Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

Well, if we manage to slow down climate change, we might also have the strength do deal with an overlarge population and an overoverlarge use of the planet's resources.

If climate change beats us, well, a rising sea level will drown the main hubs of modern lifestyle, coastal cities (we might have time to move them), and drown the land where some billion people live.
Huge migrations, hunger times, (plagues), ... ??

Probably leading to many empty niches for evolution to step into.
And what about the next icetime(s), or will climate change be to big for it ?

New research has reported that an individuals life experience to some degree influences how genes are triggered, and that some of that is saved to the next generation.
( Sorry about my vagueness, that's all I know about that.)

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

Yes, it is plainly visible to those who have feedback.

The way I see it as a user of Nokia products, the problem is with willingness to listen rather than with availability of feedback.

Well, my experience shows that Nokia does not even listen to feedback that is fairly obvious, such as "advertised features X, Y, and Z do not work in your product, even after two years of updates, here is why". And no, I do not mean just the tablets. Nokia's Symbian/S60 software support is equally shoddy, and I do not even want to start on the PC Suite...

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

But you know, feedback like "Hey, this thing doesn't work (it's not fast enough or good enough or easy enough or it's crashing), why don't you fix that" isn't always the most helpful one. Those are things that everyone is already trying to do right anyway: make things easy and fast and not crash. They generally aren't things that we could just snap our fingers and make things right upon hearing them from someone (or hearing about them for the 1000th time). (Edit addition: Please do file bugs about anything that you find. Bug reports are very useful. Naturally we are not aware of everything. )

Then, feedback like "Yes, I see what you're doing, but why don't you add features A, B and C" is problematic with the previous kind of feedback, balancing between quality vs. quantity of features.

And feedback like "Hey, why are you doing new features D, E and F when the previous ones A, B and C still suck" is also problematic, balancing between doing new things vs. supporting and improving existing ones.

Most feedback is amongst one of these three categories. Finding feedback that would have the silver bullets of how to fix problems is naturally much harder than feedback stating out the obvious.

No company has infinite resources, nor there is an infinite amount of skilled labourers available in the job market (take Maemo SW, or skilled Symbian developers, or any platform of your choice). Nor hiring people has an instant effect on improving quality: it takes time for the skill of the organization (and its individuals) to build up.

As everyone knows, every company struggles with the same problems. I'm generally an optimist, and I don't mind being the underdog. But I do think it's a misrepresentation of Nokia in general that we wouldn't gather feedback, or that we wouldn't listen to it. Then again, naturally I can't influence the perception of what things seem like. Perceptions are just what they are.

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

Here you can see the first sign of trouble. For me as a user (and therefore for your marketing department) this kind of feedback should be the most important one. Your "thing" should absolutely, positively work 99.999% of time. That is why people love Apple so much: their things always work. Nokia has got a much patchier history of things working.

Instead, as a developer, you call this kind of feedback "not very helpful" based solely on the fact that you can't address it by simple finger snapping. Yes, I am a developer too, and I know how much we would like to only address feedback that is easy to address. The life is tough though, and this is one of behavioral patterns that will not help you succeed in life. So, you have to constantly fight it, if not as a person, then at least on management level. Your management has to insist that you fix the show-stopping bugs first, not just the "easy" bugs.

This category is different in the sense that it can wait until the next hardware release or at least until the first category is fixed. Nevertheless, if several hundred users scream "give us that damn dpad" at you in unison, do you really think it is a good idea to answer "well, it is not our intended usage case". Why not let your customers decide on the usage case?

And then you have got a bunch of people who cannot be satisfied no matter what Nokia does. This, of course, does not mean that you should disregard every single suggestion or complaint by grouping everyone in the above category.

Well, then why waste your resources on rewriting the whole UI almost from scratch, then discard it only to rewrite it again in QT? I am not saying QT is bad, but isn't this plan looking strange in the light of limited resources?

If you ever talked to PR people about their work, I am sure they told you at some point that it is not really important how things really are. It is only important how things are perceived. And, take it or leave it, I suspect that most Nokia users will see Nokia as not responsive to their feedback.

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

Perhaps I ... I wrote in a way that can be easily misunderstood.

By "Not very helpful" i didn't mean "not very useful". Yes, it is useful to know, but knowing and being aware is not very helpful in making things better in itself. We certainly do prioritize to fix the showstopper bugs first. That's why sometimes apparently easy or small bugs seem to go unnoticed for a long time.

But more in practice, take working on Diablo vs. working on Fremantle as a concrete use case. Which makes more sense for us?

Ah, my favourite topic. :) I'll speak more on this once the Maemo 5 lead device is published. In the meanwhile,

we certainly do let our customers decide, by doing a vast array of usability tests, studies, evaluations etc. Dare I say, our (intended) customer base is far wider than several hundred responses here, and the results that you get from talk.maemo.org do not always correlate with the results you get from looking at things from a wider perspective. Sometimes they do, sometimes not at all.

I hope that nobody here is blind to the early adopter - developer bias that is apparent with all of us here on this forum. It would be a classic consumer understanding 101 failure to ... Ok, for an extreme analogue, hopefully you see the humour: If I would be in the business of creating a small portable flying machine for the mass market, I would be very careful in studying jetpack owners and doing exactly what they would tell me. I would certainly listen, but I wouldn't just go making a Jetpack+.

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

I do not really know, although suspect that a wise manager would allocate at least a couple of people for the continued maintenance of Diablo. Nothing complicated, basically backporting bug fixes, upgrading package versions, wherever possible, and pushing updates to existing users. And no, I do not believe that you spend a lot of resources on testing updates, not after you released Modest on the unsuspecting public. :)

Of course they will not 100% correspond to the results you get from your focus groups, but on the other hand you are getting feedback from people who actually spend a lot of time using your devices. Even if these people are mostly geeks, they are still humans and a lot of their complaints will coincide with complaints from the general populace. I mean, you will not insist that only a geek will ever use FBReader or try playing games on his tablet, will you?

On the other hand, can you be sure that your focus group testing results will reflect the actual outcome when the device is released? How much time do your focus group people spend using Nokia devices?

I just hope you also won't make it out of a solid piece of aluminium and make pilot control it with his penis, just because hand controls "are not an intended use case".

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

Oh, I'm quite certain they do, but I'm also sure they don't focus on anything even vaguely resembling real-world usage ("Yup, SSU works great on this freshly-flashed tablet!").

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

Hey ragnar i would be interested in knowing why nokia dropped developing touch sceen devices after 7710 saying that people were not ready for them. Did you guys at nokia really believe that touch screen phones were not the future?

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

What are you talking about saching, they have the 5800 and n97 don't they?
I thought everybody else is still busy develpoing 'the iphone killer' for the past few years.. *groan*..

Re: Article on Nokia Slowing Down
 

Well i brought the 7710 in 2004. After that they stopped the development of touch screen phones until apple released the iphone.
I wanted to know the reason for the drop in development in 2004.