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Comment by suthakamal | Hacker News Reader

Nokia's problem is that they don't understand: - Developer platforms - User experience - Levers to create an app ecosystem

Picking the guy who ran MSFT's business prodcuts division might help them compete with RIM in the enterprise, but it doesn't help them: - Sort out the Meego/Symbian mess, much less make it competitive with iOS/Xcode or Android

- Build the next-gen OS into something slick and sexy, instead of S60 reskinned time and time again

- Develop the kinds of tools, infrastructure and incentive Nokia needs to win developers.

All in all, I'm sure Stephen is a super smart guy, but he's not proven to have the domain expertise to solve Nokia's most pressing problems... which suggests that Nokia doesn't fully understand what their deepest problems are, meaning they really are finished.

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What do you mean they don't understand developer platforms and UI. And what is a lever to create an app ecosystem anyway?

"Build the next-gen OS into something slick and sexy, instead of S60 reskinned time and time again" They are supposedly doing this with MeeGo and Symbian^3/4.

"- Develop the kinds of tools, infrastructure and incentive Nokia needs to win developers." They are doing this with the Nokia Qt SDK and Ovi store. Both have issues, but they're heading in the right direction I reckon. They should work on the incentives.

UI: MeeGo is their first UI that doesn't have massive echo's of Symbian in it... and while it looks clean-ish, it's not necessarily any improvement over Android, which already has years of improvements, and 3rd party UI goodness (i.e. HTC Sense) built atop it.

Developer platforms: Nokia's owned QT for a while... what did they do? Nothing. Nokia had the WebKit WebRunTime years ago... what came of that? Nothing. Nokia actually enforced arcane third-party code signing/testing for apps on Symbian... who builds a developer platform and thinks that's a reasonable idea?

Ovi Store: Whereas RIM also does carrier-integrated billing for BlackBerry App World, RIM provides the developer with a consistent 70/30 split on app sales, and consistent payment intervals. With Nokia? Your split varies WILDLY from operator to operator, potentially being 35% of gross app price or lower on some operators, and you get paid depending on when those operators decide to remit payment. So, even with the most carrier relationships on earth, Nokia can't even do a decent job getting developers paid.

So, Nokia hasn't got an especially sexy UI w/ Meego, they've not got a great developer tools story (indeed with WRT and QT they have a history of screwing up even when they have a technology advantage), and they understand so little of the app developer needs that they can't even build a billing solution that competes with what RIM have built with App World.

Yeah, exactly! They will never understand why, say, Clojure and Node.js are such a buzz - because geeks like the ideas.

Adding new themes on top of an S60 crap is still the same crap.

They had a very good attempt with N900, but some stupid management bet on N97 and lost.

Nokia isn't a software development shop and never was, and of course, they should learn from Apple (why experience is important) and from Google (how to create a developer-friendly framework).

Qt might be a good attempt, but someone should write a visually attractive (think Apple's animation library) and highly polished common stuff (Apple's attention to details), like contact list, settings, etc. They think a community will do the work, but that will never happen. No one would like to do a boring task for free.

Btw, Nokia already lost the game (To Apple and Google) the same way as MS did (to Apple). And it is rather funny to see that they hired an exec from another big loser.

S60 (Nokia's nasty UI layer for Symbian) is very much dead. The next version of Symbian will remove S60 completely and replace it with a fully Qt-based UI.

"Qt might be a good attempt, but someone should write a visually attractive (think Apple's animation library) and highly polished common stuff (Apple's attention to details), like contact list, settings, etc. They think a community will do the work, but that will never happen. No one would like to do a boring task for free."

Luckily Nokia has done the work you describe. It's called "Qt UI Extensions for Mobile".

Show me a device. I feed up with a paper tigers. ^_^

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