The 'oh sh_t' moment that Nokia decided to abandon MeeGo
engadget.com
engadget.com
No where on the page do they link to the start of the original story. The 'source' button links to the page/paragraph that the quote is from, but that isn't exactly the same as linking to the front of the other article.
The only links in the content go back to other Engadget stories. I'd say its bad etiquette.
This is a truly disgusting practice. The good thing about it is that once you know what’s going on, it’s relatively unproblematic. Whenever someone directs me to Engadget I know where I have to click. (In a funny twist, once you know where it is, finding the source is actually easier than when it is hiding in the article text.)
They do tell you the source, but leave it as an exercise to the reader to find where it is.
So this isn't bad etiquette so far as the group they're conforming to is that of other journalists.
It maybe that MeeGo was going even slower than that, but that's also their fault for deciding to more or less completely ditch Maemo instead of investing resources into that back from 2008 onward. If you look at what they had with the 770 a year and half before the iPhone, and the N800 5 months before, Nokia could have been huge. Instead they stuck with Symbian without really putting the correct work into it. And now they're stuck with Windows Mobile it seems.
I'm not sure what it all really means, besides a reminder it really doesn't make sense to attach yourself too much for companies. What they do can change on a dime.
Compare to Android. It's not just about form factors. It's about hardware freshness. Android has had dual core, LTE, and double the ram for months. There are Android phones with 3D screens and 3D cameras. The iPhone 4 is looking long in the tooth. And the iPhone 4S will just be catching up to the Galaxy S 2.
If I had to point to one reason why Apple is trading at such a low multiple it's because Apple is making too few devices to maintain leadership. Apple's market share has peaked unless it starts acting very un-Apple.
And I'm not sure if much of that "hardware freshness" is really what's getting Android market share. Are there (sizable numbers of) people buying a phone because it has a 3D camera?
It may have made sense for Nokia to ditch MeeGo, but I think I was actually intending to mostly complain about how they got themselves into the corner.
Not to mention the form factors which are also pretty important. Some people demand a keyboard. Other people want a huge screen. That's just not an option with iOS. There's also brand momentum. Everyone that isn't Apple has loaned Google its brand by putting Android inside.
As for MeeGo's viability I think it's a moot point. Even if MeeGo was perfect Nokia would be in an uphill battle. Look at webOS, critically regarded as the best competitor to iOS. HP has a near zero market share. You either need to be the very best by far, i.e. Apple, or you need to have the rest of the industry behind you, i.e. Android.
The fact Nokia looked at Windows Phone 7 and Android considered them equals makes me question Elop's decision making. The article also has a telling quote when Elop says he couldn't reach someone because the other guy was "probably testing an Android device that day."
Elop might as well have decided to build personal computers with OS/2 Warp in the 1990's because IBM gave him a big check and Windows is humorously unreliable. I'm sure that would have been a great business decision.
What's keeping Nokia from playing the same game that HTC is? Is it entirely manufacturing/labor costs?
From the article: "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing."
Maybe the culture and social organization of a company is analogous to its autonomic nervous system? A shock to that is very risky and not to be undertaken lightly.
[1]http://www.itpro.co.uk/630721/nokia-r-d-spend-outweighs-appl...
So in a way it is fitting that they go with Microsoft, Microsoft has a reputation of being a better hardware than software manufacturer, too (at least for keyboards and mice, which cannot RROD).
This is, at best, a half-truth --- Nokia would have the same freedom to tinker, reskin, and add their own apps as any other Android maker, which has so far been considerable. With Windows Phone, being able to reskin is a special favor, but with Android, it's part of the package.
What's believable here is that Nokia wanted _some_ kind of special favors from Google, and Google didn't want to play that game. Microsoft did. And it isn't clear from the outside what all those special favors were --- we'll have a clearer view, perhaps, when the first devices ship, though we still probably won't know the size of the "marketing payments" --- or how the other manufacturers will react, long-term, to being relegated to second-fiddle status on the platform.
Bizweek quote from here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...
When my company was acquired by Nokia we had a choice of company-issued phones, and of course most of the geeks picked N900s (which ran Maemo, a Meego predecessor). After a few weeks using the N900 I was like “well, as a handheld Linux computer, it’s OK, but as a phone... meh.”
What complaints do you have?
EDIT: I also had to force the phone-ui to landscape mode so it wouldn't jump around on me.
You can prevent the orientation sensor from making things jump by forcing either portrait or landscape mode in the phone-ui application.
Most of those bugs in the apps have been fixed in the Community SSU: http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/13/sgi_belluzzo/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo
A cynical view would be that MSFT is happy to see their management jump to their competitors...
Yea, I know: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209064
It was common knowledge amongst anyone who tried it that MeeGo was no where near ready for consumers, and it was reasonably clear that the hardware platform they were aiming at wasn't 100% sure either.
I'm sure everyone has stories.
A dozen!
With a dozen models on the market how are customers supposed to choose?
Nokia should slow down and put as much TLC as possible into 1 or 2 products next year. Make each immaculate instead of figuring you can fix your mistakes in next month's model.
What I was trying to say was that I don't think having 12 models is going to make things confusing for consumers or be detrimental to sales.
HTC/Samsung/Motorola releases a lot of Android phones in a given year and it hasn't hurt their sales.
Edit: It must be noted that it isn't likely that any single market will have a dozen Nokia models available to the public.
If that is true why would they think it could solve their problem?
Nokia's problem was they couldn't get a competitive product out quickly enough. WinPhone gives them a chance, MeeGo wouldn't have shipped in decent numbers until 2014.
Elop is a former employee of Microsoft and has huge share in that company. His reason to be at Nokia was to bring it to Microsofts lap and so destroy MeeGo and Qt.