Jolla: The market wants an alternative to iOS and Android | Hacker News Reader

Jolla: The market wants an alternative to iOS and Android

gigaom.com

17 pointsbergie16 comments

The _sellers_ want an alternative to iOS and Android. A possible reason why none exists on the market--at least not with significant numbers--might be that the buyers don't want it. More precisely, buyers don't seem to want anything that sellers are able to produce at the price they'd be asking for it.

I'm not sure what are the proper rules to anthropomorphize the market, but I'd say that for the market to "want" something, you need sellers to produce something at a price which buyers are willing to pay.

You've got a polished and tightly controlled garden with iOS, a commoditized ecosystem in which to find commoditized phones with Android, and a base to develop one's own walled garden _a la_ Amazon, again with Android. There's nothing very exciting for non-Apple sellers here indeed, but that's a pretty good situation for buyers; I can't think of a buyer problem which would be best solved by a completely new OS.

ACtually, the answer lies in the article:

> why would an operator choose to work with you? > > we can integrate the operator’s value-added services into the device

Translated in plain english: "Operators mourn the pre-iPhone times when hardware makers and consumers were their bitches. We'll try to sell them the leashes to get their bitches back, because they're the only one who've got a problem we can fix with a new OS"

Yah. The public has been -clamoring- for crappy pre-smartphone branded apps like Verizon's V-Cast.

Can't wait to buy mine. Hope it comes with RealPlayer too!

The market has a credible alternative to iOS and Android, the market just chooses not to use it, which brings to question whether or not the market really wants an alternative to iOS and Android.

You mean WP? It's not really an alternative, it's iOS in different clothes. It's even more closed and walled than iOS, and most fruits in that garden are rotten.

Only way to succeed with walled garden is to have the best fruits in there.

Your presumption of what constitutes a viable third alternative is flawed. Most people (mass market) don't care about openness.

They care when they are forced to use inferior products. For example, IE on WP and Apple maps on iOS6.

What do maps on iOS6 have to do with the walled garden? Third-party map apps are allowed on the App Store.

I find it really sad that most of the comments here are disparaging. I, for one, do want something that isn't Apple's walled garden or Google's personal information hoover.

These are hardly the two best things we could come up with.

I am sad that WebOS didn't make it. Not only was it a credible alternative, it was also well thought-out and fun to develop for and hack on. I'm curious what Jolla will turn out to be exactly, but I also wish someone would just go and revive WebOS already. Someone with hardware pull. Someone like the Nokia of old.

Windows? Come on. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

I was looking to buy a N900, but now Nokia is dead to me.

OS's form natural monopolies. The more you sell, the more software is written for the OS, the better the OS becomes.

Its why nobody has come close to displacing windows on desktop computers.

The web helps even the playing field in become a platform that works on all devices.

Another alternative to iOS and Android will actually sell more iOS and Android devices. While it's true that a small number people will switch for the novelty of it, the two natural monopolies will actually benefit more.

Whatever the alternative is, it should target the market which iOS and Android leaves out at first: regular dumb phones.

But will it run on my N900?!

Jolla is based on Mer, and Mer runs on the N900 https://wiki.merproject.org/wiki/Nemo

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