Nokia's MeeGo is doomed - A summary of Dublin's MeeGo Summit
techeye.net
techeye.net
When I got a new phone a year ago, I considered the N900, but held back because its 3G was only for T-Mobile. (Yes, I actually travel in areas where T-Mobile doesn't have 3G. I spend one week a year in a spot where they don't even have GSM coverage.) But I figured I'd get its successor in 2012 or so.
Then Nokia and Intel announced MeeGo. I still haven't seen a good explanation for this--merge two OSes, only one of which has shipping products, instead of dumping the one that doesn't? Cue sinking feeling.
Nowadays I don't think I'll ever run MeeGo. Even when I get an Android phone, I'll have to carry my N810 until it dies. When it does, I'll have to try building a decent dev environment on Android. People have xterm running on it, but it doesn't have most of the tools that make Unix useful.
Sigh.
It's certainly slower than with a larger screen. The keyboard doesn't actually slow me down much. Hacking with one of the crappy 3-row keyboards common on phones (e.g., the N900, mrphl) would be a lot worse; but the N810 has most of the symbols I need right on the keys. For the others ({}, [], |), the xterm has a customizable palette; I just tap the right button on the screen.
>I can't even imagine using Emacs efficiently on a device like that.
Shrug. It's emacs. I've been using it for 20 years now; the control keys are burned into my brain. The main impediment is the screen size; I can't see much of my code at once.
>Don't you think a small netbook would increase your comfort and productivity without a considerable loss of portability?
No. With the N810, I can hack while walking down the street. Can't do that with a netbook.
I think fairly pure Linux plus Qt, with the heft of Nokia and Intel behind it is a fairly good hand, I guess we'll see how they play it.
...oh, you're right. [1], second paragraph.
I'm happy as long as they don't take away the Maemo core(i.e. being deb based). Also the article reeks with FUD.
Latest MeeGo release is 1.1 for handsets, netbooks and in-vehicle infotainment systems, each with their own "user experience" layer on top. The handset UX in 1.1 is for developers to have a peek on the new direction. 1.2 is coming up in a couple of months.
MeeGo distribution will be RPM based; that is inherited from Moblin. That shouldn't change anything substantial. The kernel and other guts are still all true Linux goodness.
I have N900, but it SUCKS - the screen and keyboard are too small for doing anything serious. My girlfriend uses it now, mostly as a phone :)
Nokia are the 120th biggest company in the world ( http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_l... ) (falling from 85th in 2009); they have leeway to do a lot of things wrong before they are "doomed".
Assets value and size doesn't protect you from a fall in demand. Their revenue fell 23% in 2009, and their profits fell 78.8% (http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/snapsh...).
Their biggest concern has to be their share price. In December 2008 it peaked around $40. It's now around $9. If it keeps falling like that people will start talking about takeovers and/or private equity buyouts.
iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch.
"Doug played us a charming little video that showed cartoon MeeGo-people pausing movies on their televisions, stepping out into the car and playing the movie immediately from its last pause."
Netflix streaming, more or less. Wii, XBox, PS3, iOS, Windows, Mac, some Blue Ray players, I think. All of which know what's in your queue and even where you left off watching on your other device.
The future happened while this guy wasn't looking.
I do love my N900. Coincidentally, I just started getting into app development the past few weeks. No SDK for Windows or OSX? Seriously? The SDK only works on specific versions of Ubuntu? Really? It all makes sense now why the platform has been a failure.
This one should be the easiest for developers, your not stuck with a language or framework that is foreign, getting started should be easy.
As it is now, we haven't even got any phones running it, so of course it doesn't all work and hasn't been polished yet. Whether Nokia can survive long enough to see it through, we'll have to wait and see, I hope so.
Their hoping that Open Source will save them from themselves I suppose, but that rarely works. As long as Nokia is largely fronting this project, I don't have a lot of faith in it's long-term viability.
I just don't.
You seem to be taking one journalist's opinion pretty seriously...
No SDK for Windows or OSX?
Forget about the old Linux-only Maemo SDK. The Nokia Qt SDK is what you want: http://qt.nokia.com
Which is probably the most damning thing about the platform: when such effort is spent at luring developers in, one wonders.
Before basing your opinion on MeeGo on a biased article, read Arstechnica's article too: ( http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/meego-confer... )
P.S. "At one point, after a long explanation that failed to answer the question of why MeeGo didn't yet have a framework for developers to sell their apps, a developer from Norway shouted out: "We don't care about openness, we need to be able to make a living.""
What is Qt then? http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/meego/ Come on...
The developer was complaining that there was no system in place to sell apps to users - not that there was no gui toolkit to write them.
Currently maemo.org is serving some 1.5 million open source apps for the N900 per week.
Nokia should just drop Meego and throw in with android while they are still profitable.
I guess this is what Nokia is aiming for with Meego. But, despite the excellent work of the Qt trolls, it doesn't really seem to get off the ground...
Sent from my Nokia E sixtysomething or other.
Also, if the average user of the above OSes does not download a lot of apps for that platform, the stickiness of the platform is reduced and Nokia could benefit if it could come up with a coherent OS / developer strategy.
This is the "Android is the race for the bottom" argument. It is perplexing how it keeps getting a free pass on here.
Nonetheless, for the sake of argument let's go with the notion that Android really is the domain of "(very) low-margin Chinese manufacturers" (ignore that the top selling devices are high-end devices like the Droid X, Galaxy S, Desire Z, etc), would having their own OS really defend Nokia from competing with them?
Of course it wouldn't. Android isn't taking marketshare from Android -- it's taking it from every other maker. You can't stick your head in the sand and pretend that somehow that helps your margins. Consumers generally consider every other option available out there.
This is what Apple got right: if you have your own operating system and ecosystem nailed down correctly, people do not mind paying larger margins, and you are in a different game.
It's interesting to consider that in the PC space Apple used to control their own hardware, even developing their own chips. It was a disaster. Now they use commodity hardware with a glossy shine, and it has dramatically helped their bottom line: They differentiate on top of the common, and that is their secret to success. This is almost entirely the case with the iPhone as well, where the processor is made by Samsung, the wireless chipset by broadcom, the screen by various manufacturers, etc.
The whole "the iPhone model proves the case" analysis is a profound example of a confirmation bias. You can't throw a corpse without finding a dozen counter-examples where such a "go your own way" model was an absolute, unabated disaster (including about 90% of Apple's existence), yet somehow that conclusion keeps getting restated like it's a scientific fact. It's absurdity.
No, it's not. There are always counterexamples, but in your argument you completely ignore margins in the PC and laptop market. The vast majority of laptop and PCs are sold at low margins. Since most manufacturers cannot compete one software, they compete on price. One of the few vendors that makes large margins has its own operating system. Of course, Macs are nice hardware-wise, but most people will switch 'because it is not Windows'.
This doesn't mean that every company differentiating on software-succeeds.
ignore that the top selling devices are high-end devices like the Droid X, Galaxy S, Desire Z, etc
The smartphone market is relatively small and new, as is Android. The race to the bottom has just started.
Just to digress for a minute, a related memes that I keep reading is "Apple is comfortable in their very profitable niche".
Through most of Apple's history, their niche was remarkably unprofitable. In 2001 Apple lost $52 million dollars, while Dell made $3.19 billion. How does that play into your theory? In 1997 Apple lost $1.08 billion dollars, while Dell made $747 million.
I could find counter-example after counter-example.
The smartphone market is relatively small and new, as is Android. The race to the bottom has just started.
Competitiveness is indeed just kicking off in earnest. No company is immune to it, and pointing to Apple's tremendous success at leveraging iTunes and their iPod franchise into a lucrative smartphone initiative in no way can be applied to anyone else. Again, there are endless counter-examples (how's Amiga doing these days? Atari? The ST was a pretty great machine, so they must be storming the margins), yet you demonstrated a perfect and remarkably myopic confirmation bias to demonstrate a competitive lesson.
Yes. And it is common knowledge that Apple was notably mismanaged company during the nineties.
Explain Apple's popularity, taking OS X and iOS completely out of the equation.
Now think why Jobs refuses to set up licensing contracts with other vendors. Those iMacs and iPhones don't look so interesting anymore if you can get a HP computer/phone with OS X/iOS two third of the price, one and a half times the performance. I am pretty sure the majority of the Mac users that I know would've bought HP.
Its funny you say that. Apple Cinema displays used to be the exact same LCD display as HP displays, except they had a FireWire and USB hub built into them. They also cost $400 more.
Even if Apple licensed to clone vendors again, it's unlikely HP would produce third third the price and one and a half times the performance. Apple's Pro lines remain competitive with the market.
Apple also led the way in doing things like putting accelerometers in laptops and swivel/tilt controls, Etc. HP could have done that with their hardware on the windows side (and written/loaded drivers for the hw) but choose instead to sell a bland box. Perhaps this is why Apple's hardware offerings continue to look interesting in light of cheaper alternatives.
Steve Jobs and his quest for perfection.
Now think why Jobs refuses to set up licensing contracts with other vendors. Those iMacs and iPhones don't look so interesting anymore if you can get a HP computer/phone with OS X/iOS two third of the price, one and a half times the performance. I am pretty sure the majority of the Mac users that I know would've bought HP.
Apple can easily compete on price with anyone nowdays. They choose not to in (low to mid range) computing, but the iPod/iPhone/iPad are ultra-competitive price-wise with anyone out there.
The real reason is because Jobs believes controlling the entire experience (both the hardware and the software) gives the best experience for the user. He may well be right, so long as he is in charge of the experience (cite: any other company that tried the same strategy).
Steve Jobs is a genius, but he's also 55. He's a once-in-a-generation leader, and Apple is lucky to have him.
We certainly haven't seen a race to the bottom. To be clearer, the subsidy model changes the equation. The reason for getting you on a new phone is to get you to reup a $2000 contract. If you have a phone that drives this (iPhone) then the cost of the phone is worth it to the carriers. If the phone doesn't do that (Kin) then it doesn't matter if the phone is free.
Until the US market sells unlocked phones directly to consumers (as the dominant way to distribute phones to consumers) there will not be a race to the bottom.
UPDATE: And one other thing. Since the carriers largely lock down their networks, you can't just buy a generic smartphone from cheapphones.com and have it work (at least not on the 3G/4G networks). So we also have the added factor of very limited shelfspace. Whereas in the PC market, there are tons of PC makers and DIY.
Realistically, the carriers probably won't have more than 10-15 smartphones available at any one time to purchase (testing costs money), and have good relationship with a handful of phone manufacturers -- all of which work to avoid a race to the bottom.
Not true of the GSM carriers, at least. I have a Nokia N86 which I bought unlocked from Amazon; it works fine on AT&T's 3G. And the Nokia N900 was sold only unlocked, and works on T-Mobile's 3G.
I suppose the phone you tried might not have had AT&T 3G frequencies. Most unlocked phones out there don't.
I believe that's a temporary situation with a clear end in sight. LTE is rolling out with a unified SIM standard, right? 4G should finally bring the US a market where you can consider phone and carrier separately.
On the other, thanks to competition, Acer Laptops are now available at a little over 300 Euros. The free market made computers accessible to nearly everyone in the Western world (and hopefully everywhere in the future).
I'm not really interested in some Chinese conglomerate I've never heard of's idea of of a touch based tablet or phone OS. But I'll happily buy some oddball phone or tablet running Android. In fact I just did buy a ZTE Blade, and think it's pretty stunning for the price. I'm also considering a 7" Android tablet from a range of unlikely sources including Archos and the Dixons group.
As an Android fan, I can only say: all I want is a really good Android device. Some are good enough (Nexus One), but there is still room for improvement. And Nokia probably would be able to pull it off. It is very unlikely that they'll go that route, unfortunately.
Implication : Posts bashing Nokia are bound to get lots of views
Example : HN item id:195100