselves, IMO. Not to mention that even if it "wins" over Google's or Apple's ecosystems, it doesn't still mean Nokia wins. They gave up their chance to be a big player with their own ecosystem and the markets reaction to that was pretty clear. And I believe they really had a chance. They did an unconditional surrender while being second only to Apple in profits and biggest by market share in both overall and smartphones. Now they're just an OEM among others.

[Rugoz]

I think the Nokia leadership is so obsessed with services that they couldn't even get the OS right. I mean they were talking about that for years. It seems this decision is a continuation of their obsession..

[Copernicus]

Steve Jobs is a true technological visionary, Elop is a bureaucrat. Too bad that Steve Jobs also is an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate.

A quick correction, from a person who has used and enjoyed Apple products for years (since the Apple ][+): Steve Jobs is in no way a technological visionary. Nothing that Jobs has ever done in the last twenty years has ever pushed the limits of technology, and in fact, up until the last few years Apple hardware and software have consistently been inferior to similar products in the PC world.

The one and only good thing about Steve Jobs is, as you say, he's "an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate". Let me rephrase that statement: Steve Jobs is an anal-retentive perfectionist who believes that every technological device should be just as easy and intuitive to use as absolutely possible, and drives his people hard to deliver products following that rule.

Apple is a leader in the technology industry not because it creates visionary products, but because unlike pretty much every other company out there today, it at least has a leader with a goal. Compare that to Nokia, fumbling around with lots of different kinds of phones, lots of different operating systems, lots of divergent goals; honestly, Nokia hardware and software should be beating Apple's even today, but without consistent leadership, there's just no way the company can hope to keep up...

[Frappacino]

In the days before the announcement there was also a piece about Nokia's huge R&D spending (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110203/not-seeing-much-return-on-that-massive-rd-spend-are-you-nokia/) that suddenly showed up also out of thin air. There are far too many coincidences in the lead up to this event. He decided to go with WP7 long before the day before the announcement as he has said.

Ah - someone here is starting to think with the right mindset.

All articles that appeared in the media like this are part of a information campaign - its no coincidence.

The appointment of a M$ guy as CEO by the board is also no accident and is deliberate.

When asking the question WHY WP7 was picked instead of Meego, TECHNICAL considerations of which is a better product should be TOTALLY ignored - business people at a high level who make these decisions dont know technical **** - they only know buzzwords and talking points.

You would be better off looking at the money trail, who talked with who in public and who loses and who gains in each viable outcome.

Assuming that Meego was dropped for WP7 for technical reasons just shows that you have never worked in a corporation at a high level.

[alcalde]

I really don't know, gerbick, and you may be right. But with scraping it like this we will NEVER know.

I feel no need to become an apologist for Nokia's management. I thought things were messy when Meego was announced a year ago, but there is no match to the mess we're going to see the two years to come. What with WP7 completely undercooked (no multitasking, no copy/paste), and at the same time need to write all hardware drivers to put it on Nokia's devices. Will WP7 run well on the low range phones that currently use Symbian?

As I said, I am no expert at all, but my gut feeling tells me Nokia's problems aren't just going to go away with a new OS.

We DO know. Elop's memo TOLD US. The board approved of this. What more do we need to know?

I can just imagine if someone came here and went on and on about MMS, portrait mode or all the other features Maemo was missing the way y'all are going on about things that are already in the first update (cut and paste) or that don't stop iPhone buyers (multitasking). Is cut and paste any more of an omission than custom ringtones? The most powerful OS developer in the world joins forces with the greatest phone hardware developer in the world. It's IBM + MS all over again. I don't see how this can be a bad thing in the end.

[pxa270]

In the days before the announcement there was also a piece about Nokia's huge R&D spending (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110203/not-seeing-much-return-on-that-massive-rd-spend-are-you-nokia/) that suddenly showed up also out of thin air.
B.t.w., if those estimates are anywhere near correct, they are pretty shocking I must say. Nokia apparently pays about

1200 people to work on Symbian kernel
5000 on Symbian user experience
1800 on MeeGo and Qt (of which probably between 300 and 500 on Qt)

(Again, assuming that these estimates are ballpark correct) I think it's understandable that people are questioning what they have to show for this.

[nilchak]

One big reason that many of us are not looking at is that so far Nokia has been good selling phones by itself. But it hasnt managened this in NA because here ISP tie-ups count a lot. Face it, in North America, Nokia doesnt have any stores, they closed their only 2 premium show stores ( in NY and Chicago) , they have to tie-ups with ISP to sell discounted phones which is the only way MOST Americans buy their phones.

Lacking this distribution channel in NA, they had no way to sell Maemo or Meego phones even if they were ready. Also the ISP's play a big part is accepting or rejecting a phone on tier networks and most NA ISP's are unwilling to test a new unproven OS on their networks. It takes a lot of money and time for the ISP to certify a device and a OS on their networks.

Also the mobile market has been moving so fast that for Nokia to catch up, they needed an OS with some ecosystem around it. Android while being the best choice in terms of ecosystem was unsuyitabel for Nokia as they would be commoditized along with mfrs as HTC, Samsung, LG etc.
Nobody wants to go there - unless you can make phones on the cheap.
And the Android phone market is chock full of cheap phones so competing on that front was a serious risk.

They only other viable option was WP7. Being an underdog (MS WP7 is an underdog in the mobile world) Nokia could play a stronger role - and we did see this - Nokia managed to get serious rights to change and customize WP7 in their own way. While it may not be the best of choices, its the only one they had to hit the ground running.

Without Meego having anything to show for it, and Symbian seriously showing its age, I think Nokia chose the least bad of the bad options that it had.

I think the key was that Meego while being trumped up to be a very good OS, delivered too little too late for Nokia.

Look even Palm/HP delievered WebOS in short time and now HP has said that they will make WebOS work on Smartphones, Tablets (already done) and also on PC's very soon. Wasn't that the vision of Meego too ? But lets face it when we all saw Meego 1.1 it was not ready in any shape or form for geeky end users. Meego 1.2 is still months away from fir and finish looks. So how much ever Nokia customised their own UI, the base Meego OS first has to be ready - which it is not.

[jsa]

I don't see how this can be a bad thing in the end.

I think you are missing quite a lot if you don't see that? You are comparing what there is now to what there will be in the future. Instead of what there could've been in the future versus what there will be in the future. I think you're missing a gigantic part of the picture there. As Elop put it, it's a war of ecosystems and Nokia gave up on that.

[alcalde]

Bull. Look at the average blokes in the shops. They don't need 200'000 apps. They want a nice UI and good basic apps. Many people I know realised they don't need many apps on their android devices, just the basics.

So Nokia would have been able to keep their market share with something better than symbian.

And especially something uniquely Nokia, that is how you keep customers. Actually its the reason why nokia until now still sold more symbian devices than all others android devices.
It is also how apple survived in times of crisis.

1. People wouldn't be paying so much for Android and especially iOS phones if they didn't really want any of the features. "Need " is another issue, but they definitely want them. They want a capacitive touchscreen - they have no idea what that is, but they've heard that's what they should want. They want to pinch things - why, they don't know, but the more fingers you can use at one time on the screen, the better. Say, thirty. Etc., etc.


2. Nokia didn't have anything better than Symbian ready to go.If they did, they'd have already deployed it.

3. Nokia will have complete control over WP7 on their phones.

[jsa]

2. Nokia didn't have anything better than Symbian ready to go.If they did, they'd have already deployed it.

But they don't have WP7 ready to go either until maybe somewhere towards the end of this year. Like with MeeGo. Only they now destroyed their Symbian sales too by announcing it's going out.

3. Nokia will have complete control over WP7 on their phones.

But not the ecosystem, that's the big thing here.

[Sopwith]

The question is: What will make me wait for Nokia and not buy a WP7 device now? I don't wanna buy it now, and won't buy it in a year.

Good luck Mr. Flop.

Thank you for this question, patlak, for it catalyzed (or joined ;) an epiphany regarding the situation in my (aching, thick) head.

There are indeed two points of view here -- that of the end consumers, and that of the developers and people professionally involved with Nokia (not discussing the shareholder's position, which is represented by a less vocal group). Your question is from the point of view of the end consumer -- what will the change to WP7 bring to the market, and are we going to want to buy it. The answer is, for most people here, likely NO, we will not want any of it. WP7's philosophy is polarly opposite to that of Maemo/Meego, and if we liked this philosophy we'd be happy with iOS gadgets and not spend time on TMO. So no wonder why many people here are turning to Android (the lesser evil). But we have always been a very small group that barely affects the market.

The other point of view is that of Nokia and those working for / with it. Shrinking market share in the much larger Symbian segment had to be addressed somehow. Qt was a feasible solution, but apparently it wasn't working for Symbian as expected. So the board decided to replace Symbian with WP7, a decision about which I couldn't care less because I have never been interested in Symbian devices anyway.

Now, the conflict arises from the fact that Qt and Meego are incompatible and compete directly with WP7, so when Symbian goes they are canned as well. From the point of view of Nokia this is really unimportant, Meego being just an experimental platform with zero market share. From the point of view of most end users on TMO it is the world.

In the end of the day, for Nokia, it was never about Meego being ready or not. They will get it ready in some form, but they cannot keep it as more than an experiment since it will contradict the move to WP7 in the lower segment. It is simpler to have both lower and higher end phones running on WP7.

I guess I can now leave the conspiracy theories alone, suck it up and move on. Let's hope we get a decent successor to the N900 -- the first and last Meego phone from Nokia, but c'est la vie. If it has a screen larger than 3.5'', I'll buy it.

[nilchak]

But they don't have WP7 ready to go either until maybe somewhere towards the end of this year. Like with MeeGo. Only they now destroyed their Symbian sales too by announcing it's going out.

But not the ecosystem, that's the big thing here.

While it may take a year still for WP7 phones, at least it has a eco-system around it - yes still not as thriving as Android - but neverthless a system around it that WORKS.

Nokia lame excuse of an ecosystem - OVI - purely sucked. It didn't work either on N900. It didn't have a strong and secure payment system. Maybe you don't remember the fracas when we could actually download a paid app on OVI without paying for it. While that feels good to some "it should all be free" open source type guys - its not what builds a viable ecosystem.

They might not control the WP7 ecosystem - but they can ride that to some success (hopefully).

Just developing Meego itself wouldn't have sufficed in this case.

[trbs]

I know it's popular at the moment to lay all the blame at Elop or at Nokia management (current or past). But maybe the truth is really that MeeGo was just to late and not good enough?

The impression that I get from various threads here and elsewhere is that at the moment MeeGo is still nowhere near ready, and an end-user ready release is at least another 6 months away. Now in the alternative world were Nokia did decide to ride it out with MeeGo, by the time it's finally market ready (autumn? winter?), was it actually going to be better for mass market end users than the iPhone 5 or the Samsung and HTC Android 3.x devices it would be competing against? Somehow I doubt it.

Of course, I don't believe that Nokia WP7 devices are anywhere near ready yet, and they may take even longer to get on the market. So it's not like I'm endorsing this move. All I'm saying is, maybe Nokia's fate was already sealed a long time ago. Maybe the only way they could have turned the tide was if they had reacted faster, developed faster, delivered faster than they could.

Yes I agree....

Meego will not produce a good phone before it dies.. there just not enough power/traction behind it... (aka there should have been one or two early adopters devices by now, to get close to competing in the market)

Even it they released the planned Meego phone Q4-2010 it would have still been a steep uphill battle.

Specially given how Nokia went with Maemo. I mean the N900 is a great great phone... and I'll probably use mine until it dies. Hopefully by that time some other free/oss phone is out there... otherwise I'll guess I'll have to sell my soul to HP/WebOS.

But Nokia never really worked with a good plan for Maemo as far as I could see.

Given that they let there base-os fall into the slums of decay, never rebased on current Debians and did not actively let the community contribute to the core os... (Felt more like a OpenSolaris type of development then PostGreSQL or Debian)

It would have taken a long time before there would have been consumer ready Maemo phones. But there could have been one by now!! with another one at Q2 or Q3 2011, really settling Maemo into the market..

No; there became Meego... basically throwing Maemo out of the window entirely... (sure sure it was a 'merger'... personally I have not seen much 'merging', I've seen a lot of Moblin turning into Meego)

There where hopes for Meego but to my eyes basically the same thing happened as with Maemo...

Somehow.. I have never felt much love for the platforms from Nokia after the N800....

Yes the N900 is great (and I'll say it a thousands times more) but even during the Nokia/Maemo/N900 Amsterdam event, I felt engaged... not empowered by Nokia..

Given the track record in the past the never gave me the feeling that they where actually committed... committed in more then just words and some money... With the N900 all previous devices again died in Nokia's eyes... Now I can understand this given the history... but it should not have to been that way... with proper setup of Maemo it should have been possible to keep the older devices up to date... let the community take over the roles of maintaining the devices... but i guess more coorperate issues like patents, copyrights, licenses and backroom deals where in the way of realizing that...

My hopes now are with the CSSU :)

I would really love to see US working together to rebase Maemo on Debian 6 (Squeeze) or 7 (Wheezy) trying to create a firmware that will completely blow away Maemo 5.

Maybe visually something like combining an updated userland with Canola like interface. (could be QT, could be something else)

And with development board like the Beagle and Panda board powering anything from our N900 to Tables to Cars and Home devices like thermostats, automation and whatever you can think of..

Well... guess this rambling just shows that I still love the potential of what was (is?) Maemo...

I just would have loved to see Nokia put there enormous knowledge from the like of Symbian into the Linux kernel and help create lightweight versions of some of the things bogging down Linux on small devices now...

Then we should not need to run Java (oeps I mean Dalvak) to get a Linux powered device to make phone calls with, listen to shoutcast and browse the web....

In some sense Apple already show us that this is possible right ? how much different in effect is an iPhone ? it's just a Unix kernel, with Mac userland, Obj-C and apples gui on top right ?.. sure lots of development and Q&A to make it all work nicely together, but isn't this just where Maemo and Meego failed ? Something more then a hand full of contracted developers to code up individual parts of the OS ?

But this is all so many years overdue now that I must agree with your sentiment that for a company like Nokia that needs to compete right now; it just isn't ready... and by the time it is, given the current conditions and management of it it will be many (3+) years to late.

They should have realized a year ago....

[Texrat]

Pick the easiest to do, run with that.

Right-- as in, pick MeeGo, run with it.

Elop deserves blame. If he had wanted, he could have scrambled Nokia into making MeeGo Priority 1, and we WOULD have a device right now. But I'm now convinced he was set against MeeGo from the start, and sabotaged its chances.

[Texrat]

It's IBM + MS all over again. I don't see how this can be a bad thing in the end.

Ask IBM how that ended up for them.

[alcalde]

Meego was an option. We've seen android, WebOS, QNX from RIM. Do you think Nokia is too stupid to put together a decent OS?

And Apple did not resurge by entering new markets, they just made more desirable products. The iPhone came in 2007, before that Apple was already going strong again.

1. Where's MeeGo, Rugoz? Oh that's right - it doesn't exist in a saleable form. The CEO of Nokia says MeeGo isn't ready and you're simply going to claim it is?

2. Sherlock Holmes said "When all else has been eliminated, whatever else remains, however improbable, must be the answer." If Nokia couldn't whip Maemo/MeeGo/whatever into shape in several years then YES I believe they've lost the ability to put together a decent OS. And YES, Google, Palm and RIM are currently superior to Nokia in software development. And Apple and Microsoft go without saying. They've all delivered new OSes in less time while spending far less. Facts. Don't give me righteous indignation - show me MeeGo. Or even a version of Maemo that could go toe-to-toe with iOs and Android, because the one that was on the N900 didn't succeed at that.

I have facts to back up my assertion that Nokia can't produce a decent OS anymore. Where's the proof that Elop, the board, and the shareholders who elected them are so stupid as to have this wonderful, polished, sexy, non-geeky, intuitive, buzz-worthy, bug-free OS 99.9% ready and they traded it for WP7 instead for no reason or vast conspiratorial ones? Unless you produce proof this OS exists, you can't prove that hypothesis or disprove mine.

3. The iPod (which came in 2001), iPhone, iTunes and iPad did not exist before Jobs returned to Apple. They were NEW MARKETS. Apple did not have music players before the iPod, phones before the iPhone, music sales before iTunes, or tablets before iPad. Do you think the vast majority of Apple's profits today are generated by those or by Mac sales? Steve Jobs led the company from being a personal computer company to a consumer product/entertainment company. He did not come back and take the home computer market from PCs/Windows. (He did introduce the iMac though) Elop is being charged with recapturing the lead in an existing market.

From Wikipedia:
. In March 1998, to concentrate Apple's efforts on returning to profitability, Jobs immediately terminated a number of projects such as Newton, Cyberdog, and OpenDoc. In the coming months, many employees developed a fear of encountering Jobs while riding in the elevator, "afraid that they might not have a job when the doors opened. The reality was that Jobs' summary executions were rare, but a handful of victims was enough to terrorize a whole company."[52] Jobs also changed the licensing program for Macintosh clones, making it too costly for the manufacturers to continue making machines.

With the purchase of NeXT, much of the company's technology found its way into Apple products, most notably NeXTSTEP, which evolved into Mac OS X.

So let's see... Jobs killed several products including the Newton that has a lot in common with MeeGo.

The project missed its original goals to reinvent personal computing, and then to rewrite contemporary application programming. The Newton project fell victim to project slippage, scope creep...

I'm sure some Apple fans were crying that it was almost ready to take over the world but the evil sleeper agent of NeXT was planted in Apple to destroy it. In fact, I know it's so, because the article on Newton describes how some fans were always seeing signs that it was going to be revived, produced Newton emulators, and software such as eReaders have been produced for Newton today by diehard afficionados. Some probably still refuse to buy an Apple product.

Steve also terrorized employees with fear of firing in the elevator(Elop could only top this by throwing employees down elevator shafts). He also brought technology with him from the previous company he was a part of and incorporated it into existing products, displacing the existing operating system in the process.

Sounds to me like Jobs shook things up like Elop's doing and neither are afraid to cut anything or anyone that hasn't lived up to expectations. They're also not afraid to use their previous contacts to bolster their company's products. I don't see why Mr. Elop is considered the opposite of Mr. Jobs.

[patlak]

Zune? lol, even ovi music reaches more people than zune, its likely nokia is gonna provide the music stuff for wp7. XBox live? Nice, does Apple need it for lots of quality games? Nope.

Ngage Arena beats the **** out of Xbox Live.

[alcalde]

Ask IBM how that ended up for them.

Rather well, actually, all told. It was the reverse engineering and other loss of control that allowed other manufacturers to make PC clones and undercut IBM. OS/2's another story, but that's not what caused IBM to exit the market. IBM PC-compatible computers running a Microsoft operating system still rule the business and home computer markets. Lenovo bought IBM's laptop computer business and it's still a respected business laptop brand.

I wish the startup I owned 10% of ended up like IBM. 10% of nothing = nothing. :(

[daperl]

It's IBM + MS all over again. I don't see how this can be a bad thing in the end.

I think this would be a good sig for you.

[cBeam]

I don't see why Mr. Elop is considered the opposite of Mr. Jobs.

Did you see Jobs announcing the iPad? Awesome, magic!
Compare that to Elop announcing the new strategy. Awesome, magic?

Hint: Nokia's shares tanked 15% after Elop announced the new strategy.

[HellFlyer]

Oh guys cmon , Nokia can innovate but they were never good at software . From what I recall their software projects always were failures. Elop did what he had to do, get support from software makers aka Microsoft. Regardless how awesome MeeGo was/is remember that handset UI was primary in Nokia's hands hence FAIL


Lets go back

Download! = first app store = FAIL

N-gage devices = first gaming platform FAIL

Mosh = second app store FAIL

N-gage software = gaming platform for all N- series = FAIL

Ovi services = FAIL

As N8 ad said its not the technology its what you do with it :D

In this case its not the innovation its what you do with it ;) hence iPhone and Android

[maxximuscool]

Who said Win7 is a smartphone OS?
I'd you're an idiot if you think so.

Define smartphone OS if you can.
These are the list of what Win7 Phone OS doesn't have. Which a must for a smartphone OS, without it then it is not so smart afterall.

* No cut, copy, and paste,
* No full multitasking for 3rd party apps,
* No Adobe Flash.
* Windows Phone 7 supports upgradable storage via an SD Card; however SD card memory is merged with the phone's internal storage, and changing the SD card causes the phone to reset to factory settings.
* Windows Phone 7 does not support connecting to Wi-Fi (wireless) access points which are hidden or have a static IP address, tethering to a computer
* No videocalling,
* No VoIP calling,
* Doesn't support USB mass-storage,
* No universal email inbox,
* No universal search,
* Doesn't have a system-wide file manager,
* Doesn't support Bluetooth file transfers,
* Doesn't support USSD messages,
* Doesn't support custom ringtones.
* only support syncing with Exchange ActiveSync over the network. There is no support for syncing with Exchange ActiveSync using a cable or cradle.

* does not support Office documents with security permissions
* Doesn't support IPsec security,
* No on-device encryption,
* Doesn't support strong passwords,
* No internet sockets.
* No list of past phone calls is now a single list, and cannot be separated into inbound, outbound or missed calls.
* No USB OTG (Host)

[gerbick]

Right-- as in, pick MeeGo, run with it.

MeeGo has desktop software to compliment the OS on their phones? A music store, a video store and that all works right now?

Elop deserves blame.

As does the board of directors that invited him.

If he had wanted, he could have scrambled Nokia into making MeeGo Priority 1, and we WOULD have a device right now. But I'm now convinced he was set against MeeGo from the start, and sabotaged its chances.

Sounds to me that the board of directors yet again don't know what they have in MeeGo, just like Maemo.

[patlak]

Thank you for this question, patlak, for it catalyzed (or joined ;) an epiphany regarding the situation in my (aching, thick) head.

There are indeed two points of view here -- that of the end consumers, and that of the developers and people professionally involved with Nokia (not discussing the shareholder's position, which is represented by a less vocal group). Your question is from the point of view of the end consumer -- what will the change to WP7 bring to the market, and are we going to want to buy it. The answer is, for most people here, likely NO, we will not want any of it. WP7's philosophy is polarly opposite to that of Maemo/Meego, and if we liked this philosophy we'd be happy with iOS gadgets and not spend time on TMO. So no wonder why many people here are turning to Android (the lesser evil). But we have always been a very small group that barely affects the market.

The other point of view is that of Nokia and those working for / with it. Shrinking market share in the much larger Symbian segment had to be addressed somehow. Qt was a feasible solution, but apparently it wasn't working for Symbian as expected. So the board decided to replace Symbian with WP7, a decision about which I couldn't care less because I have never been interested in Symbian devices anyway.

Now, the conflict arises from the fact that Qt and Meego are incompatible and compete directly with WP7, so when Symbian goes they are canned as well. From the point of view of Nokia this is really unimportant, Meego being just an experimental platform with zero market share. From the point of view of most end users on TMO it is the world.

In the end of the day, for Nokia, it was never about Meego being ready or not. They will get it ready in some form, but they cannot keep it as more than an experiment since it will contradict the move to WP7 in the lower segment. It is simpler to have both lower and higher end phones running on WP7.

I guess I can now leave the conspiracy theories alone, suck it up and move on. Let's hope we get a decent successor to the N900 -- the first and last Meego phone from Nokia, but c'est la vie. If it has a screen larger than 3.5'', I'll buy it.

Thanks for the thorough response to my 2 word question :). I appreciate it.
Your two point of views are correct and I agree.
My question is certainly from the consumer side and isn't that what Nokia is more interested in now? They want to grab the attention of the consumer and channel his view to their future strategy which will be long overdue and something that is currently on offer in the market. Nokia had only simple things to do to increase their presence in North America, and in order to achieve that, they should just have listened to American media. Get past the "Symbian is outdated" attacks and absorb the negative attitude towards the browser and social network integration. Browser is easy to do, they could have just ported MicroB which was praised by many. Is it so hard to include a nicely developed youtube, facebook and twitter client? There are already perfect clients available for Twitter (TwimGo) and youtube (CuteTube), only facebook needed. Nothing similar can be developed from Nokia? If they did that and advertised it, phones would sell. UI has familiarity going for it and is quite improved with S^3, attacks are only the remaining ones from the N97 catastrophe.

Only small things were requested from Nokia and they couldn't deliver. Now they have to face the new strategy by adopting an out of house OS with much less features, drop current in house OS projects that are still potentially capable of bringing back Nokia to the top and try to win over consumers yet again, just like they had to 10 years ago.

[patlak]

Who said Win7 is a smartphone OS?
I'd you're an idiot if you think so.

Define smartphone OS if you can.
These are the list of what Win7 Phone OS doesn't have. Which a must for a smartphone OS, without it then it is not so smart afterall.

* No cut, copy, and paste,
* No full multitasking for 3rd party apps,
* No Adobe Flash.
* Windows Phone 7 supports upgradable storage via an SD Card; however SD card memory is merged with the phone's internal storage, and changing the SD card causes the phone to reset to factory settings.
* Windows Phone 7 does not support connecting to Wi-Fi (wireless) access points which are hidden or have a static IP address, tethering to a computer
* No videocalling,
* No VoIP calling,
* Doesn't support USB mass-storage,
* No universal email inbox,
* No universal search,
* Doesn't have a system-wide file manager,
* Doesn't support Bluetooth file transfers,
* Doesn't support USSD messages,
* Doesn't support custom ringtones.
* only support syncing with Exchange ActiveSync over the network. There is no support for syncing with Exchange ActiveSync using a cable or cradle.

* does not support Office documents with security permissions
* Doesn't support IPsec security,
* No on-device encryption,
* Doesn't support strong passwords,
* No internet sockets.
* No list of past phone calls is now a single list, and cannot be separated into inbound, outbound or missed calls.
* No USB OTG (Host)

S40 much???

[gerbick]

Hint: Nokia's shares tanked 15% after Elop announced the new strategy.

Bigger hint: Nokia's shares have tanked 75% from 40.00+ USD in 2007 to less than 10.00 USD in 2010 from prior Nokia strategies.

[patlak]

Oh guys cmon , Nokia can innovate but they were never good at software . From what I recall their software projects always were failures. Elop did what he had to do, get support from software makers aka Microsoft. Regardless how awesome MeeGo was/is remember that handset UI was primary in Nokia's hands hence FAIL


Lets go back

Download! = first app store = FAIL

N-gage devices = first gaming platform FAIL

Mosh = second app store FAIL

N-gage software = gaming platform for all N- series = FAIL

Ovi services = FAIL

As N8 ad said its not the technology its what you do with it :D

In this case its not the innovation its what you do with it ;) hence iPhone and Android

Nokia just fails at advertising. How many people knew Ngage 2.0 was available? MOSH?

[Texrat]

Rather well, actually, all told.(

Not really. Others made out much better from IBM's PC innovations than they did-- including Microsoft.

[Texrat]

Bigger hint: Nokia's shares have tanked 75% from 40.00+ USD in 2007 to less than 10.00 USD in 2010 from prior Nokia strategies.

...and had previously gone up due to others.

[patlak]

Only they now destroyed their Symbian sales too by announcing it's going out.

Sound familiar? N900/Maemo 5

[cBeam]

Bigger hint: Nokia's shares have tanked 75% from 40.00+ USD in 2007 to less than 10.00 USD in 2010 from prior Nokia strategies.

Gerbick, I know that. So what, it shows that the previous regime (OPK & board) failed. So the savior was brought in, share prices moved up slightly. Then the new strategy was announced, and the stock tanked again. Looks like the market thinks that the current regime (Elop & board) failed.

So we do have the continuation of failure, apparently not a change to the better.

What is your point?

[gerbick]

...and had previously gone up due to others.

Not by the time I looked at their trends. 2007 was their peak year, their highest.

Nothing peaked higher than that year.

[number41]

Dude, if sales meant anything about quality, Justin Bieber and Britney Spears wouldn't sell shitloads of records.

Truth is, what most of us are angry about is that all that Maemo was is about to cease exist, in one form or another. This device is about to go down in history as a revolutionary device that didn't happen due to bad management decisions, and never again will we see anything close to it from nokia, if Ms is truly at the helm of Nokia.

And guess what, in spite of what really sells, I could really use another Maemo device, with updated specs. I'm afraid this will be no more.

[Texrat]

Not by the time I looked at their trends. 2007 was their peak year, their highest.

Nothing peaked higher than that year.

I've been making money off Nokia's stock rollercoaster going back further than that. ;)

[gerbick]

Gerbick, I know that. So what, it shows that the previous regime (OPK & board) failed. So the savior was brought in, share prices moved up slightly. Then the new strategy was announced, and the stock tanked again. Looks like the market thinks that the current regime (Elop & board) failed.

They've already failed, it was a very slow bleed from 2007 to now. If things were left to their own devices, it would have been an epic fail sooner or later.

So we do have the continuation of failure, apparently not a change to the better.

Agree on the continuation of failure.

What is your point?

Don't overlook that 2007 was the last great year. The board of directors know that quite well. Blaming the accumulated failure being blamed on the current strategies and on Elop tends to overlook what came before that last announcement.

What's my point? Don't be daft and overlook the whole truth - Nokia's been on a downhill trajectory for 4 years.

[Rugoz]

Where's MeeGo, Rugoz? Oh that's right - it doesn't exist in a saleable form. The CEO of Nokia says MeeGo isn't ready and you're simply going to claim it is?


I bought the N900 exactly one year ago, and I liked it better than android at that time, hell some things are still better today. IMO portrait mode was lacking, otherwise fine. That tells me engineers at nokia are able to do it.

If I would have never used the N900 I would agree with you.

Now harmattan devel. started maybe 1.5 years ago, and they have Trolltech helping them with UI stuff. I think it should be ready or ready soon or something went terribly wrong.

But what do I know?

Also everybody says symbian sucks, I used symbian for a long time, and it was superior to any other smartphone OS (in some regards it still is). Nokia can't do software? My ***.

[deyons]

@PXA270
I think you are partly correct as to why people are hating on Elop and Nokia. While you may say we are wrong and Nokia is in a tight spot lets look at the history of Elop, Microsoft and Nokia. Most of this I knew and some I learned from others on this forum.

Elop came from a company named Macromedia and sold Macromedia to Adobe, their was a program called Director which was like Flash on steroids and my personal opinion had more advanced features then Flash has now. Adobe took over Macromedia and killed Director as it would cause competition internally and also if sold to another company and Director died.
Source: http://piacentini.blog.br/2011/02/elop-is-after-me/

Microsoft is a good and bad up company at the same time. Microsoft does not innovate until they get pressured by competition. Microsoft is also a company filled with failures
ZUNE-Fail, WMA-Fail, Backing HD DVD-Fail, Mobile 6.5-Fail, Windows Tablets-Fail, BOB-Fail, Windows ME-Fail, UMPC's-Fail, Kin-Fail, Passing on YouTube-Fail....thats off my head their is a super long list I cant find right now but about 20 more is missing.
This is the part that should scare you!
Microsoft and the KIN. Microsoft took over a phone OS development group called Danger for $500 Million. They responsible for the T-Mobile SideKick. Microsoft then kills off the SideKick and releases the KIN and could not sell 8,000 of them. That a $500 Million dollar loss. The SideKick is no more and the SideKick community which was huge is no more(I'm one of them).

Nokia a strong company who gained the trust of millions by embracing Open development, quality phones and keeping customer loyalty. If you understand Symbian3 you would understand they are not a burning platform as Elop says how ever their bad decisions to release a OS only to kill is has put them in this place and it is Nokia's fault.

WP7 sold 2 Million phones on different Hardware manufactures.
Symbian sold 6 to 8 on just Nokia in the same time.

Nokia has been making bad decisions for some time now, is this just another.

With know all this, would you being Nokia make the same decision?
And will you be buying a Nokia/WP7?
Now I ask you, should we not be mad?

[please post corrections]

[gerbick]

Dude, if sales meant anything about quality, Justin Bieber and Britney Spears wouldn't sell shitloads of records.

But they do sell shitloads of records. I've never heard a one, but I'm sure people with different (I won't say lesser) tastes than I buy those records.

Truth is, what most of us are angry about is that all that Maemo was is about to cease exist, in one form or another.

100% agree. But I think clarity of exactly why that's come to pass is what is lacking in all of this vitriolic banter. Maemo was killed due to sheer incompetence, bad management and ultimately Nokia not realizing what exactly they had from the 770 to the N900.

Simply stated, they didn't capitalize. This is what happens when you do that.

This device is about to go down in history as a revolutionary device that didn't happen due to bad management decisions, and never again will we see anything close to it from nokia, if Ms is truly at the helm of Nokia.

Disagree slightly. Bad management, a beta device that could have been revolutionary, half-delivered.

MS is at the helm now because of prior bad decisions. That's a harsh truth.

And guess what, in spite of what really sells, I could really use another Maemo device, with updated specs. I'm afraid this will be no more.

Agree fully. Gladly, I've found a level of comfort with Android.

Too bad it's a forced happiness.

[cBeam]

What's my point? Don't be daft and overlook the whole truth - Nokia's been on a downhill trajectory for 4 years.

Why do you assume I overlook that? I really don't understand what your point is.

Okay, Nokia is on a downward trajectory for 4 years. Nokia announces new strategy and stock tanks further. So what's new?

I do not like the new strategy at all, and the stock market seems to agree.

[cBeam]

@PXA270

Nokia a strong company who gained the trust of millions by embarrassing Open development,


I know you meant "embracing", I found it funny though..

[gerbick]

Why do you assume I overlook that? I really don't understand what your point is.

Then you've chosen to overlook my point.

Oh well... continue.

Okay, Nokia is on a downward trajectory for 4 years. Nokia announces new strategy and stock tanks further. So what's new?

I do not like the new strategy at all, and the stock market seems to agree.

The stock market hasn't agreed in 4+ years. Nothing new indeed.

So why complain? Because this failure has a name and a face attached to it and a past that's connected to Microsoft?

Whatever... just continue as-is. It's your point that I'm somehow overlooking, if there was one.

I get it folks. Elop bad. Ballmer worse. Microsoft is the worst. Maemo, MeeGo are the best. Nokia was the answer.

Too bad the stock market didn't see that, nor will the creditors in a few weeks after 4 years of faith.

[maxximuscool]

I would smile if MeeGo succeeded in the future and driven alone by Intel and some other company. If MeeGo success in two years time then I can see Nokia come back and beg Intel to forgive them for the stupid mistake. I want to see Elop Fail.

[maxximuscool]

Nokia had never listen to consumer point of view or what consumers want in their device. Nokia always a self stimulated company, and never care about the customers.

If only they will listen and add what consumers really wanted into their device then they wouldn't fail like now. Look at Apple, they did their research and trails for better result, look at Android providing what customers really wanted, and soon will be WebOS. The company that drives along with the consumer's needs and request will live on to see some success.

[mullf]

The New Nokia:

http://www.seibertron.com/images/factions/energonpub/Decepticons.png

[Copernicus]

If only they will listen and add what consumers really wanted into their device then they wouldn't fail like now. Look at Apple, they did their research and trails for better result...

I gotta disagree here. Apple has never, ever listened to what their customers "really" wanted. There have been massive protests for a two button mouse, for a tower Mac (something less expensive than the utterly ridiculous Mac Pro), for better or more flexible hardware in general (going back years). The Apple Remote Control has a grand total of 6 buttons on it (used to be just 5), what consumer would have ever asked for that?

No, Steve Jobs has put the focus for Apple onto a relatively small stable of devices designed in a very particular manner. The iPhone is popular not because it is the epitome of what every customer wants; unlike other devices that try to satisfy as many expectations of as many consumers as possible, the iPhone instead tries to be the perfect extension of the Apple philosophy into the world of the cellphone. As with many other Apple products, it succeeds not by doing more things, but by doing a few things very well.

[maxximuscool]

Microsoft: Good boy Nokia Good boy..Roll over.. Sit Nokia Sit...Good boy.
Nokia: Woof Woof Wooof....
Apple: *Crunch Crunch* pop corn please...
Google Android: Lol A man and his dog trying to rule the world.. *Idiots*

[lma]

The impression that I get from various threads here and elsewhere is that at the moment MeeGo is still nowhere near ready

Well, the original Harmattan device was supposed to be launched a few months ago and apparently (http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/12/intel-kept-in-the-dark-over-nokia%E2%80%99s-meego-plans-operators-reject-first-device/) was cancelled because the hardware wasn't up to scratch.

[cBeam]

Then you've chosen to overlook my point.



Interesting. Apparently you know better than I what I choose and what I do not choose.

What is your point? Try to state your point in a few clear sentences if you are able to. Thank you.

[gerbick]

Interesting. Apparently you know better than I what I choose and what I do not choose.

What is your point? Try to state your point in a few clear sentences if you are able to. Thank you.

Wow.

Where did you get that!?

How about this. You're 100% right about everything. Always.

[jainkjohn]

MeeGo- The last hope:
http://www.ubergizmo.com/2011/02/intel-meego-phone-and-tablet-pictured-at-mwc/ :confused::confused:

[mmurfin87]

ZUNE-Fail, WMA-Fail, Backing HD DVD-Fail, Mobile 6.5-Fail, Windows Tablets-Fail, BOB-Fail, Windows ME-Fail, UMPC's-Fail, Kin-Fail, Passing on YouTube-Fail

Zune is absolutely not a fail. The fact that you think it is calls into question any assertion about Microsoft you could make.

Zune marketplace has actually recently been gaining considerably on iTunes and will only increase in the future.

WIndows Mobile 6.5 isn't the best thing Microsoft has produced, but it certainly didn't fail by any stretch.

The rest... meh.

[cBeam]

Wow.

Where did you get that!?

How about this. You're 100% right about everything. Always.

Thanks, I knew that before.

Now do you have a point or not? Seems like "or not" to me.

[abill_uk]

Nokia should never have dumped Maemo, they should have kept up development and in fact pushed it into much higher heights. And they did this for what? Meego..... oh dear something never happened or even got off the ground and they already have Maemo even if half baked is still a hell of a lot further than the dream of Meego.

Me thinks Nokia need to go see the quack lol.

[abill_uk]

Thanks, I knew that before.

Now do you have a point or not? Seems like "or not" to me.

Cool it cBeam cos if you think your gonna get a straight answer out of gerby ... ha ha good luck lol.

[gerbick]

Thanks, I knew that before.

Now do you have a point or not? Seems like "or not" to me.

I have no point whatsoever.

Nokia is the best. They've been on a ascension since 2007, Microsoft is evil. And MeeGo is 100% finished.

[abill_uk]

You sure as hell got that one right Gerby !!! am with you now hahaha.

[abill_uk]

Come on Ysss you in here... and? .............

[phil128]

Might sound silly, but I really hope what ever Nokia are going to be doing that the maemo community will still be going strong for years to come.

[abill_uk]

Maybe Gerble ysss and me aught ta go work at Nokia for a bit aye.... at least we would rustle the bastards lol.

[gerbick]

Maybe Gerble ysss and me aught ta go work at Nokia for a bit aye.... at least we would rustle the bastards lol.

Can't rustle a person that really doesn't care too much about silly words nor notions where... well, you value being more right then correct.

[abill_uk]

Can't rustle a person that really doesn't care too much about silly words nor notions where... well, you value being more right then correct.

Think the word your looking for is ARGUMENTATIVE gerby :rolleyes:

[abill_uk]

I just came back from Nokia's office in Finland and i see someone has hung a sign up on the toilet door that says ..... The Maemo and MeeGo Development Room.

[ysss]

Come on Ysss you in here... and? .............

...and I'll chime in if I think I can contribute something new and useful to the discussion :)


I just came back from Nokia's office in Finland and i see someone has hung a sign up on the toilet door that says ..... The Maemo and MeeGo Development Room.


That actually sounds believable. Pics!

[abill_uk]

Ysss you only have to fart to do that lol. ;)

[GeraldKo]

Well, the original Harmattan device was supposed to be launched a few months ago and apparently (http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/12/intel-kept-in-the-dark-over-nokia%E2%80%99s-meego-plans-operators-reject-first-device/) was cancelled because the hardware wasn't up to scratch.

I guess we can all hope that Microsoft has given billions of dollars to Nokia, and that it turns out Nokia doesn't know how to make hardware anymore either!

[arcticrobot]

So, after all this talk, there is one thing that eludes me: why discontinuing Maemo?

[jerryfreak]

if nokia was smart they woulda had harmattan to market on an n9 device last fall.

or even E7.

symbian 3 was a total waste of dev time, they should have stuck with s40 for the kiddie phones and made various flavors of harmattan on all of their E and N series devices. no reason it cant have a lightweight ui for the midrange phones

[allnameswereout]

was android perfect upon its release? how is it doing today?iOS id.

(10 characters)

[NvyUs]

What I find curious is how an unknown banking analyst, clueless about MeeGo, was able to conveniently write an open letter to Nokia and Microsoft (http://www.winrumors.com/analyst-calls-for-nokia-to-adopt-windows-phone-7/) urging Nokia to adopt WP7 and his thoughts on MeeGo: "Get rid of your own proprietary high-end solution (MEEGO) – it’s the biggest joke in the tech industry right now and will put you even further behind Apple and Google.". This piece was published and all over the web (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110202/analyst-meegos-a-joke-nokia-needs-windows-phone-7/?mod=ATD_rss).

In the days before the announcement there was also a piece about Nokia's huge R&D spending (http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110203/not-seeing-much-return-on-that-massive-rd-spend-are-you-nokia/) that suddenly showed up also out of thin air. There are far too many coincidences in the lead up to this event. He decided to go with WP7 long before the day before the announcement as he has said.
On Friday he said Nokia engineers had already been working with Microsoft engineers a couple of months yet on sunday he said the decision to go WP was only made Thursday lol.
The decision in his mind was made long time ago, what he really should of said was he only convinced other on Thursday to get green light

[HellFlyer]

Random troll thought...

Who is going to provide support for Nokia WP 7 devices? I mean Nokia's staff doesn't have a clue . Are they gonna train them or they will hire MS employees? :D

[Cue]

Random troll thought...

Who is going to provide support for Nokia WP 7 devices? I mean Nokia's staff doesn't have a clue . Are they gonna train them or they will hire MS employees? :D

They'll probably do what most people do, I'm guessing they will just be forwarded to some kind of WP7 helpdesk if it's a software related problem or Nokia themselves if it's hardware related.

[ossipena]

Major markets viewed Symbian the way they viewed station wagons... as outdated.

what markets are you talking about?

[allnameswereout]

[..]

The MSFT flunky that invaded Nokia was invited by Nokia's board of directors.Well, thats the Evil side of a public owned corporation:

Finnish Newspaper Reports That American Investors Forced Nokia To Hire Stephen Elop [Nokia's New CEO Is The First Non-Finn In The Company's History - But New Report Claims That Nokia's Hand Was Forced In Hiring (http://nexus404.com/Blog/2011/01/26/finnish-newspaper-reports-that-american-investors-forced-nokia-to-hire-stephen-elop-nokias-new-ceo-is-the-first-non-finn-in-the-companys-history-but-new-report-claims-that-nokias-hand-was-for/)

The source of this article is Kauppalehti, a newspaper from Finland. Unfortunately, the investors are unnamed in the report.

[alcalde]

I have no point whatsoever.

Nokia is the best. They've been on a ascension since 2007, Microsoft is evil. And MeeGo is 100% finished.

Gerbick is now Gerbick of Borg. He's been assimilated. :(

[alcalde]

...and I'll chime in if I think I can contribute something new and useful to the discussion :)



That hasn't stopped me....

[gerbick]

Gerbick is now Gerbick of Borg. He's been assimilated. :(

If you believe that, I have a bridge I'm willing to sell to you.

[Texrat]

Don't overlook that 2007 was the last great year.

Yeah, no kidding. Huge parties in Helsinki. Great dinners all the time. Workgroup meetings in Paris and Siikaranta (http://hotelli.siikaranta.fi/fi/sisalto/12inenglish/).

Man I miss it...

[zwer]

It's IBM + MS all over again. I don't see how this can be a bad thing in the end.


Cool story, bro, wear it proudly!


Bigger hint: Nokia's shares have tanked 75% from 40.00+ USD in 2007 to less than 10.00 USD in 2010 from prior Nokia strategies.


To be honest, you can't compare a single-day 14+% drop with a three year drop. And you can't know that the drop will continue down to oblivion, or will get better in the following months. Also, the fact is that Nokia started to gain momentum again in mid '09, but then messed it up completely in '10 - '10 was their chance for a comeback, they completely screwed it. Anyway, the LSE opens up soon, we'll see if the weekend managed to dampen the drop a bit, but I'd be highly skeptical of that - the stock will probably fall for another 5-10% before stabilizing, and from there - nobody knows where it will go, your guess is as good as mine.

But I think it will be going steadily down - '11 will be probably the year with record low profits for Nokia as they will have difficulties sell Symbian devices and they won't have any WP7 devices even if those would be able to save them. Laying off excess employees and cutting R&D budgets will probably help to slow down the descent, but playing with NOK stocks atm. is extremely risky and not for the fainthearted.

[NvyUs]

watch out Elop is trying to save money he will cut R&D around meego if chart is correct then he'll stop the bills payment for maemo.org.
If i was the people who want to keep maemo alive i would be mirroring everything possible now

[ossipena]

watch out Elop is trying to save money he will cut R&D around meego if chart is correct then he'll stop the bills payment for maemo.org.
If i was the people who want to keep maemo alive i would be mirroring everything possible now

good point, suddently I don't trust Tero Kojos announcement that Nokia will inform really early if something like that is planned/decided...

[allnameswereout]

[...] Too bad that Steve Jobs also is an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate.Orly. Why does my MBP have Bash? And so on, and so on.

Don't confuse Apple gadgets with Macs. Thank you.

[alcalde]

what markets are you talking about?

Non third-world nations. America, for instance. And if the Internet is a nation, then that's another good example. ;)

There's no neutral page that extolls the virtues of Symbian. Reviews of the N8 almost universally loved the hardware and faulted the software.

Go to the phonearena.com article about Android overtaking Symbian (http://www.phonearena.com/news/Android-steals-Symbians-Top-Smartphone-OS-crown_id16332) and check out the comments. Outside of the MeeBorg Cube, people think Symbian is something their great-great grandparents used. I've posted other links where people were all for the Nokia WP7 mock-ups at Engadget. As I said then, they'd love to buy Nokia phones but the word "Symbian" makes them recoil. Whether it's based on reality or perception is irrelevant. As long as they know Nokia didn't make the software, they're much happier with the idea of buying a Nokia phone.


Symbian is not under 1 phone its under ALOT as well like android. And symbian was first created in 1980 so that's 30 years to get where its at and it only took what android 3 year to get where its at. Not really pathetic is it?



Symbian was definitely a leader in smartphones, but it's definitely a joke now. The thing is, Symbian is still an echo of when smartphones were just for business people. Apple killed that and Android exploited it. Because of it, RIM, Nokia, Palm, and even Microsoft have suffered because they didn't adapt quickly enough.

Mobility Digest article - Why Symbian Sucks and Why It Wont Stop Sucking Anytime Soon (http://mobilitydigest.com/why-symbian-sucks-and-why-it-wont-stop-sucking-anytime-soon/)

I have no idea what this page is (http://amplicate.com/hate/symbian) but it's filled with people posting why they hate Symbian. What's interesting is that those who have never used it still say they "know" it's bad, the UI sucks, etc.

PC World Australia ran the article in October Why Nokia's Symbian OS sucks - Nokia's Symbian OS may be the world's most popular mobile operating system, but it is clearly lagging behind the competition from Apple, Google and even Microsoft. (http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/364740/why_nokia_symbian_os_sucks/)

This page (http://www.suckreport.com/search/symbian) shows all tweets that contain both the words "Symbian" and "suck". It's a decent amount.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this page (http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/) reviews all the anti-Nokia posts coming from here and other Nokia fan sites and pronounces most of the participants "nuts". :D I hope there really is no such thing as bad publicity... :eek:

The author of that piece really gets it.. and by "gets it", I mean he agrees with me and says what I've been saying. :D

Nothing matters in this world more than apps. Write that on your forehead. Write that on the mirror on your bathroom wall. Write that on your car windshield. Whatever it will take so you remember it.
HP execs know this. Google’s execs know this. Everyone in Silicon Valley knows this.
Apps are the ONLY thing that matters now.


I told y'all it's all about pinching widgets.

In the real world, one might have an easier time having the name "Mel Gibson" while living on a kibbutz than the name "Symbian" in the OS marketplace.

Ok, Gerbick, while they're attacking me, detach from the MeeBorg Cube and run!!!!

http://www.freeimagehosting.net/uploads/796eb1f2cf.jpg

[allnameswereout]

A quick correction, from a person who has used and enjoyed Apple products for years (since the Apple ][+): Steve Jobs is in no way a technological visionary. Nothing that Jobs has ever done in the last twenty years has ever pushed the limits of technology, and in fact, up until the last few years Apple hardware and software have consistently been inferior to similar products in the PC world.

The one and only good thing about Steve Jobs is, as you say, he's "an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate". Let me rephrase that statement: Steve Jobs is an anal-retentive perfectionist who believes that every technological device should be just as easy and intuitive to use as absolutely possible, and drives his people hard to deliver products following that rule.

Apple is a leader in the technology industry not because it creates visionary products, but because unlike pretty much every other company out there today, it at least has a leader with a goal. Compare that to Nokia, fumbling around with lots of different kinds of phones, lots of different operating systems, lots of divergent goals; honestly, Nokia hardware and software should be beating Apple's even today, but without consistent leadership, there's just no way the company can hope to keep up...This, together with applying the right inventions into an (seemingly) innovative product hyped by Apple marketing.

[wmarone]

Orly. Why does my MBP have Bash? And so on, and so on.

Don't confuse Apple gadgets with Macs. Thank you.
And don't let Apple lie to you about the capabilities of the hardware in your pocket. They're only telling you those things because they want to reserve it for themselves and things they control.

Believe me, back in 2006-2007 it was all about Apple. But all the awesome openness and capability of OS X was for naught when they decided that not only was the mobile space the future (which it is) but that they would play gatekeeper and sole source.

If not for that I might have an iPhone and write iPhone Apps today. Instead today I own an N900 and my Macbook now hosts Ubuntu.

[allnameswereout]

And don't let Apple lie to you about the capabilities of the hardware in your pocket. They're only telling you those things because they want to reserve it for themselves and things they control.

Believe me, back in 2006-2007 it was all about Apple. But all the awesome openness and capability of OS X was for naught when they decided that not only was the mobile space the future (which it is) but that they would play gatekeeper and sole source.

If not for that I might have an iPhone and write iPhone Apps today. Instead today I own an N900 and my Macbook now hosts Ubuntu.Yep, and what scares the **** out of me is that they brought an App Store into OS X.

[wmarone]

Yep, and what scares the **** out of me is that they brought an App Store into OS X.

That's absolutely not a problem. If they make it the sole means of getting software on to the platform, THEN there is a problem.

[nocain]

And ten billion Microsofties are working on it right now... not ten or fifteen Nokia employees. Microsoft started over from scratch and managed to produce WP7 and the first update. Despite the comments here, WP7 generally got very good reviews and the fellow who runs Nokia Insights called it the most stable phone OS he's ever used. Microsoft also has Zune this and XBox that to tie into WP7 and they'll certainly deliver better desktop integration. Does MeeGo even have an interface yet? Putting your chips on the idea that the world's biggest software producer can churn out an OS quicker than you can is not an unwise bet.

I doubt they have that many people working on it, a couple thousand sure, and I agree about the desktop integration as long as your on windows go figure MS kind of makes that, but i use Linux on all my computers, and as for apple with it's continually growing consumer marketshare???

Have you used a WP7 phone? If so what were your impressions? I tinkered with one one of the IT deans at my work got( a die hard ms fan by the way ) I did not care for it personally the ui seemed interesting but not smooth flowing, did it have promise, sure, do I think it was more stable then any android or iPhone I've used? No. Did it wow me? No. Connectivity was lacking, it couldn't get on the wireless for some reason, didn't sync right through imap. Seemed pretty beta.

That dean didn't have that phone when we came back from winter break, instead they had a droid2. Said they got frustrated with it. I consider this person your average high end user, and they are a self confesed MS fan.

And as of a few weeks ago nokia had a few hundred employees workin on meego and who knows how man intel devs are working on it and how many and plans to put on it.

[zwer]

In the real world, one might have an easier time having the name "Mel Gibson" while living on a kibbutz than the name "Symbian" in the OS marketplace.

So, to summarize your rather lengthy post consisted of repeating the same sentence in as many ways as humanly possible - people are magpies, they go for the shiny, flashy things? :rolleyes: Ok, I tend to agree with that actually...

However, about the cheering masses on the Nokia WP7 concept @ Engadget, you might want to check their Disqus profiles - most of them, especially the high-praising ones, are single-comment only participants, specifically joined/registered to post that one comment. Now I'm not saying that Nokia or Microsoft were sending drones to praise the concept - which would not be all that unbelievable as I highly doubt they'd release the concept pics prior to last night at MWC, but given the rapid stock value decline they needed some positive feedback - but I'd bet that most of those are coming from either .NET developers or WP fan-page forums that are there to praise Microsoft, not Nokia.

[allnameswereout]

One big reason that many of us are not looking at is that so far Nokia has been good selling phones by itself. But it hasnt managened this in NA because here ISP tie-ups count a lot. Face it, in North America, Nokia doesnt have any stores, they closed their only 2 premium show stores ( in NY and Chicago) , they have to tie-ups with ISP to sell discounted phones which is the only way MOST Americans buy their phones.

Lacking this distribution channel in NA, they had no way to sell Maemo or Meego phones even if they were ready. Also the ISP's play a big part is accepting or rejecting a phone on tier networks and most NA ISP's are unwilling to test a new unproven OS on their networks. It takes a lot of money and time for the ISP to certify a device and a OS on their networks.

Also the mobile market has been moving so fast that for Nokia to catch up, they needed an OS with some ecosystem around it. Android while being the best choice in terms of ecosystem was unsuyitabel for Nokia as they would be commoditized along with mfrs as HTC, Samsung, LG etc.
Nobody wants to go there - unless you can make phones on the cheap.
And the Android phone market is chock full of cheap phones so competing on that front was a serious risk.

They only other viable option was WP7. Being an underdog (MS WP7 is an underdog in the mobile world) Nokia could play a stronger role - and we did see this - Nokia managed to get serious rights to change and customize WP7 in their own way. While it may not be the best of choices, its the only one they had to hit the ground running.

Without Meego having anything to show for it, and Symbian seriously showing its age, I think Nokia chose the least bad of the bad options that it had.

I think the key was that Meego while being trumped up to be a very good OS, delivered too little too late for Nokia.

Look even Palm/HP delievered WebOS in short time and now HP has said that they will make WebOS work on Smartphones, Tablets (already done) and also on PC's very soon. Wasn't that the vision of Meego too ? But lets face it when we all saw Meego 1.1 it was not ready in any shape or form for geeky end users. Meego 1.2 is still months away from fir and finish looks. So how much ever Nokia customised their own UI, the base Meego OS first has to be ready - which it is not.Explain please why Android is not a viable option to customize and sell in NA whereas WP7 is?

[alcalde]

... playing with NOK stocks atm. is extremely risky and not for the fainthearted.

Buy! Buy! Buy! :D

[ossipena]

Non third-world nations. America, for instance. And if the Internet is a nation, then that's another good example. ;)

exactly. I suggest that you should do your research better. I am sick and tired telling all the "look outside your own bellybutton" -mantra so I won't do it (again here).

e: hint: s^3 was getting affordable in the eyes of 4 billion people. Your america has 0,35 billion people....

ee: and this is what symbian is fighting against there:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/28/htc-wildfire-review/

[zwer]

Buy! Buy! Buy! :D

I am fainthearted! :o

That didn't stop me to make some sweet cash in '09 off of the very same stocks. :cool:

[nocain]

Funny how any critic of MeeGo is now automatically assumed to be a supporter of WP7 (despite the fact that I made it clear in my opening post that I believe WP7 actually makes things worse).

And FWIW, I believe that WP7 was far too late too, and that that's one of the bigger reasons for its lack of success so far.

I never assumed you were a WP7 fan so sorry if I gave that impression I was just trying to point out WP7 is late too with no real backing outside of a huge money machine and even at that it is still by no means a production ready platform yet, just a good beta still missing a lot of core functionality despite it's release.

[alcalde]

So, to summarize your rather lengthy post consisted of repeating the same sentence in as many ways as humanly possible ... you might want to check their Disqus profiles - most of them, especially the high-praising ones, are single-comment only participants, specifically joined/registered to post that one comment.

I'll accede that that's certainly a possibility. Where I would like to disagree though is that at times I feel I have repeated myself in ways that ascend into the inhumanly possible. Please don't ask for explanations, as it involves the use of something called the Nokianomicon.... ;) [Unless you're a Lovecraft fan, you won't get it.]

[cBeam]

This page (http://www.suckreport.com/search/symbian) shows all tweets that contain both the words "Symbian" and "suck". It's a decent amount.



That's a hilarious website, but needs a lot of improvement. It does not provide a count of hits, which would be really useful.

If you "suck-search" for Symbian, you get hits. The first one is from about 17 hours ago, the last one on the first page is from Feb 10th 10:49pm.

Now, if we do an Android "suck-search", the first tweet is from 30 minutes ago and the last tweet on the first page is about 11 hours ago.

This seems to indicate that Android sucks much more than Symbian.

Further research shows:
- Iphone sucks as much as Android
- HTC sucks less than Symbian

But the winners are:
- WP7 does not suck at all

and most importantly:
- cBeam does not suck either!

Thanks, alcalde, for this entertaining site!

[alcalde]

e: hint: s^3 was getting affordable in the eyes of 4 billion people. Your america has 0,35 billion people....

ee: and this is what symbian is fighting against there:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/28/htc-wildfire-review/

1. Android is also beginning to find itself in very cheap Chinese handsets as Elop mentioned.

2. Awww... the HTC Wildfire! I wished that came to America; I thought it was the perfect little baby Android phone for my mother.

[alcalde]

...and most importantly:
- cBeam does not suck either!

Thanks, alcalde, for this entertaining site!

I was going to say that cBeam has just shown me how much more of an expert at sucking he is than me! ;) :D

[cBeam]

I was going to say that cBeam has just shown me how much more of an expert at sucking he is than me! ;) :D

>>> busy searching if alcalde sucks <<<

[ossipena]

1. Android is also beginning to find itself in very cheap Chinese handsets as Elop mentioned.

2. Awww... the HTC Wildfire! I wished that came to America; I thought it was the perfect little baby Android phone for my mother.

1. but still those cheap Chinese handsets have pretty high specs (ZTE Blade ~= N900), unlike wildfire = room for competition with price by lower hw requirements.

2. do not ever never go even near of Wildfire, I'd have to consider a lot between selling my mother as a slave and buying her a wildfire...

[zwer]

Please don't ask for explanations, as it involves the use of something called the Nokianomicon.... ;) [Unless you're a Lovecraft fan, you won't get it.]

Oh, but you'd first have to define what Nokianomicon is, unless you are thinking of cryptic WONTFIX reports from the Nokia's Book of Magic Bugs. Or are you trying to imply that Nokia is now, how shall I put it, Necro? Even if so, I can't find the leter 'e' in both Microsoft or Nokia, thus making it a lousy joint abbreviation of their respective names.
[No, I'm not a Lovecraft fan, really]

However, me explaining how yielding to the masses of magpies is strategically wrong and how it presents a crime against technology, and humanity by extension, would be nothing short of a masterpiece essay worthy of one Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings' signature. I'm pretty sure, should I write it here, that I'd effectively decimate Maemo/MeeGo supporters much better than Nokia could ever do. Elop might even hire me as a hitman. Hmmm, I should buy some stocks :D

Now, back to the topic, where were we? :confused:

[sygys]

I said meego would suck as from day one. but no one would listen. it looks like a childish learn platform with these rediculous puppets as logo. its insane! its a good thing nokia didn't put that garbage on all their "high end phones"

Im not sure windows phone 7 will save them... its both terrible... they really should have builded further on maemo 5, upgrading it instead of building yet another whole new system...

[slender]

I said meego would suck as from day one. but no one would listen. it looks like a childish learn platform with these rediculous puppets as logo. its insane! its a good thing nokia didn't put that garbage on all their "high end phones"

Im not sure windows phone 7 will save them... its both terrible... they really should have builded further on maemo 5, upgrading it instead of building yet another whole new system...
You seem to be pretty insightful!

Interesting analyze. Tell us more! Could you give any hints about what else is childish.

I would highly appreciate your golden hints!

[ossipena]

I said meego would suck as from day one. but no one would listen.

shame that it was scrapped before you could prove your point....

[allnameswereout]

Rather well, actually, all told. It was the reverse engineering and other loss of control that allowed other manufacturers to make PC clones and undercut IBM. OS/2's another story, but that's not what caused IBM to exit the market. IBM PC-compatible computers running a Microsoft operating system still rule the business and home computer markets. Lenovo bought IBM's laptop computer business and it's still a respected business laptop brand.Gates essentially bought QDOS from a corporation, and as far as I understood it he only had to port it. And then, once MSDOS has marketshare, he made sure every IBM clone had to run Microsoft OS via all kind of dirty tactics, see for example AARD code (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code).

Had IBM not opted to partner with Microsoft at this point, there would've been more competition on technical grounds. Because if there is one thing Microsoft hates to do is compete on that ground.

So Microsoft became big in the PC consumer market thanks to IBM, and then Microsoft used lies and deceit to make sure IBM would not get their cut (including control) in the desktop and server market. That is the OS/2 & wnt/w9x debacle.

Some call the above "brilliant businessman" and all that. Fine, I find it shortsighted (dumb & selfish).

While it was not only due to Microsoft that IBM lost its dominant position, IBM left the consumer market when OS/2 didn't prevail in the consumer market (because Microsoft went with Windows NT and Windows 9x behind their back), and never came back. From that point there was no IBM and "home computer markets", and the Thinkpad never aimed for consumers. The fact laptops became a commodity instead of a business product with high margins made IBM leave that market. They knew they could not compete with trends in market a-la gadgets, they suck at that kind of stuff, its not where they do business, so they sold something not part of their core-business.

And yeah, Microsoft ****ed their partner. Its not only the situation which matters. It is also about the choices made by the parties involved.

Here's what happened with SGI when they were in trouble late 90s. From Wikipedia:

Another attempt by SGI in the late 1990s to introduce its own family of Intel-based workstations running Windows NT (see also SGI Visual Workstation) proved to be a financial disaster, and shook customer confidence in SGI’s commitment to its own MIPS-based line.The guy who managed to make these decisions (Rick Belluzzo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo)) got himself a job at Microsoft afterwards as COO. Here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/09/sgi_chapter11_analysis/) a brief history of how he screwed SGI. One of the things he did was going for Windows NT workstations which undermined the faith customers had in the IRIX/MIPS product line. We see the very same here! I thought Qt was going to be the bridge between Nokia's products but now its all vague. See e.g. this post + comments. (http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/12/nokia-new-strategic-direction-what-is-the-future-for-qt/)

Speaking of which. It is the ****ing same for the games industry. Instead of writing for OpenGL et al, they write for DirectX and therefore cannot port to platforms on which DirectX does not run (every non-Microsoft platform). Studios are screwed with this lack of portability.

I don't get how people keep falling with their big fat feet in this **** puddle of Microsoft!

[Kangal]

I just want to know what would've made a better platform Android or MeeGo?

Android is now pushing insignificant updates compared to before, I feel it is reaching a plateau. And there is no denying that the software runs noticably slower than it should on the hardware (I've seen first hand how the N8 can outpace the SE Xperia X10: ARM11 vs Snapdragon)

So the question really is=
Is Qt not as great as we thought it to be?

Surely if it was faster than the java* implementation in Android, and provided the promised cross-platform compatability (between ARM and x86) .... Nokia would've realeased it already.

Is Qt a dud?

[bobbyfisher]

was android perfect upon its release? how is it doing today?

There are bug reports for meego which say that battery charging still doesn't work properly (for the n900). This is too far away from perfect. It makes meego useless for production purposes (at the moment).

[Copernicus]

Is Qt a dud?

Qt is the technology behind one of the two major Linux desktop GUIs, and as such has been used every day on millions of computers for over a decade now. So, Qt itself is no dud; had Nokia chosen to actually use it for a phone, rather than hem and haw and finally throw up their hands and let some other company write the all OS software for all of their phones, we might have had a chance to see how well it would really perform...

[xaccrocheur]

Wow, so this is going on and on ; From what I gather ppl are already mad at Nokia for being unreadable, constantly switching horses, this is not going to improve I guess.

I mean it's all about consistency in mobile devices : Ppl are *scared* of machines you know. You don't realize, you fiddle with bash on chrooted phones, but out there people barely dare tapping the icons on their new fancy phone (that they bough because they were practically forced to by overwhelming marketing forces).

Is there such a thing as techno-fatigue ? I guess Nokia is tired of all that, and wants to quietly go out of business.

If thats the case, then way to go, ditch the most used mobile OS for the least-used one.

Even here where I live (Africa) where MSoft was once very popular, it's starting to look bleak. Who wants to use windows anyway ? Windows is soo passé. I really mean it ; I work with teachers, school directors, students, parents, and they're all mad at MSoft. Look closer, everybody hates Microsoft. They dragged the entire IT business down ever since they came into business, forcing adoption of bad technologies, burying good ones, and generally behaving like a bully to users, and like a regular thug to competitors ; If they had their way, things would be even worse now.

Now they want to kill QT. One can understand why they would want to do that. QT is cool. QT works ; QT is a real threat to them.

[ysss]

So long as people are blaming Elop as the source of the problem, then they will be missing the bigger issue.

He is a black sheep.

A logical red herring to stop your thoughts from tracing the true issue.

[twigleaf1976]

Meego just doesn't exist, so it is a drawing board OS that is easy to get rid of now, whereas supporting it if phones were using it takes resources, so it makes sense to jump ship.

Then again they jumped into bed with ballmer and M$, silly people. WP7 is dire and isn't selling, M$ is jaded in a world of open source they still cling to an old model. IE9 and internet standards, buying the docx support and dubious business practices and they still have no search website like google and can't compete in the mobile market. Me thinks Nokia are on the way out with going to WP7.

Wonder if Elop still drawers a salary from M$ for this jump?

[Jedibeeftrix]

I know it's popular at the moment to lay all the blame at Elop or at Nokia management (current or past). But maybe the truth is really that MeeGo was just to late and not good enough?

The impression that I get from various threads here and elsewhere is that at the moment MeeGo is still nowhere near ready, and an end-user ready release is at least another 6 months away. Now in the alternative world were Nokia did decide to ride it out with MeeGo, by the time it's finally market ready (autumn? winter?), was it actually going to be better for mass market end users than the iPhone 5 or the Samsung and HTC Android 3.x devices it would be competing against? Somehow I doubt it.

Of course, I don't believe that Nokia WP7 devices are anywhere near ready yet, and they may take even longer to get on the market. So it's not like I'm endorsing this move. All I'm saying is, maybe Nokia's fate was already sealed a long time ago. Maybe the only way they could have turned the tide was if they had reacted faster, developed faster, delivered faster than they could.

frankly, it doesn't matter to >me< whether MeeGo is ready or not, my loyalty is to an open platform not Nokia itself.

[patlak]

Well, thats the Evil side of a public owned corporation:

Finnish Newspaper Reports That American Investors Forced Nokia To Hire Stephen Elop [Nokia's New CEO Is The First Non-Finn In The Company's History - But New Report Claims That Nokia's Hand Was Forced In Hiring (http://nexus404.com/Blog/2011/01/26/finnish-newspaper-reports-that-american-investors-forced-nokia-to-hire-stephen-elop-nokias-new-ceo-is-the-first-non-finn-in-the-companys-history-but-new-report-claims-that-nokias-hand-was-for/)

The source of this article is Kauppalehti, a newspaper from Finland. Unfortunately, the investors are unnamed in the report.

Off topic:

You must be slavic to have that avatar :)

[patlak]

So long as people are blaming Elop as the source of the problem, then they will be missing the bigger issue.

He is a black sheep.

A logical red herring to stop your thoughts from tracing the true issue.

The source as in Micro($)oft

[patlak]

I just want to know what would've made a better platform Android or MeeGo?

Android is now pushing insignificant updates compared to before, I feel it is reaching a plateau. And there is no denying that the software runs noticably slower than it should on the hardware (I've seen first hand how the N8 can outpace the SE Xperia X10: ARM11 vs Snapdragon)

So the question really is=
Is Qt not as great as we thought it to be?

Surely if it was faster than the java* implementation in Android, and provided the promised cross-platform compatability (between ARM and x86) .... Nokia would've realeased it already.

Is Qt a dud?

Check out TwimGo. It seems to be running smoother on N8's ARM 11 rather than N900's Cortex A8.

[dchky]

Meego just doesn't exist, so it is a drawing board OS that is easy to get rid of now, whereas supporting it if phones were using it takes resources, so it makes sense to jump ship.

Let me just point out that Maemo exists, it works right now, they were happy to dump that off. Why not jump back to a ship that already floats? :-) The geek in me would love an enhanced Maemo or the much better MeeGo. Doesn't matter, both are good.

When you look at MeeGo from a normal human perspective, the user interface that is, it seems to me it's a childlike cross between Android and iOS instead of anything unique and interesting. Cartoon characters? - really, we moved past that in 80's. People want glitzy transitions, a nice 3D beveled interface, and real time interaction - meaning you touch the screen and something happens instantly.

Your average human also wants tons of near identical pointless applications to choose from - all of these must live in a store that utterly fails to categorize anything correctly, this store must also excel at making your searches present you with the opposite of what you actually want - but you wont notice because it shows you a bunch of new shiny stuff, distractions. As a normal human you don't really know what you want anyway, and your attention span is microscopic in length :-)

Android, anyone that likes the N900 will not be happy with a migration in that direction. It's clunky, not very intuitive, and the UI just gets in your way and slows you down.

WM7? I don't know, haven't used it, but I believe slashdot posted a story yesterday or the day before to say Microsoft would open it up to be more geek friendly.

Ultimately it's safe to say that Nokia are being monumentally stupid with their decision making process right now - give it six months they might decide to go with Android after all :-)

[abill_uk]

So long as people are blaming Elop as the source of the problem, then they will be missing the bigger issue.

He is a black sheep.

A logical red herring to stop your thoughts from tracing the true issue.

Seems to me most people on here (not all thankfully) believe what they read !!.

You lot need to get much more realistic and see everything for what is is based on past history and stop jumping to conclusions like... oh we have a new wizz at the helm of Nokia.

Something very wrong about all of this and it will only take time to find out just what will happen.... till then WAIT.

[pxa270]

Ok, I haven't done very deep research about MeeGo development. But from what I've seen, a consumer handset release in 2011 pretty much needs to be based on the upcoming 1.2 branch (due in April. Since the development cycle is 6 months, a handset based on 1.3 would have made it "a 2012 event".)

So I have 2 basic questions, that I hope some of the more directly involved people might be able to answer.

1. Was 1.2 (including the seemingly top-secret Nokia handset UX) on track to be production-ready on time?
2. Is the overall user experience of 1.2+handset UX in its current state competitive with iOS 4 or Android 2.x?

[Daneel]

Whenever you post, all i see is:


http://knowyourmeme.com/system/icons/63/original/Picture_2.png?1232033096

[buchanmilne]

I said meego would suck as from day one. but no one would listen. it looks like a childish learn platform with these rediculous puppets as logo. its insane! its a good thing nokia didn't put that garbage on all their "high end phones"


You have assessed the whole platform, based purely on the reference (read: vendor-neutral, test) theme? *That* seems childish.

[ysss]

The source as in Micro($)oft

The source as in:

WTF happened between Nokia's golden years and now?

It's certainly isn't MS (nor Google, Apple, etc).




IE:

You're fat, broke and ignorant... and for some reason your sexy wife ran off with a young dashing rich dude.

What's the true source of the problem?

(Then again, due to the ignorance level this may not pose a problem to the subject.).

[tissot]

I read somewhere recently that Nokia had 10 guys working on meego...Elop could have hired 10 x the developers....sounds more like a msft flunky is invading it's competition and then letting it die.

Anyone who can't put 2 and 2 on this one must have fallen off the fruit truck comming into town.

Some people truly believe everything they read. Nokia had on Friday 130 jobs open from this month alone for MeeGo.

[lma]

Nokia had on Friday 130 jobs open from this month alone for MeeGo.

Interesting, jobs.nokia.com (US-only, I think) shows 20 and nokia.taleo.net (global) 71 when searching for "meego" today.

[wmarone]

1. Was 1.2 (including the seemingly top-secret Nokia handset UX) on track to be production-ready on time?
Considering they were demoing a unit to carriers and got rejected on the hinge I suspect that it was ready. Of course, we don't know about the finer details so this segues into your second question:

2. Is the overall user experience of 1.2+handset UX in its current state competitive with iOS 4 or Android 2.x?
We don't know, because it's entirely hidden within Nokia. And that has absolutely nothing to do with MeeGo, despite the entirety of this thread.

[chowdahhead]

Nokia was building on top of the Linux kernel, GNU libs, and QT. All of the heavy lifting was done for them. They only needed to release a solid basic OS. I think that this is exactly what it looks like, a former MS exec whose intentions had always been to bring Microsoft in regardless of Nokia's best interests. Nokia could have partnered with Google, reskinned Android and used OVI services instead of Google services and they'd have their stopgap platform. They'd still have OVI store revenue, and most people probably wouldn't even know it was an Android device. Tablets would be covered, and with steady revenue and possibly even some growth, development could have continued on Meego/QT without the pressure of pushing it out prematurely, offering both short and long term solutions. Investors would have been satisfied, and business would've moved on. I don't think the problem was Meego, there was a lot of enthusiasm over it and they had a prominent partner in Intel. The unpleasant truth is that the Nokia board made a very unwise choice in Elop and should have seen this coming.

[pxa270]

Considering they were demoing a unit to carriers and got rejected on the hinge I suspect that it was ready.
I guess you're referring to this
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/12/intel-kept-in-the-dark-over-nokia%E2%80%99s-meego-plans-operators-reject-first-device/
Even assuming that this rumor is true, the hardware issues do not imply that the software was in fact ready. What I'm looking for is some reliable report or demo that the software is in fact near ready / on track.


We don't know, because it's entirely hidden within Nokia. And that has absolutely nothing to do with MeeGo, despite the entirety of this thread.
Huh? Suppose for the moment that the handset UX was nowhere near ready for a launch this year. How can you say it has nothing to do with MeeGo?

[gerbick]

Hmm, the hinge part concerns me. Were they just showing off a model of the upcoming phone - non-working, sans OS - or was it the entire thing?

Surprised that the hinge on the G2 passed and this one couldn't.

[stickymick]

Maybe the reason why the carriers rejected the MeeGo demo was because they couldn't put their own branding crap on it and restrict it's usability.

Orange and T-Mobile rejected the N900 on those grounds. And I believe Vodafone were trying to get Skype functionality removed from the device.

[allnameswereout]

[...]

IE:

You're fat, broke and ignorant... and for some reason your sexy wife ran off with a young dashing rich dude.

What's the true source of the problem?

(Then again, due to the ignorance level this may not pose a problem to the subject.).In a conflict, there are always at least 2 parties involved, and trying to pinpoint toward 'the true source of the problem' is often oversimplifying the issue at hand. In your example, there is no clear cause and effect, and you have to put force behind your argument by using the notion sexy wife and young dashing rich dude. You also assume that the value of being fat, broke, ignorant, or divorcing is an inherent bad thing whereas what the other parties decided to do (wife + dude) is good.

Well, in my opinion a relationship is about balance, and a healthy relationship (or in this case marriage) would not have let it come to this or would find a less dramatic, more peaceful solution if hey would decide to part. The wife, in your example, would have played an important role to make sure her partner wouldn't go in the direction she'd dislike (say: fat. broke, ignorant). Now, of course, if she is some kind of pre 20th century ****slave who got herself into a contract (marriage) instead of post-feminist, self-reliant woman who has an equal say in the relationship, that wouldn't happen. Fortunately, women nowadays have much more to say in relationships, at least in modern Western societies (sans Italy, apparently...) however this makes your argument weaker because you try to put the responsibility of both change of husband, sex appeal of wife, wife's attraction to dude, and (I'd say inherent) divorce on the husband. Even though he might be primarily responsive or have a big influence on all of this, it is really much more complex than that...

IOW, applying logic is good for the sake of argument, but your example is inherently weak, as it includes too many human factors with too vague premises.

Now, for this new marriage, I advice people to look at the partnerships Microsoft + SGI, Microsoft + Novell, heck even Microsoft + DEC and compare this with Machiavellian teachings. From what we understood from the deals, it seems as if the other party gets something out of it while it is in fact Microsoft who gets the side benefits not directly mentioned (such as FUD for their current MIPS/IRIX platform as I pointed out in a previous post). In this case, entire cross-platform path Nokia has been working on past years is now clouded with vagueness.

[Corso85]

I remember when people used to come here and complain about Maemo/N900. The number 1 answer was, it's NOT A PHONE!!.

I guess Elop wants to sell "Phones". WP7 has phone in its name.

I think MS has the power, resources and tenacity to make WP7 work. Xbox 360 rose from the ashes of Xbox 1. Windows 7 rose from the ashes of Vista.

It's fast, it's smooth. Even iPhone boys who tried it, say so. Whatever it lacks in features will be added with time.

All I've seen with Maemo and Shmeego is re-inventing the wheel every year. Only to reach where we were a year ago or just WONTFIX

[arnoldux]

i personally dont give a F! about nokias new develpments, all i want is my n900 has it is, this community AND the new alien dalvik to be released, perfect combo

cheers

[sachin007]

Elop's interview
http://www.bgr.com/2011/02/14/an-interview-with-nokia-ceo-stephen-elop/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheBoyGeniusReport+%28BGR+|+B oy+Genius+Report%29&utm_content=Twitter

[ysss]

In a conflict, there are always at least 2 parties involved, and trying to pinpoint toward 'the true source of the problem' is often oversimplifying the issue at hand. In your example, there is no clear cause and effect, and you have to put force behind your argument by using the notion sexy wife and young dashing rich dude. You also assume that the value of being fat, broke, ignorant, or divorcing is an inherent bad thing whereas what the other parties decided to do (wife + dude) is good.

Well, in my opinion a relationship is about balance, and a healthy relationship (or in this case marriage) would not have let it come to this or would find a less dramatic, more peaceful solution if hey would decide to part. The wife, in your example, would have played an important role to make sure her partner wouldn't go in the direction she'd dislike (say: fat. broke, ignorant). Now, of course, if she is some kind of pre 20th century ****slave who got herself into a contract (marriage) instead of post-feminist, self-reliant woman who has an equal say in the relationship, that wouldn't happen. Fortunately, women nowadays have much more to say in relationships, at least in modern Western societies (sans Italy, apparently...) however this makes your argument weaker because you try to put the responsibility of both change of husband, sex appeal of wife, wife's attraction to dude, and (I'd say inherent) divorce on the husband. Even though he might be primarily responsive or have a big influence on all of this, it is really much more complex than that...

IOW, applying logic is good for the sake of argument, but your example is inherently weak, as it includes too many human factors with too vague premises.

Now, for this new marriage, I advice people to look at the partnerships Microsoft + SGI, Microsoft + Novell, heck even Microsoft + DEC and compare this with Machiavellian teachings. From what we understood from the deals, it seems as if the other party gets something out of it while it is in fact Microsoft who gets the side benefits not directly mentioned (such as FUD for their current MIPS/IRIX platform as I pointed out in a previous post). In this case, entire cross-platform path Nokia has been working on past years is now clouded with vagueness.

Nokia wouldn't have kicked out OPK and needed to use headhunters to find them a new CEO if their company performance had been tip top.

[koivjann]

There must be somethig which we dont know behind the whole circus. Meego is almost ready the hardware was ready. OVi-store has got huge amount new clients after summer and it's bigger than MS-store. Why this kind of strategy? Is the North America really so important that Nokia has to be ruined for it.

[stickymick]

Nokia wouldn't have kicked out OPK and needed to use headhunters to find them a new CEO if their company performance had been tip top.

I think things started to go downhill quickly at about the time they released the N96. Bugs? Sheeeesh.

I had one of the very first N73s and that crashed at least 3 times a day, the N95-8GB was pretty much the same at first and I believe the vanilla N95 was worse still.
Then came the N97 fiasco that used to run out of memory and reset itself if you had more than 2 widgets on the home screen. By that time I reckon Symbian had run it's course 3 times over. I also believe they introduced a little known thing called Kastor UI bit by bit with each new handset. The N95 was the first to feature it, I believe. And I think they started boasting about S60^3 in about early 2008. Took them 2 years to put it on the shelf.

Someone somewhere was slacking, surely.

[Peet]

I guess you're referring to this
http://eu.techcrunch.com/2011/02/12/intel-kept-in-the-dark-over-nokia%E2%80%99s-meego-plans-operators-reject-first-device/
Even assuming that this rumor is true, the hardware issues do not imply that the software was in fact ready. What I'm looking for is some reliable report or demo that the software is in fact near ready / on track.

Huh? Suppose for the moment that the handset UX was nowhere near ready for a launch this year. How can you say it has nothing to do with MeeGo?

Something about that canned model smells like Intel Inside...


(from the mentioned Techcrunch article: )
It was hoped that the open-source OS would put Nokia back into a leadership position in the smartphone space as Symbian inevitably trickled down to lower-cost, mass-market devices, while in turn and somewhat ironically it would give Intel the heavyweight partner it needed to “catalyse” MeeGo’s ecosystem. It also added immediate credibility to the chip maker’s aim to put “Intel inside” smartphones, tablets and other types of converged devices.

I wasn't "aware" (still aren't, it's speculation) that instead of going with ARM's battle-tested mobile chips Nokia had tried jumping this early on the flamin' hot Intel platform!

No wonder if the hinges couldn't support the added weight... :rolleyes:

[shockgiga]

as what i have read from the Q&A with elop at MWC, is that, nokia may be depending on microsoft and pay them royalties for it, but at the same time, there will be no more money spent on OS development. so those factors just balances the situation. ( and it may be cheaper just to pay royalties too )

he also stressed out that microsoft is actually investing money more than nokia coz of nokia's location based services & etc. ( as elop has claimed, by the billions in monetary worth )

i believe even if nokia has prioritiezed meego lesser or even the least now, that even though doing so means wasting a lot of money and effort invested already, it would still be the wiser choice in penetrating the US market. since meego is not really as welcomed there compared to WP7. also, as i have seen with intel's prototypes in MWC (video), meego still has a long way to go in terms of development as compared to an already polished, and currently already selling WP7 OS.

so did nokia really ruin themselves? not really. coz even if they dominate the rest of the world, it would still be something else for "total" world market domination again, as they used to.

[Peet]

Whatever monies MS might promise to eventually pay Nokia (billion+ $$ ??) as part of this pact:

1) MS has already benefitted many times over by fully kneecapping the only proper Linux + Qt system in existence. Their winpho is nowhere yet and it doesn't cost them anything to keep Nokia fumbling around for the next 1-2 years.

2) Nokia has already lost many times over. 25% and counting already lost from Nokia's asset balance since the news of the MS-elop pact leaked out. Nokia could've bought Linux #2 Novell (large patent & IP portfolio, Qt/GTK/.NET/Mono developers, also working on Meego) for a fraction of this lost valuation.

3) Nokia's subcontractor network (also well on their way to migrating to the Qt platform) are taking a massive hit now, as is the Finnish stock market/economy, but that's none of MS/elop's concern of course.

Did Nokia go all out and try making the Meego (they could easily have rebranded it FFS!) strategy work?

Nope.

[alcalde]

QT is a real threat to them.

Ballmer did not lay awake at night worrying about a framework primarily used for Linux desktop KDE applications. Can you think of one major piece of software available on Windows, Mac and Linux that was written with Qt? I don't mean an open-source project; I mean a piece of commercial software. Developers were not chomping at the bit ready to port their Windows software to the 2% worldwide desktop Linux market. Windows developers are using things like .NET, not Qt. The Mono project would probably be more of a worry for Ballmer than Qt.

[alcalde]

Nokia was building on top of the Linux kernel, GNU libs, and QT. All of the heavy lifting was done for them. They only needed to release a solid basic OS. I think that this is exactly what it looks like, a former MS exec whose intentions had always been to bring Microsoft in regardless of Nokia's best interests. ... I don't think the problem was Meego, there was a lot of enthusiasm over it and they had a prominent partner in Intel. The unpleasant truth is that the Nokia board made a very unwise choice in Elop and should have seen this coming.

1. You have a very different opinion of what this looks like than I do. What you lay out in your first three sentences looks like Nokia dropped the ball for three years before Elop even showed up, while you conclude these facts mean Elop is to blame. Or are you suggesting that MeeGo was ready and polished and perfect and Elop scrapped it for diabolical reasons?

2. There was no enthusiasm for MeeGo outside of here. There were no hoardes of users screaming "Give me MeeGo and I'll dump my iPhone! I want to get rid of my Android phone and use MeeGo! We need another OS! We're buying smartphones and apps by the bushel because we can't stand our current choices!!" There was no media buzz concerning MeeGo (outside of that created by the burning platform memo, which rather proves the point). You even had the one analyst call MeeGo a joke. I'm not aware of any analyst who praised the idea of MeeGo and issued enthusiastic buy recommendations based on the expected future performance of MeeGo. Carriers certainly were not thrilled by the idea of an open and unlocked OS on their networks.

3. Oh, the board saw this coming. They made it come. They got rid of the last CEO and hired Elop specifically to do what he's done now. They brought in an outsider to shake things up. Given his past affiliations, they may have even been partial to a Microsoft deal when they chose him.

[alcalde]

There must be somethig which we dont know behind the whole circus. Meego is almost ready the hardware was ready. OVi-store has got huge amount new clients after summer and it's bigger than MS-store. Why this kind of strategy? Is the North America really so important that Nokia has to be ruined for it.


1. Elop said MeeGo was not almost ready. It's a fact and must be accepted barring any evidence to the contrary - of which there isn't because no one's seen a supposedly almost-ready MeeGo. It's unclear if it even has a UI yet.

2. Ovi-store is not exactly a runaway success.

3. Nokia isn't ruined. It was losing the entire smartphone market and facing new pressure from android in the low-end market and had to do something different and now. Sitting back and just saying hey our Ovi store and ecosystem is awesome (despite going from 38% to 28% smartphone share in 2010) and pouring more resources into a project that was over-budget and behind schedule wasn't a realistic option.

[alcalde]

I wasn't "aware" (still aren't, it's speculation) that instead of going with ARM's battle-tested mobile chips Nokia had tried jumping this early on the flamin' hot Intel platform!

No wonder if the hinges couldn't support the added weight... :rolleyes:

Ok, Nokia partners with an industry giant who needs someone to put their product into smart phones and which a lot of people have an impression of as being inferior to the existing product (in this case, ARM). This industry giant promises OS help in exchange. This industry giant has been cited numerous times for monopolistic, anti-competitive and blatantly illegal tactics to maintain its position but is facing heat from an emerging mobile market for which it does not seem to have an adequate response.

Now, my simple, humble question is....


HOW COME NO ONE HAD A PROBLEM WITH THIS THEN BUT THEY DO NOW?!?

:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

[Rugoz]

Nokia has already lost many times over. 25% and counting already lost from Nokia's asset balance since the news of the MS-elop pact leaked out. Nokia could've bought Linux #2 Novell (large patent & IP portfolio, Qt/GTK/.NET/Mono developers, also working on Meego) for a fraction of this lost valuation.


As a company you don't loose money if your stocks are going down. A high equity price is useful in the case you want to issue new shares, companies don't do that very often. So short-term fluctuations are no big deal.


Ballmer did not lay awake at night worrying about a framework primarily used for Linux desktop KDE applications. Can you think of one major piece of software available on Windows, Mac and Linux that was written with Qt?


I guess Maya is the biggest one. But Qt is usually used for smaller projects where making platform-specific implementations is too costly. Once worked for a company which used Qt for a scientific visualization software, they had approx. 10 developers.


as i have seen with intel's prototypes in MWC (video), meego still has a long way to go in terms of development as compared to an already polished, and currently already selling WP7 OS.


Does not tell us much. As far as I know the harmattan handset ux should still have been in c++ (QSceneGraph), guess it was already finished, QML for 3th party apps.

[zwer]

Can you think of one major piece of software available on Windows, Mac and Linux that was written with Qt? I don't mean an open-source project; I mean a piece of commercial software. Developers were not chomping at the bit ready to port their Windows software to the 2% worldwide desktop Linux market.

Autodesk Maya, Skype (GUI/frontend part only), Google Earth... I'd consider those pretty much major. Plus most research labs I know of use it for scientific analysis apps that require GUI (and some that dont) - CERN being one of them. And if I remember correctly, Hollywood uses it quite heavily for custom written post-production and/or visual effects packages.

Qt is not used only for cross-platform stuff, albeit it is its strongest feature, it also has one of the best environments for GUI development. I'd much rather use Qt than WPF even in Windows-only projects.

[Peet]

Now, my simple, humble question is....

HOW COME NO ONE HAD A PROBLEM WITH THIS THEN BUT THEY DO NOW?!?

:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D

That's a lot of LOLling (but to be expected I suppose)...

If Nokia's very first MeeGoh device was going to be Intel-based, I for one had no idea! Intel doesn't have anything nearly suitable for that space yet.

MeeGoh was supposed to be co-developed by Nokia, Intel et al, in the open. I wasn't aware of any plan, let alone requirement, that Nokia adopts Intel's yet unsuitable platform for their devices, esp. this early on. If Nokia did that by their own choice, well, what's new... :rolleyes:

(and pardon my feeding the...)

[GeraldKo]

HOW COME NO ONE HAD A PROBLEM WITH THIS THEN BUT THEY DO NOW?!?



Certainly no need for big font for that question!

Plenty of people here had a problem with the move from Maemo to MeeGo. Maybe you weren't around much then, or have a memory lapse.

People have a bigger problem this time, because the Intel collaboration did not kill openness, Linux stuff, etc. And while the MeeGo transition seemed stupid, this one sounds suicidal, or at least extremely diminishing of what Nokia was and could have been.

[Frappacino]

As a company you don't loose money if your stocks are going down. A high equity price is useful in the case you want to issue new shares, companies don't do that very often. So short-term fluctuations are no big deal.


Thats a rather simplistic view - at the extremes price matters - see credit ratings and cost of funds.

[Peet]

As a company you don't loose money if your stocks are going down. A high equity price is useful in the case you want to issue new shares, companies don't do that very often. So short-term fluctuations are no big deal.

Of course you don't lose that in cash in real time, but stock works in mysterious ways. Including as currency in stock-swap based acquisitions and a part of remuneration packages.

If I still rooted for Nokia I'd be worried by them losing a quarter of their market valuation (what you call a "short-term fluctuation") practically overnight as the market's opinion to elop's eloping with ms.

[wmarone]

Huh? Suppose for the moment that the handset UX was nowhere near ready for a launch this year. How can you say it has nothing to do with MeeGo?
Because Nokia's UX was going to be closed source. The reference UX is the bare minimum required to operate a device, not a complete user experience. This was laid out many times.

So whatever Nokia had, has no bearing on MeeGo itself, which is much, much more than the reference user interfaces that people have been crying and whining about.

BIG TEXT
Totally fair question, however Intel has not been tried for anti-competitive actions, only investigated in ways that led them to folding (and fast!) The caveat with the MeeGo partnership vs WP7, is that Intel never once had a hold on Nokia over it.

[alcalde]

Whatever monies MS might promise to eventually pay Nokia (billion+ $$ ??) as part of this pact:

1) MS has already benefitted many times over by fully kneecapping the only proper Linux + Qt system in existence. Their winpho is nowhere yet and it doesn't cost them anything to keep Nokia fumbling around for the next 1-2 years.

2) Nokia has already lost many times over. 25% and counting already lost from Nokia's asset balance since the news of the MS-elop pact leaked out. Nokia could've bought Linux #2 Novell (large patent & IP portfolio, Qt/GTK/.NET/Mono developers, also working on Meego) for a fraction of this lost valuation.

3) Nokia's subcontractor network (also well on their way to migrating to the Qt platform) are taking a massive hit now, as is the Finnish stock market/economy, but that's none of MS/elop's concern of course.

Did Nokia go all out and try making the Meego (they could easily have rebranded it FFS!) strategy work?

Nope.

1.These posts belong on abovetopsecret.com. I was just reading a post there "China Developing Anti-Gravity Technology". Intriguingly, there was a 30-second WP7 ad on the page. Proof of the conspiracy!!!

1B. Poor, poor, Ballmer. Lying awake at night worrying not about iPhone, Android, Chrome OS, ARM compatibility, iPods, the Cloud, but Linux and the Qt framework. Yes, Qt, the most fearsome threat Microsoft has ever faced. It must be destroyed by any means possible! It's available on Windows desktop, Max OSX and desktop Linux and I can't think of one commercial software vendor adopting it rather than products like Visual Studio and .NET, but somehow it's going to take over the world when it's on a Nokia phone! That way people can write software that works on a non-existent MeeGo and a dying Symbian - it's unstoppable!

1C. Yes, Microsoft entered a deal with Nokia to intentionally make them "fumble around" at a cost of only a few hundred million or billion dollars (because they weren't fumbling around already and were never going to implode if left to their own devices). Microsoft's goal was to screw with an open source framework, not to get its mobile OS on smart phones and help secure its place in an emerging mobile market before it gets shut out. No, that would be crazy conspiracy talk.

2. Yes, the clear plan for Nokia would have been to purchase a business that contains an unprofitable and dying network segment and a profitable desktop Linux segment, neither of which Nokia knows anything about, then kill off the network business and halt development on SUSE Linux Enterprise to channel their developers into MeeGO and introduce things like Mono into MeeGo, probably requiring another major rewrite/reset of the OS. Of course, it wouldn't actually need to buy Novell and kill it in order to get experienced Linux developers or use open source Mono and could just license any patents it needed for much cheaper than buying them and it already has a great deal of software engineers and is spending massive amounts on R&D with little to show for it, but hey... why not drag another company down with them?

2B. As an unabashed fan and user of openSUSE, which dragged me away from Windows XP for good, your scenario is giving me chest pains right now and my hands are shaking.

2C. Making a phone OS on top of openSUSE would have been a nice idea, however.

3. No, it's not his concern. If Nokia's been ladling out the gravy for years and spending enormous amounts of money on R&D that have failed to yield what they needed to return to a leadership position, how dare he stop spending that money or remove people who can't show that their work has contributed to the bottom line of the company? What would Finland had done if GM was located there when the company almost went bankrupt? Demanded GM hire more auto workers and give them all raises and make no budget cuts and not get rid of any failing brands? (RIP Pontiac, the Symbian of cars :( )

4. Yes, if Nokia had just clicked its heels togther three times, made a wish, sprinkled fairy dust, then asked all of Nokia's employees to just try really, really hard this time, MeeGo would suddenly get finished, it would kill iOS and Android, and Finland and MeeGO and Richard Stallman would all live happily ever after.

[Copernicus]

as what i have read from the Q&A with elop at MWC, is that, nokia may be depending on microsoft and pay them royalties for it, but at the same time, there will be no more money spent on OS development. so those factors just balances the situation. ( and it may be cheaper just to pay royalties too )

Yes, that's the way forward in the technology industry; don't do the hard work yourself, pay somebody else to do it for you. The next obvious step for Nokia is to outsource hardware development to, say, Motorola or somebody. Then, just slap the "Nokia" name somewhere on the thing and boom, the company is rolling in pure profit!

[Peet]

your scenario is giving me chest pains right now and my hands are shaking.

So at least something good came out if it. :rolleyes:

[Rugoz]

Yes, Qt, the most fearsome threat Microsoft has ever faced. It must be destroyed by any means possible! It's available on Windows desktop, Max OSX and desktop Linux and I can't think of one commercial software vendor adopting it rather than products like Visual Studio and .NET, but somehow it's going to take over the world when it's on a Nokia phone! That way people can write software that works on a non-existent MeeGo and a dying Symbian - it's unstoppable!


First, stop acting like a jerk.

Although I wouldn't call Qt a threat currently, good development tools other than those provided by microsoft which are platform independent are indeed a problem for microsoft. The dominance of windows is also due to their superior development tools compared to other platforms.

Remember applications today and in the future don't necessarily have the look and feel of the platform as in the past.

[shockgiga]

Yes, that's the way forward in the technology industry; don't do the hard work yourself, pay somebody else to do it for you. The next obvious step for Nokia is to outsource hardware development to, say, Motorola or somebody. Then, just slap the "Nokia" name somewhere on the thing and boom, the company is rolling in pure profit!

now that will surely never happen. coz nokia is most known the world over for its awesomely designed, engineered and built hardware.
(even critics do not have anything to say about that).

so having to outsource hardware production is just plainly stupid.

[Copernicus]

now that will surely never happen. coz nokia is most known the world over for its awesomely designed, engineered and built hardware.
(even critics do not have anything to say about that).

so having to outsource hardware production is just plainly stupid.

Why not? You yourself noted the amazing amount of money Nokia will be saving by not developing an OS; they could save just as much money by not developing any hardware. If there's no business advantage in having an operating system built under your own control and to your own specifications, then surely there's also no business sense in messing around with your own hardware designs either. Let somebody else do all the real work, and Nokia can just sit back and let the bucks roll in...

[shockgiga]

Why not? You yourself noted the amazing amount of money Nokia will be saving by not developing an OS; they could save just as much money by not developing any hardware. If there's no business advantage in having an operating system built under your own control and to your own specifications, then surely there's also no business sense in messing around with your own hardware designs either. Let somebody else do all the real work, and Nokia can just sit back and let the bucks roll in...

hardware is nokia's pride. they make the most beautiful and well built handsets. outsourcing the job will mean losing their legacy.

as for software. (if it is not yet obvious to you), it speaks very well for itself.

[deyons]

Zune is absolutely not a fail.

Zune marketplace has actually recently been gaining considerably on iTunes and will only increase in the future.

.
I'm not talking about Zune MarketPlace, I'm talking about the Zune

Hummm lets see, is the ZUNE a Fail?.....Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune
In January 2009 Microsoft's quarterly earnings filing with the SEC indicated that Zune sales had fallen $100 million from 2007 to 2008 during the fourth quarter of the calendar year. The Wall Street Journal estimated that sales appear to have dropped from about $185 million during the holiday period in 2007 to just $85 million in 2008.....Zune market share decreased to 2% in the first half of 2009,
ZUNE 2010 It sales fell more Source:http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222002863&pgno=2
Sales of Zune and related products were off 14% in Microsoft's most recent quarter

ZUNE=FAIL
ProTip. Don't attack Facts with opinions.

[Copernicus]

hardware is nokia's pride. they make the most beautiful and well built handsets. outsourcing the job will mean losing their legacy.

as for software. (if it is not yet obvious to you), it speaks very well for itself.

I'm being facetious here. :) In truth, what is obvious to me is that in the cellphone market today, there are three hot names -- Apple (a company that designs all hardware and software internally), Google (a company almost purely devoted to software), and Microsoft (another company almost purely devoted to software). Of all the cellphones on the market, pretty much only Nokias were not under the direct control of these three companies. (Yeah, webos is around there somewhere too.) Today, people don't go looking for a Motorola phone or an HTC phone, they look for an Android phone or a Windows phone. There may be slight differences in the hardware provided by different manufacturers, but only hard-core enthusiasts worry about that; the average end user only wants to make sure they can continue to use all the apps they've bought and enjoy the same user interface.

Nokia has just chosen to not be one of the few software companies, and join the rest of the forgettable mass of commodity cellphone manufacturers. This means they will have to try and compete purely on price against the chinese manufacturers on the low end, and hope they can somehow distinguish themselves on the high end against all the other manufacturers producing phones that run exactly the same software in exactly the same manner as their own. A tall order, in my opinion...

[extendedping]

I'm being facetious here. :) In truth, what is obvious to me is that in the cellphone market today, there are three hot names -- Apple (a company that designs all hardware and software internally), Google (a company almost purely devoted to software), and Microsoft (another company almost purely devoted to software). Of all the cellphones on the market, pretty much only Nokias were not under the direct control of these three companies. (Yeah, webos is around there somewhere too.) Today, people don't go looking for a Motorola phone or an HTC phone, they look for an Android phone or a Windows phone. There may be slight differences in the hardware provided by different manufacturers, but only hard-core enthusiasts worry about that; the average end user only wants to make sure they can continue to use all the apps they've bought and enjoy the same user interface.

Nokia has just chosen to not be one of the few software companies, and join the rest of the forgettable mass of commodity cellphone manufacturers. This means they will have to try and compete purely on price against the chinese manufacturers on the low end, and hope they can somehow distinguish themselves on the high end against all the other manufacturers producing phones that run exactly the same software in exactly the same manner as their own. A tall order, in my opinion...

I agree now there is nothing distinguishable going on. Its not like Nokia will be the only guy selling windows right?

I see this as a soulless gutless decision.

[Daneel]

Just from the top of my head: Maya, VLC, Skype, Photoshop.
Now go thank more people that spread MS FUD and post some more of that ******** propaganda

Ballmer did not lay awake at night worrying about a framework primarily used for Linux desktop KDE applications. Can you think of one major piece of software available on Windows, Mac and Linux that was written with Qt? I don't mean an open-source project; I mean a piece of commercial software. Developers were not chomping at the bit ready to port their Windows software to the 2% worldwide desktop Linux market. Windows developers are using things like .NET, not Qt. The Mono project would probably be more of a worry for Ballmer than Qt.

[Dr. Drips]

what got intel up on it's sleeve? http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/14/editorial-intel-keeps-pushing-meego-but-why/

[Frappacino]

Obi-Intel - you are our only hope !

[number41]

I'll accede that that's certainly a possibility. Where I would like to disagree though is that at times I feel I have repeated myself in ways that ascend into the inhumanly possible. Please don't ask for explanations, as it involves the use of something called the Nokianomicon.... ;) [Unless you're a Lovecraft fan, you won't get it.]

Nokianomicon? Guess what, we have an ancient one on the loose, straight outta R'lyehmont, and I'm afraid he's going to bring an end to the world: Elophulu has risen.

You're with them, I take it? Now I guess I know too much and I'll likely disappear soon.

[gerbick]

Nokianomicon? Guess what, we have an ancient one on the loose, straight outta R'lyehmont, and I'm afraid he's going to bring an end to the world: Elophulu has risen.

And the Lovecraft love continues...

You're with them, I take it? Now I guess I know too much and I'll likely disappear soon.

Nokia fhtagn.

[mmurfin87]

I'm not talking about Zune MarketPlace, I'm talking about the Zune

Hummm lets see, is the ZUNE a Fail?.....Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune

ZUNE 2010 It sales fell more Source:http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222002863&pgno=2


ZUNE=FAIL
ProTip. Don't attack Facts with opinions.

Maybe you should make your assertions with more clarity than "ZUNE-Fail". Zune is an umbrella brand for several services and devices.

Granted the Zune never took over the market for portable media players. That said, it sold MILLIONS and made LOTS of people very satisfied. Thats hardly a fail.

Furthermore the device itself lead into the marketplace and services that not only continue to this day, but are gaining competitively in marketshare against the leader iTunes. In that sense the device is most certainly not a fail, no matter how many or few physical devices it sold.

Protip I don't like heated arguments, so please start acting like an adult so that I can treat you like one.

I'm not saying Zune is objectively and quantitatively awesome (although I subjectively believe so). I'm just saying its not a failure. The facts support me.

[gerbick]

What were the numbers for Nokia's "Comes with Music" and Ovi's Music?

It's always nice to compare to the Zune numbers if we're to discover what's a fail or not.

[ysss]

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/1120/leavecthulhualone.jpg

[gerbick]

New keyboard. Right now.

*Stolen from wmarone

[wmarone]

New keyboard. Right now.

*Stolen from wmarone

I charge RAND royalties of One (1) Internet per use.

[deyons]

Maybe you should make your assertions with more clarity than "ZUNE-Fail"

Dude you can bend the english how ever you want.
ZUNE=ZUNE the Media Player player, not ZUNE the Market.

If you got a ZUNE and you taking this personally...guess what ZUNE still=FAIL

[kureyon]

I assumed that Elop was brought in to fix the SW development problems Nokia has. I assumed Nokia has an execution problem and a new CEO is capable to fix that.He fixed it.
Permanently.
No more software development means no more software development problems.

[abill_uk]

Nokia and Meego would have stood a chance if Nokia had pulled its engineering together so there must have been a reason for them to do what they have done and bring in ELOP.

This is not good ... source http://meego.com/aggregator

Your editor, along with many others, was looking forward to an updated N900, running an evolution of Maemo 5 with a shinier user interface; better battery life and slightly less bulk. Looking around the mobile landscape, there's no obvious alternative at the moment, with HP's webOS series of devices looking most likely. It's sad to think that the N900 might have been a "Concorde moment"; and Nokia's MeeGo device will be treated similarly to the 770 five years ago, but without the future promise of OS 2005. Unless there's a change in Nokia's leadership (or at least Nokia's leadership's mind), the MeeGo device from Nokia will be stillborn.

With Elop at its helm and as long as he stays there i reckon you can forget anything going toward Meego and Maemo as he has only one goal as he is still being paid by M/S which makes you wonder just what has happened here with Nokia, were thay in that much deep shite they had to bring in M/s.... strange behaviour without explanations aye.

[abill_uk]

Might be worth reading the rest of that by the way !.

[ossipena]

I'm not saying Zune is objectively and quantitatively awesome (although I subjectively believe so). I'm just saying its not a failure. The facts support me.

I assign myself a goal for this working day: to not pick nose more than 10 times. If i succeed, it is not failure, the facts support me!

[abill_uk]

I assign myself a goal for this working day: to not pick nose more than 10 times. If i succeed, it is not failure, the facts support me!

HA HA but if Nokia go the way ELOP want then you will have nothing else to do but , Nokia will probably move oooer.

[gerbick]

http://gerbick.com/images/elop_information.jpg

Had to share.

[tgalati4]

Epic. .

[eitama]

Reading this thread for the last 30 minutes really depressed me.
Although I have moved on from N900 to Galaxy S, and am very happy with my decision, I guess deep inside I was always waiting for a Nokia Meego device with N900+ Hardware to come out and prove me wrong.

Now it feels this will never happen. It is very disappointing. As a long-term Nokia owner (from 3120 to N900 via 3100 3310 n73 n95), I think I should start getting used to the Idea. Nokia as we know it is gone.
For good and for worse, we don't know what the future holds, but it doesn't seem bright.

(Flamers, before you tell me to not read if the thread depresses me, READ what I wrote, you should sympathy if you loved nokia 1 year ago.)

[tgalati4]

Nokia should follow Kodak's lead and make Christmas lights. Everybody loves Christmas lights.

[alcalde]

Nokia should follow Kodak's lead and make Christmas lights. Everybody loves Christmas lights.

Wouldn't work. Hardcore Nokia fans would insist that if Nokia wasn't actually generating the electricity to power those lights, it just wouldn't be Nokia and that the lights would be an epic fail. Also, that the only good Christmas lights are ones that you can unscrew and put in whatever color bulbs you want. And if Elop owned three shares in a utility company, forget it. :p

[alcalde]

http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/1120/leavecthulhualone.jpg


You're not posting from a machine running Chulhubuntu, are you?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ymjPaT9O_XY/Rug1MufDDxI/AAAAAAAAABE/607IsRjnDrk/s320/ubuntu-hello-cthulhu.png

[abill_uk]

HA HA HA good one alcalde

[marktold]

If MeeGo was late ....

.... how about the first WF 7 Nokia devices out in 2012.

As far as I know we asked when will Falsh 10.1 come to N900

My questions might be when does any flash come to WF 7, unless I am wrong and WF 7 has Flash support.

Markus

[davidh101]

This is the first time that I have posted here in quite a while.

What I thought was unfortunate at the time (early last year), was my work took me away from working with Maemo/Meego, and bought me straight into the WP7 world. However, open-minded as I like to be, I went with it (and was being paid to go with it, so that helped).

As a developer, I have to say, that WP7 is actually one of the better platforms out there, it has so much potenial. Yes, not everything was there from the outset, but what new OS does have everything.

The most interesting thing, is that it has been created with teh user in mind (it pains me to say this, but similar to iOS in that way). If you look at all of Nokia's OS's, and Android, they have all been made with the developer in mind, open source, allowing people to do what they want (within reason)

Yes, Android has done well recently, but how long did it take to get there, what would that mean for Meego, on how long it would have to be in the market before it gets somewhere. If Nokia ar going to move, they don't really have any options, they can't go from one open-source system to another,they may as well just carry on with their own. WP7 was the only way they can go.

In fact, currently, I have an HTC with WP7 (my first ever non-Nokia device), and provided by work, so not entirely by choice, but I don't have a bad word to say about it. Well, there are a few features that could be improved or missing, but then I said that about my N900.

I think, a good decision by Nokia and MS, well done. Both are after marketshare, and I think this deal will do them both some good in the long term.

[davidh101]

If MeeGo was late ....

.... how about the first WF 7 Nokia devices out in 2012.

As far as I know we asked when will Falsh 10.1 come to N900

My questions might be when does any flash come to WF 7, unless I am wrong and WF 7 has Flash support.

Markus

No flash support yet on WP7, but I susect that it will be doing the same as Apple, and going down the HTML 5 line of things instead.

More interestingly, no silverlight suport within the browser!!!!

[abill_uk]

No flash support yet on WP7, but I susect that it will be doing the same as Apple, and going down the HTML 5 line of things instead.

More interestingly, no silverlight suport within the browser!!!!

HA your brave posting what you did on the last 2 but i am with you and lets face it... do we have a choice here???.

[davidh101]

HA your brave posting what you did on the last 2 but i am with you and lets face it... do we have a choice here???.

I thought what the hell, I know I'm going to get moaned at, but I suspect that a lot of these people will be eating their words in a year or 2......but then again, I could be too!!!!

[ysss]

This is the first time that I have posted here in quite a while.

What I thought was unfortunate at the time (early last year), was my work took me away from working with Maemo/Meego, and bought me straight into the WP7 world. However, open-minded as I like to be, I went with it (and was being paid to go with it, so that helped).

As a developer, I have to say, that WP7 is actually one of the better platforms out there, it has so much potenial. Yes, not everything was there from the outset, but what new OS does have everything.

The most interesting thing, is that it has been created with teh user in mind (it pains me to say this, but similar to iOS in that way). If you look at all of Nokia's OS's, and Android, they have all been made with the developer in mind, open source, allowing people to do what they want (within reason)

Yes, Android has done well recently, but how long did it take to get there, what would that mean for Meego, on how long it would have to be in the market before it gets somewhere. If Nokia ar going to move, they don't really have any options, they can't go from one open-source system to another,they may as well just carry on with their own. WP7 was the only way they can go.

In fact, currently, I have an HTC with WP7 (my first ever non-Nokia device), and provided by work, so not entirely by choice, but I don't have a bad word to say about it. Well, there are a few features that could be improved or missing, but then I said that about my N900.

I think, a good decision by Nokia and MS, well done. Both are after marketshare, and I think this deal will do them both some good in the long term.

Hey man,

Welcome back!

Before anyone else takes their opportunity to say this, let me be the first to tell you that you're a shill! What a timely return, only to spew out some well written niceties about WP7 to quell our anger!!!














jk :)

It's nice to hear different perspectives on a big issue like this. Please ignore the troll! (and disregard my avatar)

[2disbetter]

Well said DavidH101. I couldn't agree more.

Sometimes picking the untrendy better option doesn't make sense to people regardless of the facts.

[deyons]

@davidh101

I have seen and used WP7 and it's a very good OS I would have bought it if not for the lack of features. But if other companies can support multiple OS's...HTC for example sell Android and WP7. Nokia's decision to go WP7 is not the problem but dropping it all together(un-Sure cause Meego will still be in R&D said Elop)

[kureyon]

3. Nokia will have complete control over WP7 on their phones.Absolutely. To the limited extent that MS allows them of course.

Where's the proof that Elop, the board, and the shareholders who elected them are so stupid as to have this wonderful, polished, sexy, non-geeky, intuitive, buzz-worthy, bug-free OS 99.9% ready and they traded it for WP7 instead for no reason or vast conspiratorial ones?Money does wonderfully corrupt things.


The board probably has been bought off, promised cushy non-executive positions on MS's board when they takeover the soon to be dead Nokia.
With enough money you can buy off the DoJ to call off their United State vs Microsoft case.
With enough money you can stuff enough stooges into the ISO standards approval process to get a non-implementable standard get voted in as a standard.


Sounds to me like Jobs shook things up like Elop's doing and neither are afraid to cut anything or anyone that hasn't lived up to expectations. They're also not afraid to use their previous contacts to bolster their company's products. I don't see why Mr. Elop is considered the opposite of Mr. Jobs. Huge difference. Jobs created new Apple products and are not beholden to any other company (except that they had to buy off or scare away companies whose product names and trademarks (iphone, ipad) they had misappropriated). Elop is ditching entirely what Nokia has done for the past decade or more and going with a provenly failed OS. Sure Nokia hasn't been doing too well lately, but MS's mobile offerings have been doing worse, always.

IBM PC-compatible computers running a Microsoft operating system still rule the business and home computer markets.See that? And why exactly is that a benefit to IBM? All those companies making the compatibles aren't paying any royalties to IBM. They wanted to change that way back when they introduced the MCA bus to replace ISA. The other PC makers wanted no part of it and went with Intel's PCI bus instead.

Lenovo bought IBM's laptop computer business and it's still a respected business laptop brand. Lenevo only wanted the profitable and prestigious Thinkpad brand. IBM made Lenevo take the loss making PC division as well as part of the deal.

[kureyon]

Zune is absolutely not a fail.When Zune (the WMA playing device) was launched Ballmer said they would kick Apple's iPod butt. It failed, miserably.

WIndows Mobile 6.5 isn't the best thing Microsoft has producedWhen WM6.5 was launched Ballmer said they would kick Apple's iPhone butt. It failed, miserably.

When WP7 was launched, ... you get the idea.

[vi_]

zune.

lol.

[kureyon]

in fact, up until the last few years Apple hardware and software have consistently been inferior to similar products in the PC world.
Huh? Surely it's the other way round? Up until they switched to commodity Intel hardware, Macs have consistently used more advanced hardware than WinTel machines. SCSI and firewire are a couple of examples.

[allnameswereout]

[...] Can you think of one major piece of software available on Windows, Mac and Linux that was written with Qt? I don't mean an open-source project; I mean a piece of commercial software.[...]Yes... many.

Out of the top of my head: Opera, Maya, Google Earth, Skype, TeamSpeak.

[zwer]

... and bought me straight into the WP7 world. However, open-minded as I like to be, I went with it (and was being paid to go with it, so that helped).

Traitor! :p

As a developer, I have to say, that WP7 is actually one of the better platforms out there, it has so much potenial...

... The most interesting thing, is that it has been created with teh user in mind (it pains me to say this, but similar to iOS in that way). If you look at all of Nokia's OS's, and Android, they have all been made with the developer in mind, open source, allowing people to do what they want (within reason)

Make up your mind, is it good for a dev eloper, or good for the end user? It can't be both on the same level. Knowing various .NET/CLI caveats, I'll take a guess - WP7 is better for the user, and you are saying that it's made with the user in mind, and here is what I have a problem with...

How come something is created with the user in mind, yet it tries to lock in the user and milk cash from him/her whenever it can? Doesn't that seem rather contradictory? Let me put my user hat for a moment, and lets say I purchase a WP7 device - how am I to transfer my music library from my Linux laptop to it? And even VBox is not a solution, already tried it and it didn't work, but even if it would - why would I buy a desktop OS to run it in a virtual machine just so I could transfer my files to my mobile device? How is that 'with user in mind'? How is it bad for the user to be able to access the device via a standard USB connection, or to transfer his/her files from network storage, or...? Name me one good reason to only be able to access your device through a proprietary app and how can that be good for the user?

I personaly have no problems with closed-source apps/OSes/whatever, I have a problem with locked in systems directed and censored by some outside entity - in such system you end up leasing your device instead of owning it, where the manufacturer can change the terms of use retroactively, after you've purchased the given device - and I just cannot accept that. True, given a choice I prefer OSS, but closed source is just fine as long as it uses widely accepted standards and does not lock you in.

[Frappacino]

>> How come something is created with the user in mind, yet it tries to lock in the user and milk cash from him/her whenever it can?

err... wtf... you recently come from north Korea or something ?

The point of a business is to make money, that is their bottom line - in practice they have no other aim (do no evil my ***).

And controlling the customers device allows the company to make more money. Given this, what - you expect the business to take the less profitable but more "ethical" approach and over time get beaten by businesses that are more profitable ?

Welcome to the real world and how business works - if anything blame the general consumer for behaving in such a manner which means that for a business to make the most money, they must exercise such control.

dont hate the player, hate the game haha

[ysss]

The lack of understanding (of what a customer needs) in this forum is too disturbing at times...

Each time reducing my faith of FOSS solution to 'take over' the world.

[gerbick]

Make up your mind, is it good for a dev eloper, or good for the end user? It can't be both on the same level. Knowing various .NET/CLI caveats, I'll take a guess - WP7 is better for the user, and you are saying that it's made with the user in mind, and here is what I have a problem with...

Ok... let me ask you this. Why does it have to be one or the other? Good for developers shouldn't mean that users lose out with a weaker UI/UX and a strong (or simple) UI/UX shouldn't mean that the developers take a loss or are boxed in. Too much of that mentality is prevalent now and thus if it becomes a quickly stated stance of "Too shiny, it's for the sheep" or "Too difficult, it's gotta be for developers" when neither should be true.

How come something is created with the user in mind, yet it tries to lock in the user and milk cash from him/her whenever it can? Doesn't that seem rather contradictory?

Man, I've been trying to figure that one out. Like... they make the user experience simple and that somehow allows them to add too much room for "Let's fleece these suckers..." functionality.

Let me put my user hat for a moment, and lets say I purchase a WP7 device - how am I to transfer my music library from my Linux laptop to it?

About the same way you would an iPhone on Linux - you wouldn't unless you could mount it as an device, move your files over to the SD card manually, or wait for DoubleTwist to hit Linux too. At least there's an external SD card, unlike the iPhone. As it stands though, many reports are sorta negative around the SD card usage for WP7.

And even VBox is not a solution, already tried it and it didn't work, but even if it would - why would I buy a desktop OS to run it in a virtual machine just so I could transfer my files to my mobile device? How is that 'with user in mind'?

Same prob I've been having with... say any phone without a good desktop app that doesn't support my OS's of choice - OS X mostly, but also Ubuntu and Windows 2008 R2 Server 64-bit - and I can't mount as a device. I use VMWare and don't think that I should in order to get the full experience in one of my aforesaid OS's. But often have to.

Lately, I've been all about running my own webDAV on the device - iPhone, iPad and now Android (via an app called WebSharing) and that gives me the freedom to share, collect files as long as I'm around wifi and another computer and/or smartphone - I hate wires.

How is it bad for the user to be able to access the device via a standard USB connection, or to transfer his/her files from network storage, or...? Name me one good reason to only be able to access your device through a proprietary app and how can that be good for the user?

I'd rather mount it, drag and drop, be done with it. Having me use iTunes marries me to their ecosystem, I have to authorize my gadget on my own computers and then if I were to grab a song from another device, I have to run the risk of wiping my library clear if I sync with another machine.

But... desktop apps give people that don't know ctrl+c, ctrl+v or standard folder structures a chance to use higher functions such as... moving movies and/or music over to a device too.

Having it both ways is ideal, imho. Desktop app and mount as a device.

I personaly have no problems with closed-source apps/OSes/whatever, I have a problem with locked in systems directed and censored by some outside entity - in such system you end up leasing your device instead of owning it, where the manufacturer can change the terms of use retroactively, after you've purchased the given device - and I just cannot accept that. True, given a choice I prefer OSS, but closed source is just fine as long as it uses widely accepted standards and does not lock you in.

I'm just waiting on somebody to get right. If I have to purchase music, then have a store that has music I like, can give me the methods I like to keep my library in order as well as sync my phone, back it up properly off of the device and if I'm out and about, the ability to share or collect files, make it easy for people like my mother and offer a UX that makes sense and doesn't require me to think in programming patterns to get the simplest thing done.

Still waiting... a week later of playing with it, WP7 doesn't give me that.

[JoOppen]

I am a mere user of a N900 and thus Maemo. I like to play around and value that freedom higher than perfection. in many respects IOs is more finished, polished etc. but also rather limited (my favorite on the N900 is Easy Debian and therefore I love the resistive touch screen and the stylus because a system following the desktop paradigm otherwise would be unusable). From such a point of view, it is not necessarily a question of either/or (unless you are single-track minded) but there could be a parallel approach.

However, I easily can see that Meamo - and apparently Meego in its present state - might suite me but is not form my brother (literally. For good reason he likes his IPhone).

That is why I make this statement: there might be the simple recognition, that Meego (unless it is really polished) would be for a different clientele than WP7 (or IOs or Android) is aiming for.

I am one of those who are a bit frustrated because my favorite path is somehow deemed to be less supported now. However, little hope remains that is not fully abandoned yet. Should it once turn out that a third system for the bigger market will not catch on, a return to the alternative path (Plan B) appears to be still possible although I see the risk that this path is diminishing due to lack of care. We will see.

[zwer]

Ok... let me ask you this. Why does it have to be one or the other? Good for developers shouldn't mean that users lose out with a weaker UI/UX and a strong (or simple) UI/UX shouldn't mean that the developers take a loss or are boxed in. Too much of that mentality is prevalent now and thus if it becomes a quickly stated stance of "Too shiny, it's for the sheep" or "Too difficult, it's gotta be for developers" when neither should be true.

Of course it doesn't, but one must prevail. The thing is, for the end user it's better if all of the UI/UX is consistant throughout the whole system, including 3rd party apps. And in most cases, it also helps the developer - but then again it stifles creativity because you, as a developer, are forced to obey some system manufacturer's guidelines, which can range from severely limited to downright frustrating.

In an ideal system, the user would be informed when installing an app that it may affect the system performance, look and feel, and let the user decide if the app is worth granting such access.

As it stands though, many reports are sorta negative around the SD card usage for WP7.

Changing the SD card resets the system for some reason, so we were reluctant to try it. And, as I understood, even then you wouldn't be able to add music to the media player that way - it's either Zune way or the highway.

Having it both ways is ideal, imho. Desktop app and mount as a device...
...
Still waiting... a week later of playing with it, WP7 doesn't give me that.

Ditto, and that's one, amongst other things, that Nokia loses going the WP7 way. Granted, both PC Suite and the later Ovi Suite never got to the ease of use of competing suites, but they were still enough for a laymen - us, techies, are using rsync for years now. It even works on newer s40 devices. I can't see how that is bad for the user, and how a platform that doesn't provide you with such basic functionality is 'created with user in mind' :rolleyes:

[alcalde]

Absolutely. To the limited extent that MS allows them of course.

Money does wonderfully corrupt things.


The board probably has been bought off, promised cushy non-executive positions on MS's board when they takeover the soon to be dead Nokia.
With enough money you can buy off the DoJ to call off their United State vs Microsoft case.
With enough money you can stuff enough stooges into the ISO standards approval process to get a non-implementable standard get voted in as a standard.



I'm done. I love surreal comedy but this is getting too surreal even for me. When the conspiracy folks at abovetopsecret.com are putting forth sounder logic (top member thread pick today involves how the Israel UFO video is probably a hoax) than here... there's no way to discuss the issue. When an empty assertion is considered an argument.. how do you respond? When people are not only entitled to their own opinion but their own set of facts (by simply making them up as they go along)... how can there be rational discussion? When the Scobelizer blog leads off its article on Nokia fans with a picture of a basket of walnuts (http://scobleizer.com/2011/02/11/dear-nokia-fans-youre-nuts/), maybe that ought to be a hint the more extreme elements should be reined in to avoid making everyone look foolish, as all of the mocking plan(whatever) websites are already doing.

Gerbick, I'm not going to become part of the MeeBorg collective, I'm getting into an escape pod and abandoning ship. I'll watch from a distance as WP7 becomes the #2 smart phone OS thanks to Nokia and Nokia means something again in America besides ultra-cheap phones (like the Nokia 2720 I bought for $40 unlocked). I expect to see desktop OSes on handhelds before my new nephew enters kindergarten, something which is somewhat possible today with devices like the Viliv N5 and UMID BZ. Canonical will probably deliver the small device open OS consumer-focused software that MeeGo was supposed to be in the interim.

Good luck, folks. My recommendation is that instead of daydreaming "Plan B" scenarios and not looking at what the rest of the world is writing about "Plan A" (interestingly devoid of conspiracy theory) you fork Maemo, code open source versions of the closed source parts using the Qt tools I've been told in another post are the most popular in the entire world, even more so than VS and .NET, and produce your own ARM-based consumer OS. If all it should take is, in the words of Steve Ballmer, "developers, developers, developers" then this should be accomplished even quicker than those here claimed MeeGo could have been whipped into shape by Nokia if they hadn't all been bribed by Microsoft. If things like "copy and paste" are both simple and essential, your fork should be state-of-the-art and completely polished out of the box, else it shall be failure. If the market doesn't want to pinch widgets and buy apps then it should also be adopted by commercial companies and you'll be vindicated. But, if that doesn't happen, at least you'll have done something more productive towards getting yourselves a desktop/phone OS than plotting to storm stockholder meetings. I sincerely wish you good luck turning whatever code you have available into the OS you've been dreaming of, but I expect you'll find it's not as simple as you think nor will the results be as market-grabbing. Me, I think I'd rather slap openSUSE 11.3 on a Viliv N5 and carry it around with my new $40 Nokia phone and call it a day.

http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/walrusphone.jpg

[allnameswereout]

Ok, Nokia partners with an industry giant who needs someone to put their product into smart phones and which a lot of people have an impression of as being inferior to the existing product (in this case, ARM). This industry giant promises OS help in exchange. This industry giant has been cited numerous times for monopolistic, anti-competitive and blatantly illegal tactics to maintain its position but is facing heat from an emerging mobile market for which it does not seem to have an adequate response.

Now, my simple, humble question is....


HOW COME NO ONE HAD A PROBLEM WITH THIS THEN BUT THEY DO NOW?!?[/SIZE]Your argument is valid in the sense that Microsoft gotten their profits from a dominant market position (the Windows desktop, and Office) where they've used business tactics for which they've been convicted, and have entered various other markets using the profits from said position which are not, or are hardly, profitable. Examples include Zune, WM, Xbox.

For Intel similar. Convicted monopolist who is putting R&D in different projects, and selling different hardware than x86-32 chips. Itanium, x86-64, Atom, WiFi, and so on, and so on. However it is inherent to tech industry because the market changes so fast. It also questionable which corporation is 'more evil' which values influence each of our views, knowingly or not. And this is where the equation doesn't hold much water anymore...

1) Because in a Capitalist system we welcome competition on hardware platforms; e.g. ARM in desktop/workstations/servers/netbooks/smartphones and so on and Intel on smartphones/GPUs/tablets/GPS and so on.

2) Because a lot of MeeGo code is platform agnostic. Since it is written in languages such as C and C++ it is portable to other platforms than x86-32. Debian, for example, also uses code by Intel in say Linux kernel or MeeGo packages even though Intel is a convicted monopolist. They also have various ports of Debian; even non-x86-32 ones, and even non-Linux ones.

3) Intel is different. Intel is primarily a hardware company, and if you look at the past, that type of company is often open source friendly while corporations which are (proprietary) software companies are not. Intel play by the rules of open source in this market, and they never played dirty in this sector (unlike Microsoft). They've build up credit with their Linux kernel development. Microsoft has not build up credibility with open source development. On the contrary; the Halloween documents have received additional addendum due to the SCO debacle. Microsoft had several chances for building up credibility e.g. with Mono, and screwed it with exclusive deals (where Novell received a lot of money from Microsoft... sounds familiar?) but they refrain from official statements which can be used legally so they can use their patent arsenal once more, when time is right. Qt and MySQL have safety mechanisms build in; Nokia and Sun still bought them. The Office debacle also shows what kind of control freaks they still are. Which shouldn't surprise anyone when the CEO is not a techie (marketing or sth) and someone who was with Microsoft from the first hour. In short, Microsoft's core business competes with a lot of corporations including some assets from Nokia which are technical advanced such as Qt, and Symbian. Intel? They primarily compete with AMD, IBM, ARM. Intel is also not a competitor of Nokia. Microsoft, Apple, Google, et al. are. So what you asserted about Intel is drawing attention away from Microsoft. What you say has nothing to do with the threat from Microsoft and their shady business tactics (brief analysis here (http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1993150&cid=35193068)) which should not be forgotten. People recognize factors from previous cases, and share their observations. You can see some previous deals Microsoft had with 'strategic' mobile partners (http://www.asymco.com/2011/02/11/in-memoriam-microsofts-previous-strategic-mobile-partners/) and that is actually this very market segment only.

Wouldn't work. Hardcore Nokia fans would insist that if Nokia wasn't [...]Hardcore Nokia fans like anything Nokia does. This is inherent to being a fan. Take for example an Apple fan. If he would question or criticize an aspect of Apple, he'd not be seen as a fan anymore. Instead, I see rather many sceptics and critics here, as well as open source purists. Which can actually be a huge pain in the arse for a corporation.

[abill_uk]

Very interesting points made there "allnameswereout" and just goes to show the importance of a company and their products because it is obvious now that Nokia are just not the kind of company that should be involved with an OS in any way or form, they lack the expertise and the knowledge to carry through any OS.

I very agree with you on Intel as they are for sure more open, so if they do take on Meego then i am sure we will all benefit all round.

Nokia keep out of software development please !!!!.

[Drekkie]

the silver lining to all of this is at least the Meego mascots will get a second chance at life. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM3a4DrYWvY)

[kureyon]

I'm done. I love surreal comedy but this is getting too surreal even for me.Open your eyes.

[pxa270]

After some 25 pages of off topic blather, I still can't get some simple answers.

Has anyone here actually seen solid evidence that the MeeGo code in its current state was on schedule for a solid release within, say half a year, that could go toe to toe with with whatever Google and Apple will have on the market by then?

Again, I'm not implying that WP7 is better or on track for faster delivery or anything like that. I do not like this Microsoft alliance any better than most of you folks here. Actually, I don't want to talk about Microsoft and WP7 at all.

The only thing I'm curious about is the actual state of the MeeGo code as it stands right now. Is it anywhere near ready and competitive with Android 2.x and iOS 4.x?

edit: spelling

[abill_uk]

After some 25 pages of off topic blather, I still can't get some simple answers.

Has anyone here actually seen some evidence of a solid evidence that the MeeGo code in its current state was on schedule for a solid release within, say half a year, that could go toe to toe with with whatever Google and Apple will have on the market by then?

Again, I'm not implying that WP7 is better or on track for faster delivery or anything like that. I do not like this Microsoft alliance any better than most of you folks here. Actually, I don't want to talk about Microsoft and WP7 at all.

The only thing I'm curious about is the actual state of the MeeGo code as it stands right now. Is it anywhere near ready and competitive with Android 2.x and iOS 4.x?

Hey you can say what you want about WP7 as it is a M/S product so ripping it apart right now is perfectly ok ha.

Ask yourself a question ... IF Meego code was anything like ready for release on ANY mobile device do you think Nokia would drop it like they have done?.

Gates is and will always be a monopoliser a creep and a money grabbing bastard so we all love him to bits i can tell you ! but the problem is the bastard has money to chuck around and like Rupert Murdock he uses to his full advantage so you can probably hazard a guess and watch WP7 suddenly come to a new life !.

Nokia on the other hand should and could be a hell of a lot better than what they have done to date and i reckon this could well be the end of Nokia as we know them, they will now take a whole new turn BUT the distant future that could change.

Thats my thoughts and i am entitled to them so there :p.

[strongm]

Gates is and will always be a monopoliser a creep and a money grabbing bastard so we all love him to bits i can tell you ! but the problem is the bastard has money to chuck around and like Rupert Murdock he uses to his full advantage so you can probably hazard a guess and watch WP7 suddenly come to a new life !.

You are aware that Bill Gates hasn't run Microsoft for a number of years, yes? He is merely a part-time non-executive chairman of the company.

[ossipena]

You are aware that Bill Gates hasn't run Microsoft for a number of years, yes? He is merely a part-time non-executive chairman of the company.

in addition he has been pretty eager to dump his fortune for charity and common good.....

[jsa]

Has anyone here actually seen solid evidence that the MeeGo code in its current state was on schedule for a solid release within, say half a year, that could go toe to toe with with whatever Google and Apple will have on the market by then?

Nokia has been developing most of Harmattan behind closed doors, so unsurprisingly not many outside Nokia can tell you that. We'll be the judges when they get the "MeeGo related device" out. Certain is, that it wouldn't have had similar ecosystem around it as iOS and Android have, as it was to be only the first high profile MeeGo device announced. And it won't have the chance to develop one now that the wings have been cut already.

But I think that's an irrelevant question in the big picture. It's becoming clearer that this decision wasn't about which OS is the best or the fastest to roll out. This was about ecosystems. Basically came down to three options.

1) Continue with your own.. Ovi Services, Qt, own operating systems and control over them. Highest risk, highest potential gain.

2) Partner with MS.. Keep some elements of your own ecosystem (money from advertising, revenue from content sales etc.) and some control over the OS. Medium risk, medium potential gain.

3) Partner with Google. Probably wouldn't offer the same perks MS did with WP7 as Google didn't have as much to gain. Smallest risk, smallest potential gain.

The choice was number 2. Not confident they could out-do Apple and Google by themselves, and felt they'd give up too much with Google.

We'll now see what happens but we never know what would've happened had they continued with their own path. There are two possible outcomes. 1) They thrive with WP7 and the ecosystem and the world will remember Elop as the one who made the decision that saved Nokia. 2) They go belly up with WP7 and the world will remember Nokia as a company even Elop couldn't save with this decision.

Nowhere will it register that this decision may have been the one that pushed them over the edge and continuing pushing the old strategy could have saved them or earned them better gains than this deal. We will never know.

[abill_uk]

You are aware that Bill Gates hasn't run Microsoft for a number of years, yes? He is merely a part-time non-executive chairman of the company.

I really dont want to know as i just do NOT like M/S like millions of others and i dont care if he is in a trench or if he wants to give away whatever it is still M/S and thats all needs to be said.

[abill_uk]

Nokia has been developing most of Harmattan behind closed doors, so unsurprisingly not many outside Nokia can tell you that. We'll be the judges when they get the "MeeGo related device" out. Certain is, that it wouldn't have had similar ecosystem around it as iOS and Android have, as it was to be only the first high profile MeeGo device announced. And it won't have the chance to develop one now that the wings have been cut already.

But I think that's an irrelevant question in the big picture. It's becoming clearer that this decision wasn't about which OS is the best or the fastest to roll out. This was about ecosystems. Basically came down to three options.

1) Continue with your own.. Ovi Services, Qt, own operating systems and control over them. Highest risk, highest potential gain.

2) Partner with MS.. Keep some elements of your own ecosystem (money from advertising, revenue from content sales etc.) and some control over the OS. Medium risk, medium potential gain.

3) Partner with Google. Probably wouldn't offer the same perks MS did with WP7 as Google didn't have as much to gain. Smallest risk, smallest potential gain.

The choice was number 2. Not confident they could out-do Apple and Google by themselves, and felt they'd give up too much with Google.

We'll now see what happens but we never know what would've happened had they continued with their own path. There are two possible outcomes. 1) They thrive with WP7 and the ecosystem and the world will remember Elop as the one who made the decision that saved Nokia. 2) They go belly up with WP7 and the world will remember Nokia as a company even Elop couldn't save with this decision.

Nowhere will it register that this decision may have been the one that pushed them over the edge and continuing pushing the old strategy could have saved them or earned them better gains than this deal. We will never know.

Why all the words? is it not as easy to say that Nokia were doomed as a company and took the best offer available to them????.

[ossipena]

I really dont want to know as i just do NOT like M/S like millions of others and i dont care if he is in a trench or if he wants to give away whatever it is still M/S and thats all needs to be said.

so no use regretting ones mistakes and trying to make 'em up by doing pretty significant steps for common good (for example forcing the instances doing research with funds given to make every result etc public. that has never ever before been done and it catalyzed pretty much everything concerning the areas research a lot...) ?

[jsa]

Why all the words? is it not as easy to say that Nokia were doomed as a company and took the best offer available to them????.

I like how you managed to miss the whole point completely. But I'll leave it at that. The thought of having to engage in a debate with you even over such mundane things like current weather makes me want to bash my head to a brick wall, let alone over topics as complex as this.