ZogG | # 241 | 2015-12-16, 22:41 | Report

Some people try to do the same thing again and again and expect different result

tortoisedoc | # 242 | 2015-12-17, 07:36 | Report

But "doing the same thing" is not the same as "making the same product", as you can make the same product in many ways

ZogG | # 243 | 2015-12-17, 10:03 | Report

Doing same mistakes. i think you share the same mistake as Jolla does. Product is important part, but it's not about product. It's about platform and moreover - support, communication, interaction, inovation, cooperation with 3rd parties and indie devs.

pichlo | # 244 | 2015-12-17, 11:14 | Report

All those Jolla revellers, every time you are about to post again how fantastic and absolutely faultless Jolla is in every aspect, please remind yourself this one crucial thing:


That single thing explains everything. It is the corner stone of understanding Jolla's behaviour. Yet it seems like some people's memory is comparable to a koi carp's.

billranton | # 245 | 2015-12-17, 11:24 | Report

Nokia's biggest failure was to listen to american shareholders. Jolla seems to have learned from that, by not having any.

JulmaHerra | # 246 | 2015-12-17, 13:46 | Report

Without product, none of the other parts have no relevance. Also, latter reside on sufficient amount of resources. Which leads to conclusion: for big money and big corporations only. Startups, don't bother.

ZogG | # 247 | 2015-12-17, 14:44 | Report

Again, i did not told you that product is not important. but smartphone is not phone. It should do more than just call. And don't start "but it's linux", I can have n900 and it's more linux. Btw you can have a lot of linux stuff on android and even on jailbroken iOS(unix after all).
It's about platform. And platform is not golden shinny brick, but something that is working, have support and applications/features developed by 3rd parties, which is more important for "startup" company.
As about "startup" - they are here for a really long time already, but yes, on every failure we call them startup. It's there problem and it's not an excuse. there are plenty smaller companies that succeeded more with lower investments at the beginning (they had from Nokia some $ as help for ex-nokians, not even talking about meego related parts they got access too and experience).
They are company with small amount of people, but not a startup. On their own words they had mature product for a while ago. but they failed to get developers and 3rd parties interested in them, by trying over controlling and doing everything by themselves behind walls (not even share info they had to. e.g. is current situation and no update for a really long time).
no one forced them to conquer the word, they could go smaller first and use money wisely. i'll remind you that all huge corporations started as small companies, but those days there was no such definition as "startup", so they had no excuse.

JulmaHerra | # 248 | 2015-12-17, 15:30 | Report

True.

I won't as for me it being Linux is mostly a "means to an end"-kind of thing.

True, however, doing it "the right way" (whatever that means as mostly people can only describe that it is not...) requires resources, money, good will and luck. Which leads to the same old thing: without backing of big money, chances are you will fail.

Show me one such startup that has done something of same magnitude as Jolla has using less resources and being profitable since from the beginning. Shouldn't be a problem as I get the impression there is one on every street corner...

Fundamentally it all boils down to one single problem that is common for startups: money. No matter how you twist and turn it, it has been the number one problem since from the beginning. So we can call them startups or non-startups or whatever you wish, as it's mostly irrelevant to the root cause of the problems which is money and resources.

Possibly. It was the cost of not fragmenting the platform, which was major PITA in Android years ago until Google decided to take it more strictly under their control. If they didn't try to control it as tightly, they might have attracted couple of other companies, which is why they are likely to change that in the future. It may or may not attract other companies to do some of the lifting, now that the basics are mostly in place. Remains to be seen.

Also, I really don't see how you make mobile OS by going smaller. There are functions that must be in place and the foundation has to be solid and there are no shortcuts for achieving them. Also, you will need to have something to show (like products someone is actually using). So, if it was going "smaller", it would most likely be something very different than independent mobile OS. Of course there would be nothing wrong with it per se, we just would be discussing about something very different thing than we currently are.

aegis | # 249 | 2015-12-17, 15:38 | Report

You don't have to look far.

There was once this guy called Linus, from Finland.

Or some British guy working in Switzerland.

I think what ZogG is getting at is Jolla needed to get a lot of people on board and they squandered it by having too many barriers in the way. eg. limited docs, api, no paid apps, limited developer outreach...

JulmaHerra | # 250 | 2015-12-17, 16:02 | Report

...and it what time frame was all of it succeeding, in what king of environment/market? How many mobile phones or comparable products Linus launched? Time is not an infinite resource when creating complex commercial product.

Yes. However, some of the api-restrictions were there because of unstable Qt-version they had to use, which IMO was good reason to restrict them. Don't know about current restrictions though. Also, having all of those other things doesn't come free either and having too much of "administrative burden" may have undesirable results. That's why there has to be something in place to begin with and when it's opened, all of the documentation, api's, bug trackers, infrastructure to support public contributions etc etc have to be in place in such way they don't need to be parsed by developers in difficult and painful way (which is the main reason there's so little interest in contributing to ie. Nemo-project). Doing all of those takes resources, which has to be derived from resources and time used in developing the platform itself, which means there are choices to be made how they are prioritized. Usually they are always prioritized "wrong" as there is always the army of people who know better how to do things even without having insider knowledge from company.

Another thing is that there will always be that one major gripe that was there in the Nokia days also - some things have to be kept out of the public for certain periods of time (ie. regarding new products and their features), which has to be solved somehow without making it all a huge mess. So, I don't really believe there are easy solutions for these things until the resources problem (sustainability of the company) is solved somehow. We may hear something tomorrow, let's hope it's good.