Years ago, Nokia deliberately split internally and erected silos: E series, N series, and mobiles. Only E was permitted to include in their devices features thought to be of interest to on-the-go business people. Only N was permitted to include in their devices features thought to be of interest to creative, media hungry, tech savvy users. And the mobiles division got the massive S40 and S30 market.
Consumers demanded smartphones that could serve them all day, both in the office and out. They demanded ActiveSync, powerful office tools, games, great media playback, good web browsing, powerful cameras, the works. E and N each waved their hands and stomped their feet. "Why do you keep asking for everything? We've explained our divisions time and time again. It's black or white. Are you a business person or someone with a life outside of work? Make you choice and buy the appropriate device!"
Increasingly, people did. They bought iPhones. They bought whatever. They bought devices from companies who tried to build what consumers wanted.
Meanwhile, neither E nor N tackled the tough work enhancing and preparing Symbian or its UIs for the future. By all accounts, Symbian C++ is no joy to work upon, and neither division wanted to be the fool who spent their precious budget allocations on development work the other division would take, use, and benefit from for free.
So as their technical foundation grew old and crumbled, E and N built the walls of their internal empires out of legions of middle managers. Customers were lost. Market share eroded. Enhancements to Symbian and its UIs were blocked. And innovative new ideas like Maemo were suppressed.
When Nokia at last recognized their position and developed a Qt ecosystem plan as their salvation, they found themselves weighed down by the cryptic fragility of Symbian, the underdeveloped state of Maemo, and a sea of middle managers with strong, reflexive aversions to anything NIH or outside the status quo.
E broke bread not with N, and N not with E. Behold! I come as a middle manager. And there shall be great wailing and gnashing of teeth, even unto the next billion.
And I saw an unclean spirit emerge from the mouth of Nokia, and its name was the N97. And the people spake, saying "Verily, I shall buy an iPhone, or those Android things look quite shiny, also".
Mismanagement and bureaucracy shall follow thee all the days of thy life, and one named Elop shall arise, but it shall be no use blaming him really, for the damage was already done.
Excellent... I only hope you're talking in past tense...
And that all the lessons have been learned, & all the necessary reforms undertaken.
If not, Nokia won't be around for much longer "in the scheme of things".
1 browser for light browsing
1 browser for intense browsing.
brilliant idea, no?
#edit, here is whole quote as it has a lot of interesting info (and from a key dev)
"N9 has exchange support. We use it internally a lot, so it's in stellar shape.
Qt is easy to develop on. You use QML to do the UIs, which is like turbocharged HTML. Then the additional logic you either code in c++ or python. Really easy. SDK has a one click packaging tool. Development easyness is definitely in the same ballpark as android.
Qt will live on at nokia also in other areas than just Symbian. I think officially the next billion strategy is the one we refer to. More details come later. And I won't go into those.
DLNA stack is there on the device by default, but not in use. We didn't have the time to make sure it works just perfectly, so we'll either roll the UIs out later or 3rd parties can enable it very easily. N9 doesn't have HDMI.
Package management is still debian based in N9.
Fash is supported in fennec, but not in the default browser. We wanted to keep a clear differentiation between "desktop" -alike browsing and mobile browsing. Default browser focuses entirely in one handed use and relaxed browsing, where as fennec just does it all and acts like a desktop browser (tabs and all)
Landscape home is not available as default. You will need to install a theme that pretty much just inherits the default theme and overrides one property. I'm sure that will be available on sales start."
Years ago, Nokia deliberately split internally and erected silos: E series, N series, and mobiles. Only E was permitted to include in their devices features thought to be of interest to on-the-go business people. Only N was permitted to include in their devices features thought to be of interest to creative, media hungry, tech savvy users.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Maemo had gone to the E camp. Our community has proven itself more than capable of providing plenty of better media players, social service terminal apps etc so we wouldn't have lost anything important, but on the other hand we still don't have a decent email client.
Originally Posted by
Meanwhile, neither E nor N tackled the tough work enhancing and preparing Symbian or its UIs for the future. By all accounts, Symbian C++ is no joy to work upon, and neither division wanted to be the fool who spent their precious budget allocations on development work the other division would take, use, and benefit from for free.
Well, by that time at least they were all playing with S60 (aka "you shall have all this processing power but you can only control it with a numeric keypad and a tiny joystick"). Before, they also had S80 (the ATM-style UI found in Communicators) and S90 (Hildon's ancestor) to contend with.
Originally Posted by
So as their technical foundation grew old and crumbled, E and N built the walls of their internal empires out of legions of middle managers. Customers were lost. Market share eroded.
There was also a funny little thing called Symbian Signed which played a role in that. If you ever meet anyone who wrote apps for Symbian OS, buy them a round or three (they'll need it) and ask them about it.
Originally Posted by
Enhancements to Symbian and its UIs were blocked.
Symbian also had UIQ, a UI that they developed in-house. It was really nice originally (the SE P9x0s for instance were years ahead of anything Nokia had to offer at the time), but version 3 was so bad that it essentially killed it.
Originally Posted by
When Nokia at last recognized their position and developed a Qt ecosystem plan as their salvation
There is some speculation/superstition going around that Qt is the kiss of death for mobile platforms (Zaurus, Openmoko, Greenphone, and now Maemo, Symbian ...) (yeah, I know it's not totally accurate).
Originally Posted by
they found themselves weighed down by the cryptic fragility of Symbian
So they bought it, opened it, found out that nobody cared anymore and eventually closed it and re-sold it. Clever, that :-/
Originally Posted by
the underdeveloped state of Maemo
So they nuked whatever the original plan was, and made everyone wait 4(!) years for the Qt version with only a single more underdeveloped and also still-born release in-between. Oh, and the Qt version turned out to be still-born too.
Fash is supported in fennec, but not in the default browser. We wanted to keep a clear differentiation between "desktop" -alike browsing and mobile browsing. Default browser focuses entirely in one handed use and relaxed browsing, where as fennec just does it all and acts like a desktop browser (tabs and all)
Alas this was later rebuffed by some other devs...
Search for or ask about it in the N9: it's finally here thread.
Originally Posted by
Landscape home is not available as default. You will need to install a theme that pretty much just inherits the default theme and overrides one property. I'm sure that will be available on sales start."
Most of the other stuff you posted has already been mentioned, although perhaps not in OP.
But thanks for trying to help, every bit of genuine & non-trivial info is welcome.
So they nuked whatever the original plan was, and made everyone wait 4(!) years for the Qt/maemo version with only a single more underdeveloped and also still-born release in-between. Oh, and the Qt/meego version turned out to be still-born too.
^ This... sigh... Anyway I digress.
We should get off this discussion, that's not this thread's focus.
There are other threads for that... http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=74181
Anyway I digress.