> 4) The blame for Nokia's current woes does not lie with Elop and his current strategy. It lies with the previous one.
wrong. see http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/12/calcula...
wrong. see http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/12/calcula...
Go back and read his blog in 2008-2009 where he conclusively proved every time he wrote that Nokia phones were much better than the iPhone and Android, and that no one really wanted a touchscreen device anyway.
I believe the author (Tomi Ahonen) gives a window into how most businesses product management and marketing work for good or for bad.
Companies start with a technology base for a product and hire pretty smart people to look at the market and identify the features which will sell more units or the segments they need to target. The decisions are usually very fact driven because they have to justify in terms of a business case, and in general I think Ahonen is factually very solid.
If you looked at the figures and facts from 2008-09 I don't think you'll find much wrong and public position of Nokia (outside of the US tech community) was pretty strong.
However, the fundamental problem about relying solely on this approach is that it is a. very reliant on execution of your engineering org. b. takes no account of the ability of engineering to scale c. remains susceptible to disruptive big-bang technologies.
This is why product development organizations need a coherent personality rather than be treated as factories and prescient leadership.
What I disagree with is his mindset: it is all Elop's fault, and there is a vast Microsoft conspiracy to destroy Nokia.
I don't agree with Elop's decision to go to Windows Phone. But I do agree with Elop's conclusion that the Nokia platform(s) were "burning" and that they should be abandoned.
I think he should have gone with Android, but I understand the reasons why he went with WinPhone.
Meanwhile, Tomi Ahonen still claims that Meego was the ultimate solution to all of Nokia's problems. Ahonen has never accepted that Meego was 2 years too late for it to be a viable player, and he's never accepted that Nokia isn't a big enough player to build a sustainable ecosystem around an operating system that was so late.
Nokia is not in trouble because of Elop. It is in trouble because of two trends. One is the rise of the middle class in emerging markets who don't want cheap, nasty feature phones. And two is the move from both Apple and Android into lower and lower price points.
And the fact is that Meego had nothing going for it. It had no apps and no related ecosystems like Google, Microsoft and Apple have. And as we are seeing with RIM developers simply aren't interested in building 4 versions of their apps. So this idea that Meego was going to save the day is pure delusion.
What a shame...
Aside from timing and suicidal memos, given the obvious incompetency of Elop, I doubt WP was the right decision at all. Of course I do not have all the information that Elop had back then, but I wonder did they consider other options, such as forking android (maybe in cooperation with amazon), seriously. I wonder what role his previous employment played here.
Sorry but only a few geeks care about QT, and other developers care about the ecosystem and go where the money is. I wrote some QT code about 10 years ago and it was good, but is it so great compared to iOS/ObjC, Android/Java and WinRT/C# that developers would just flock to it blindly? I seriously doubt it.
I care about QNX too, it's such a cool RTOS.
But what can it do for RIM that can't be done by Darwin, Linux kernel or the NT kernel? As I said, us geeks by our very nature get excited by the things that the users don't, unless they can see a difference in usage.
Also, the fact that it's POSIX compliant helps immensely when porting existing code.
Moreover, RIM is doubling-down on Qt. It's unclear what this move by Nokia does, but I think you'll see a lot of Qt developers being hired by RIM. Whether they'll pick up the project and run with it is another story.
(Not trying to be snarky, but I would indeed be concerned about RIM following the same path as Nokia, especially considering the massive job cuts they've recently announced.)
RIM may be on the decline right now with BBOS, but you simply need to look into the great work they're doing to seed the developer community with the support they need to create great apps for BlackBerry 10. I know the typical thing to spout is that RIM is dead, long live Android/iOS, but if you actually looked into it yourself, you would see that RIM is doing some really great things with BlackBerry 10. They're reaching out to FOSS communities, seeding actual hardware, and making their tools easier to use than ever.
But I know that many, maybe yourself included, will call me a fanboi, downvote me, and won't bother looking into it themselves. They'll continue spouting this nonsense about RIM's death, never changing their opinion, and taking Apple/Google's word for it. That's fine, continue being uninformed.
The rest of us developers with an open mind will happily pick up the slack on the sinking ship that is RIM. We might be wrong, and you might be right. But what happens when we're right? Where will you be?
That's great, but the health of a company and it's products depends on a bit more than their developer relations team. The engineers at HP/Palm were also doing great things with webOS before it got axed entirely.
> But I know that many, maybe yourself included, will call me a fanboi, downvote me, and won't bother looking into it themselves. They'll continue spouting this nonsense about RIM's death, never changing their opinion, and taking Apple/Google's word for it. That's fine, continue being uninformed.
I have no personal stake in the matter nor do I particularly care whether RIM survives or dies. I was only making the observation that if I was a Qt developer that just got laid off from Nokia, I would not want to take up a job at RIM for fear of the same situation repeating itself in 12-18 months. I mean, in the best case scenario it's a gamble that BB10 succeeds in the marketplace at all. If I had a family to support I would be looking to find a less risky proposition.
> The rest of us developers with an open mind will happily pick up the slack on the sinking ship that is RIM. We might be wrong, and you might be right. But what happens when we're right? Where will you be?
The same place I always was? RIM's success or failure is entirely irrelevant to me.
I did not mean applications like yours and never implied it was a toy.
That being said, we already knew Nokia was going to dump it, they already sold off the commercial support and licensing division and made a shallow claim "we're going to continue contributing to Qt," which almost always should be read by adding "until..." at the end.
I'm happy to see Qt back in the hands of someone who cares about it. Personally, I'm not much interested in whether or not Nokia plays in the sandbox.
But Android? On devices with a completely different form factor, input schemes, and resource requirements? I don't think that is feasible, particularly from a user experience point of view.
And having ported a fairly successful iOS app to Symbian^3 (using mostly Qt Quick/QML), I would seriously contest the claim of 1) Qt working like a charm on Symbian and 2) how well Symbian works in general.
Rather, that to provide the best user experience on each different type of device (i.e. to follow platform conventions and paradigms and take advantage of unique device capabilities where present), it's best to use platform specific tools and design your application to be consistent with the expected user experience for that particular device.