MeeGo Preview Shows Why Nokia Embraced WP7 | Hacker News Reader

MeeGo Preview Shows Why Nokia Embraced WP7

gigaom.com

34 pointsnl12 comments

Shame. Maemo was actually pretty good. I used to have an n770 and it was a nice, usable little device (if underpowered). It had an app store in 2005 (which was an apt repo with a web interface in front of it), and there was a decent app selection since it was so easy to port linux desktop software to it.

This is what I don't understand. Why drop Maemo for a partnership with Intel and a long road integrating Maemo and Moblin into Meego? What was Nokia getting out of it? What could a "strategic partnership" with Intel have that would ever be worth delaying to market a single Maemo device?

It seems obvious to the HN readership that integrating Maemo and Moblin would be a difficult and risky task, but I'm not sure whether the Nokia leadership understood that one year ago.

Basically, none of them were software people. The CEO, Mr Kallasvuo, was a lawyer who had been at Nokia for decades. He had seen the company's meteoric rise thanks to a combination of hardware expertise and logistic superiority, and his actions suggest that he couldn't see any other path to success.

At Nokia, software was at best something extra that enabled specific features of the hardware, not an integral part of the product.

At the end of 2009, they must have known that there's a problem on the software side, but didn't know how to go about solving it. For a leadership team of lawyers and career managers, a "strategic partnership" is a natural solution. They probably thought that they will solve the integration problem and accelerate Meego development by simply throwing another few thousand contractors on it (failing to notice that this approach was meanwhile killing Symbian).

yes, maemo was great. I used the n770 and n810i ... they were my first mobile browsers (before iphone). A bit slow, still worked like a charm. with airsnort, nmap, mutt etc. Cross-compilation with the change root environment damn easy. Loved the apt-get install

Sad, sad.

Did anyone really think this was a surprise? Symbian? Not gonna do it. Nokia clearly bet the future on Meego, decided that it wasn't going to cut it, and hedged with WP7 instead of Android (because they weren't going to be competitive with the rest of the world who had a year's head start on Android devices).

Progress: plodding on despite your neighbors, commentators, pundits, and others disparaging you. Changing directions due to group think and not sticking to plans will kill any project.

Remember that people throw stones only at trees that have mangoes.

Then there's throwing good money after bad, knowing when to fold, and cutting one's losses. Idioms go both ways.

I find it telling that a smaller company like Palm could take Linux and roll it into WebOS in an amazingly short time but two massive heavyweights, Intel and Nokia, haven't managed anything close to the same.

Am I the only one who doesn't really like the name MeeGo? I don't know anything about it beyond the wikipedia page nor am I making any judgement regarding it as a platform, but I think the name is kind of goofy. Haha.

The name unfortunately is a homonym for "Mi-Go," who are an extra-terrestrial race that appear in several stories of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos. The Mi-Go are not particularly friendly. For example, in one story they extract a person's brain from his head, then keep the brain alive in a jar while they fly with it through space to their base on Yuggoth (Pluto). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi-go

So if you ever see jokes along the lines of "MeeGo: the phone that extracts your brain from your head!" or "MeeGo: the phone from Yuggoth" or similar, that is why. I have not yet seen Charlie Stross reference this in one of the Laundry stories, but I'm waiting for it. ; )

I would hope this is unintentional on Nokia and Intel's part. I mean, who would intentionally name their OS after something in Lovecraft?

You can't always trust your instincts with these things. We got used to the Wii in the end - product names often sound strange until the metaphorical corners rub off through repeated use.

That's definitely Qt/QML running on that tablet. I knew QML was a dog, but that that much of a dog running on current hardware. That's a shame.

Embraced like you embrace a smelly alcoholic uncle/aunty in a family gathering. Sickening but unavoidable.

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