Some time ago I received a private email directly from Elop (just me, nobody else in CC, I am not going to go into details as to why), in which he explained that the biggest problem was the small amount of MeeGo devices in the years immediately ahead.
This is simply not true.
Before explaining why, I’ll quickly say that I actually work on hardware adaptation, so if somebody knows the amount of effort needed to adapt MeeGo to different hardware platforms, it’s us. Plus, I closely follow Linux related mailing lists (linux-arm, linux-omap, linux-media, etc.), and know a lot of people in different companies that work precisely in this area. I have quite a few years of experience doing this, so I know what I’m talking about.
Update: To avoid confusion, I am a mere software engineer. And when I say “us” I’m talking about the bigger team I am part of.
Nobody I know believes what Elop said, and let’s keep in mind that Elop is not an expert in this area, we are. So my guess is that he got his information from some upper management guy who didn’t know what he was talking about either.
As I explained Elop, if we wanted to ship 10 devices with OMAP 3 (the same platform of the Nokia N9) today, there is absolutely no problem from the software point of view: all the UI software remains the same, and the hardware adaptation would probably require few modifications, if any.
The problem is when porting to an entirely new hardware platform, say Snapdragon. Suppose only 3 devices are planned on the “years immediately ahead”, well, then it makes sense to have 3 different hardware platforms, and each one of those requires work from the hardware adaptation team, not from the upper layers, though. However, that’s not a technical limitation, it could very well be 30 devices instead of 3, it’s basically the same amount of work for us. IOW; what matters is the hardware platform, not the number of different devices.
Note: all these are merely examples, not actual plans
Funnily enough, Windows Phone only supports one hardware platform: Snapdragon (and in fact only certain chips). So MeeGo already has an advantage over Windows Phone; you could ship more devices on more hardware platforms. All we need is the word.
Not to mention the fact that most of the hardware adaptation is already done by hardware vendors. They do it because it’s the easiest way to demo their hardware (it’s Linux). I tried to explain that on an earlier post where I show many examples of people porting MeeGo to a plethora of devices (it’s easy and fun).
Another advantage of course is that MeeGo is already here (Nokia N9).
Not to mention the fact that MeeGo is open source, and Linux is a synergetic endeavor; there’s many more than one company (Microsoft) working on it, in fact, almost everybody else is.
Elop’s answer? “I am simply going to choose to respectfully disagree on multiple fronts”. He didn’t even bothered to mention exactly what was the disagreement.
So there you have it, if there’s a reason for ditching MeeGo, it’s certainly not a technical one, and most likely not a good one either. I hope the people out there like what we did with the Nokia N9 and ask the though question “Why exactly did you leave MeeGo, again?”, specially when there are no signs of any Windows Phone device.
Note: as usual, this is my own personal opinion, and it’s based on publicly available information
Felipe Contreras 
I think all we can do now is try to help market the N9 and get developers to try and get as many N950 as possible as well, as if what’s existing in the MeeGo space is a big success, the numbers might speak for themselves and help convince those who doubt that it works.
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“Note: as usual, this is my own personal opinion” well, I think you’ve missed few hundred thousandth here, because they think same way about all this anti-MeeGo campaign created by Elop. In old times he would be kicked hard in his …ss
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Hello Felipe
Without knowing the exact details of your emails, we could simply speculate a misunderstanding. When Elop referred to “small amount of MeeGo devices”, maybe he wasn’t referring to different platforms where it could be adapted to run on. Maybe he was referring to the number of models that different manufacturers were willing to produce — that is, the ecosystem.
From all I’ve heard since Feb 11, that’s the reason. Not that it wasn’t competitive; not that it wasn’t easy to port; not that it couldn’t be adapted to other needs. It was simply that there were few others of relevance who would join Nokia in the handset market to create an ecosystem. We were told that operators welcome a third option to Android and iOS, but their reaction is “make it happen first then we’ll join”. So the higher ups decided that joining the WP provided a more likely chance of succeeding in creating that third ecosystem.
I don’t have to like the decision to understand how it was reached. I don’t have to even agree with it — I just understand the thought process.
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@Thiago No, he was referring to Nokia devices; the things we were building.
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+1
It really annoys me that Mr. Elop are taking sides, it doesn’t make any sense to Nokia to be in this position restricting itself to only WP and having a phone with a platform it publicly criticized.
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you might have worked in HW adaptation but don’t seem to understand the whole process of making a product. Even when you use the same HW platform, you still make changes in peripherals(screen, camera, mic, modem, you name it), you also add, remove, modify features in the platform (be it meego or other) and add applications, operator variants, market variants, different certifications, etc. etc. Since you are trying to differentiate those products from each other. Now, you have to develop test and integrate all those changes and if you change something on the platform, you might need to agree those changes with multiple stakeholders (upstream, platform, in house, …). Suddenly is not about HW integration anymore but about a thousand other things too, so it gets complicated.
if the hw vendors were to provide a quality linux baseport and/or meego/android support out of the box (somewhat qualcomm manages some of that, hence their success on android), we wouldn’t have this discussion. But this is not the case, major rework is needed in terms of quality, feature support, etc. HW vendors are not good at SW (not meaning that they don’t have real experts in house) and I can state this due there is big industry just around helping OEMs and silicon vendors with this specific issue (and that’s why there are companies doing “system integration”).
So is not about shipping 10 or 30 devices based in OMAP3, is about shipping 10 or 30 differentiated devices….
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@Guest Screen, camera, mic, etc. are all parts of hardware adaptation, and these require minor modifications, I know because I have seen the patches. In fact these often change in the process of building the same product.
Adding applications, operator variants, market variants, etc. is not a problem with MeeGo. In fact, it’s probably easier because the source code is freely available for other people to tinker. Moreover MeeGo is already in an advantage over WP because there is localization and internationalization support, whereas in WP it’s under development. I have never seen this used as an argument.
There is already a quality Linux baseport support out-of-the-box, as I already mentioned, that’s how hw vendors build their demos. Moreover, it’s easy to take Andoid kernels, and run MeeGo on top. It’s Linux, remember?
However, how is that “baseport” stuff relevant? WP doesn’t have any of that; there’s only one platform supported: Snapdragon (and only certain chips).
Again, shipping 10 devices with MeeGo is not a problem, it’s probably easier than 10 Windows Phone devices.
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Funny thing is that Microsoft is not leaving basically any space for hardware differentiation. 🙂
Anyway sad that Nokia put maybe over a billion on last few years on maemo/meego – in my understanding there has been done many mistakes in software development point of view. I dont go so much into details in this list:
-development open source for very openly for the community and listening all other possible meego users is slow compared what would be if they just develop for their own needs.
-Qt UI is finally acceptable, but similar could have been done faster only thinking the handheld devices
-internal conflicts on what is the wanted outcome and pulling the process in different directions is also slow
So the main problem was in management and how to deal the ideological differences. There are few successful quite heavily open source related projects (iOS and android), but both are for the important parts been developed internally and only those parts that have licensing issues have become open source.
All those issues in making open source “work” can be in the end useful, but we are living in a world where the time matters in the business.
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@ FelipeC – well said
If N9 is the last phone to come with Linux from Nokia and it becomes a successful device,maybe Nokia will reconsider making more Meego phones,
But N9 and N950 are just so awesome and will be here for a very long time,
I’ll definately buy the N9 and wait for the Nokia Morph.
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Pingback: My disagreement with Elop on MeeGo « Felipe Contreras | Maemo Meego
I too would like to see Nokia reconsider it’s position on it’s Meego phones – but the only way Elop will be persuaded to change his mind is if the N9 is phenominally successful – something akin to the first iPhone. So it is up to us the consumers to help spread the word so that the advantages of this phone make it a winner. Let’s face it, if Nokia doesn’t continue to make Meego or Linux based devices, then I don’t see any of the other major players willing to step in right now.
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Great post.
The N9 is creating the same buzz as the N900 back in 2009, but it remains to be seen how far Nokia is willing to take it this time around:
http://www.mobileinfoplanet.com/2011/06/17/what-nokia-should-learn-from-the-n900/
I fear though that they won’t really back it this time either, especially since Elop has to make sure that WP7 is a success in order to support his decision to partner with MS.
Either way, I will be voting with my wallet and get the N9 – let’s see for how long can keep ignoring MeeGo if they sell it by the millions.
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Any time you adapt the SW to a new HW platform you break the binary compatibility of the old apps. (unless the app platform uses some sort of managed code like Android or WinPhone).
Consequently, old apps won’t work on the new HW. And future apps will have to be compiled for the different platforms.
Porting the SW to a new HW platform could be simple, but it has deeper consequences on the ecosystem..
Maintaining different HW/SW platforms in parallel is also another challenge.
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It’s not about N9 being successful, so Nokia will push Meego again.
Nokia will push Meego only if WP7 fails badly. There is no other way for Elop.
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Nokia, please, do not drop MeeGo.
– MeeGo for the high- and mid-end smartphones, tablets, and netbooks,
– S40 (+ Qt and Maps as announced today, great evolution for S40) for lower-end phones
– and a gradually phased out (but well supported and better updated!) Symbian to temporarily (until 2016 for example) cover everthing in between. The fact that (Qt-)apps for Symbian and MeeGo are largely interchangeable should make a smooth transition possible. I personally have a Nokia C7, and I’m fairly pleased with Symbian, but its death seems inevitable, which I kind of regret, but anyway.
This combined with one of the largest app stores (the Ovi Store is 2nd only to the Apple App Store in terms of revenue), a truely open OS (more than Android, which is important to the tech community) and a powerfull/user-friendly Qt-development environment to cover Symbian, MeeGo and S40 at the same time,… That Mr.Elop, is more of an eco-system than Windows Phone will ever be.
(Nokia + Intel) + (MeeGo + Symbian + S40) + Qt. I personally think it could have been great. Could have, yes, because this doesn’t seem to be the main strategy for Nokia.
And maybe, just maybe, Nokia can use some Windows Phones to get a foot on the American market. After all, even smaller players like HTC can handle multiple ecosystems at the same time. But Microsoft need Nokia more than Nokia needs Microsoft, especially after seeing MeeGo.
Symbian is a bit like Internet Explorer. For a long time it had a huge, almost dominant, market share (just like Symbian in the smartphone segment in the early 2000’s). Until there was a new flow of competitiveness (Firefox and Chrome for IE, or the iPhone and Android for Symbian). And it is quite obvious how a market leader is bound to lose quite a bit of market share when new players enter the field. Internet Explorer for example, lost so much market share that it no longer was the dominant browser (Firefox was larger in Europe, at some point, or even today). Microsoft has chosen to step up its game and the modern IE9 is indeed much better than IE6 (let’s say IE6 is equivalent to Symbian on the N97, which was a disaster). Nokia however, has chosen to go for Windows Phone, which is equivalent to Microsoft saying “ah well, f* it, we’re going with Opera from now on”. Note that Opera actually has a larger market share than WP, so the descision to go with WP makes even less sense.
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I think meego can displace windonws phone anytime at this point, and meego really have the potential to break the android and ios market.
The thing is that meego needs to port rapidly some 3rd party apps like whatsapp for example, that really connects people for others platforms too, that will create a big door for meego entrance to the Os fight.
I don t know much about technical development but it’s clear that the connection between different platforms such instant messaging (like whatsapp) makes the difference when choosing a mobile phone.
I think at this point meego is a great fighter but to be an real opponent to the other OS needssome common apps so the people can see the benefits.
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I agree with NotSoBad , and one of the things that works best is an OS made for the device and not the other way around, they are not getting that thats why Apple products are so successful.
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Why do you engage in Long email discussions with Idiots???
My best regards to all the people who worked on Meego… You believed in it, and delivered it… You have earned respect of millions of people like me globally. Please continue your brilliant work… The N9 design was simply brilliant!!! If not Nokia, I am sure this work will convince some other vendor to take up Meego, and polish it beyond the reach of Nokia….
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As a former engineer (for Nokia Maemo devices) and product designer (elsewhere) I can vouch for everything Felipe says. Elop’s comments about MeeGo device development are disingenuous and simply designed to reinforce his decision to go with Microsoft. Maemo was run on a shoestring budget yet managed to make incredible progress– put serious resources behind MeeGo and Nokia or any other company would outperform competitors in device innovation. The retreat from MeeGo points to the success of FUD more than anything. Sad that we have allowed that and risk aversion to stifle innovation.
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Show your support fro MeeGo here! – http://twitition.com/3c3ah
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I think Meego greater than windowsphone 7 at this time.
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You guys took way too fucking long to deliver. Stop crying. Columbus CANCELED, Dali CANCELED, Lankku TOO LITTLE – TOO LATE.
You want to blame someone for Nokia becoming a MS OEM? Start by blaming yourself.
P.S.: STFU and stop washing the dirty laundry in public.
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Call me a fool, but I really like the emperor’s new clothes…
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Disappointing hardware specs..
I am really disappointed by the hardware:
The OMAP platform is (now?) miles away from other platforms look at the specs:
CPU:
A single cortex A8(@1GHz )? my n900 has a A-8@600Mhz with overclocking to 1.150Ghz,
so not real that much improvement (“real live” performance could be higher, I doubt that!)
GPU:
PowerVR SGX530 GPU vs PowerVR SGX530 GPU -> This chip was old(2005) even in N900!! no upgrade?!
Display:
854×480 vs. 800×480 not much improvement here, I hoped for some retina like resolution(retina display was released 1 year ago!)
Touch:
capacitive vs resistive -> this is a great improvement(multitouch), also the gorilla glas is a nice touch!
Keyboard:
None vs. 3 row keyboard on n900 (however much bulkier design)
Infrared:
None vs infrared interface ( Great! Finally augmented reality is possible on n9!!
Camera:
8MP vs 5 MP -> Great, also Video in HD should be much better!
MicroSD:
No Slot vs. up to 32 GB on N900 (unbelieveable to cut such a feature!!)
Battery
1450 mAh vs 1320mAh not much improvement here(10%) I think it will vanish by the power demands of the new HW?
Weight:
131g vs. 181g This is an improvement which is mostly because of the missing keyboard, i think
So at the end we have waited approx. 2 years and we get an improved product (touch, camera, weight, compass) with a lot of painballs as well:
– No better GFX-Performance
– No Keyboard
– No MicroSD Port
The improvements are nice, but not breath taking, especially if you take 2 years of development into account(compare IPhone 3(2008) to IPhone 3GS(2009) to IPhone 4(2010) these are three phones in released in 2 years with mayor improvements(note that N900 is not that bad compared to IPhone4 and clearly suceeds IPhone 3)).
I am really interested in the reasons for these design decisions:
Cost? Energy? Size?
Do not get me wrong:
I surely will buy an N9 and I appreciate your work, but I will miss my keyboard and I was expecting new grounds, more state of the art!
Nevertheless,
Best regards,
Peter
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Dear @AAAAA
If only it were that simple. Do you think, for example, that the homescreen swipe in Symbian^3 does not follow your finger because the engineers can’t do it? There have been videos demoing a proper slide (as will now come with Anna) since the N8 has been released. Why is it not on devices yet? Because the engineers can’t deliver? Or because some useless middle manager / one of the ridiculous number of “senior vice presidents” cares more about their own cushy jobs than the company? Now add MeeGo, potentially upsetting the higher ups who depend on Symbian. Extrapolate as you will; but the engineers follow the requirements, they’re not the ones changing them all the time or cancelling projects.
And airing dirty laundry is important for democracies, transparancy and accountability and all those good things and all that.
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To be honest. The only reason, this phone is out and good, is because six months ago Stephen Elop fired the 7000 engineers that had nothing better to do than delay the release of Meego. The software was a shambles until they actually got rid of the dead wood and let the people who knew how to deliver get on with the job. This phone could quite easily be called the duke nukem forever phone.
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Pingback: Nokia Decides to abandon Meego - Page 3 - Digit Technology Discussion Forum
Petition in Facebook for NOKIA to keep MeeGO:
http://www.causes.com/causes/621381
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@anon this is the kind of stuff that would be so interesting to know the details of. Good point!
Knowing the frustration of dead wood (management or developers), I just feel for guys like this: http://konttoristhoughts.blogspot.com/2011/06/respect.html
N9 software looks amazing. Biggest question is about the future.
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Indeed I like very much what I see today being displayed by N9. I own a HTC HD2 (which you know does boot into quite a palette of operating systems), I was toying with the idea of jumping to a Galaxy II or an Optimus 3D (to the omnipresent Android), after I briefly thought of getting Pre 3 with WebOS, but now I’m giving serious thoughts of waiting for the N9 to appear.
However, I am not a standard user, but more of a developer and tester of mobile devices, willing to risk and experiment.
Man, you really got my attention with the N9 and MeeGo; I can not promise I will buy it (and keep it), but will definitely want to play with it a little.
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i agree with you, i am trying getting a developer version to start coding.
i hope meego is a huge success,but elop doing everything to downplay it.
can CEO be fired.
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I have the feeling Elop never got an accurate picture about MeeGo and its potential ecosystem before making his strategy decision, and neither about what is the point in open source SW development in general. He is not alone with that, within or outside Nokia. Nevertheless, thinking all way back I wonder if he ever cared about these.
Just for fairness, I still keep around the theory that the strategy shift indeed was an ad-hoc chaotic turn and not a trojan job – at least it would explain for the mistakes around communicating it. But the only good way to announce such a big change is to pull out a Nokia WP7 phone from the pocket and show the new disruption. Why was this public play needed about “we don’t know, let’s see”, but then make a decision which looked illogical in its context for everyone on the market 0resulting in falling stock. This just does not match.
On Feb11 maybe he meant deconstruction, but so far ended up demolishing everything. He and his team has not foreseen this, and that is a serious error at his level. Even if they expected the effect, things moved too fast and seem to have gotten out of control.
But his story cannot be evaluated yet without seeing the Nokia WP7 phones. So wait one or two years before judging him.
Now what concerns open source developers, Nokia is a lost case. The only thing that personally hurts me is why could not MeeGo development coexist with WP7 within Nokia – others have done it, it makes profit on a larger front, and leaves you with more choices… No explanation so far was good. I tend to blame Ballmer, but that’s a too easy shot :).
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Do you want to know the actual reason?? Elop still is on the top 10 holders of Microsoft -> http://t.co/84McSds
Nokia did it wrong with current CEO, microsoft is heading your company.
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meego is amazing UI, best on the market right now.
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Elop will always find a way to dismiss maemo. He can always say there is no ecosystem, he can claim it is not disruptive, he can even claim it’s failure, because of the ugly blue color.
The reason he can do it: HE IS THE F**** CEO.
He can fire the whole maemo team to buried, and later claim it was not a team that delivers.
Confronting your opinion with Elop is a brave thing, but at the same time not a very bright one. He has already wan his battle once he got appointed to be CEO.
Man, take care of yourself, and watch your back.
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Felipe,
Since you work in hardware adaptation, I’m curious, with the BlackBerry Playbook running omap4 and having similar gesture areas around the screen, how difficult would it be to get this gorgeous UI running on the playbook?
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AAAAA, trolls like you contribute nothing useful. Your opinion is meaningless.
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I hate Elop and I hate Microsoft. Period.
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@Christian That’s not true, I use the same binaries on my Nokia N900 and Nokia N9, that is because there’s a standard binary format for ARM called EABI, it should also work on Snapdragon chips and other ARM platforms. What you are thinking about is architecture.
However, MeeGo obviously aims to support both ARM and Intel architectures, so that’s not really an issue.
Either way, Windows Phone is worse in this area.
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Microsoft acquired Skype (Scandinavian)
Elop (former Microsoft employee) is the key player to take down the open Source operating systems created by Nokia.
Open source = linux = a threat to microsoft and to any North American Operating system/phone company.
Scabdinavian countries are years ahead of the world when it comes to freedom, that is why they invented the cell phone technology (nokia), that is why internet access is a citizens right there, that is why thepiratebay website was born there, and that is why Skype (free voip video/calls worldwide software) was born there.
All the Scandinavian free/open source mentality companies are a threat to North American companies.
The issue here goes beyond MeeGo. North America is taking over the European market and Elop (Canadian) will try to sabotage the N9 because his mission is to insert Microsoft into every Nokia mobile in Europe.
Meego (Maemo 6) is a fantastic software, but even if developers made 500000 apps and 100 million units were sold, that Elop guy won’t still consider MeeGo. His mission is to insert windows in Europe, that is all.
People do jot need to be a computer geek to realize about that.
Nokia should hire Alberto Torres again and fired that Elop.
Elop is the first non Finnish guy that runs nokia. How did Finland allow that??? There should be a law that protects their key corporations. Nokia is too important.
ATT Sabotaged the N900 by not letting the device access its 3g data service.
3g n900 in the usa would have brought down the iphone. t-mobile was the only who let N900 users access its 3g service. In canada no canadian n900 user was allowed to have a 3g speed access.
North America sabotage Nokia. Elop (Canadian) should not be the CEO of nokia. That guy is a threat to Nokia and Europe.
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i think this ecosystem talk is to far over blown. how many manufactures make Iphones only one yet apple has not had an ecosystem problem
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@anon That’s an interesting theory, but I don’t think it’s true. AFAIK the only publicly announced job cuts are on the Symbian area. The only thing Elop accomplished is to scare away the best talent from MeeGo, which already left Nokia.
I’m not sure if it would make sense to run a smart-phone UI on a tablet, perhaps pieces of it could be integrated into official MeeGo and use that instead. Anyway, I don’t think it would be that difficult, but it depends on the level of support the drivers have in upstream Linux. Most likely it would require significant changes on the Linux kernel in order to get everything working.
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4 million cellphones use windows and 400 million cellphones use a Nokia made software.
How on earth did Finns let a foreign guy ruin their company?
23 percent of Finland tax revenues are provided by Nokia. If nokia goes down, Finland will go down, and it will be a canadian, the responsible one.
That Elop guy must have an account in Andorra getting fatter with Bill Gates money gifts $$$.
If i was a Finn, I would be protesting there gathering more Finns to restore Nokia and mass produce many phones with MeeGo and Symbian.
Alberto Torres, the lead VP of the Meego/Meamo enginners at Nokia was Fired by Elop as soon as Elop was named CEO.
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I wrote little rant about Nokia but instead thought I’ll save you some time. I really like MeeGo at least what I’ve seen so far. Sadly from my experience of Nokia all I’ll say is don’t hold your breath. Of the N9 I like MeeGo but the hw spec. doesn’t meet my expectations of a modern phone about to enter the market.
I think the majority of the people commenting here are loyal Nokia customers and I wonder if the N9 or its successor is going to loose people like you (I can’t count myself for reasons I wrote about in rant) what is there to be said of the rest of their market share?
I hope Nokia get it right with Meego. Only time will tell.
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@……. Hardware is not the end of the road, it’s what you do with it. The Nokia N9 could make much better use of the processor, but it’s good enough, and way beyond what Android does with it (IMO). If all you care are the numbers in a box, then the N9 is not for you. But if you care about a device that’s sexy, resistent, has long batter life, Twitter/Skype/Facebook/Gmail integrated, plays all sorts of media with good performance, excellent camera, etc. It might.
I say go to the store and give it a go.
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@FelipeC Hardware is where it all begins, from how it feels to hold it in your hand to the strength of the signal when you’re making a call. In both these regard Nokia has a good history. I was very excited when I read about the N8 utilising Qt and a powerful GPU. But if you look at all these devices they owe their heritage to things like the Psion Series 5 and Apple Newton neither of which can perform the multitude of task we require of a modern mobile phone. I can’t think of one killer app that came along and needed less cpu performance or battery power or a smaller screen, fewer pixels, lower sampling rates, less memory (except when you’re talk about the product of compression algorithms like lzw or huffman so on and so on )
I agree with you though, I do care. Personally, I don’t need Sexy, I’d like sexy but I like functionality better. Twitter, Skype, Facebook, Gmail integration well that is data aggregation an important part of any modern platform.
As for peripherals such as a camera, well that’s like a computer monitor with speakers, if you buy the monitor for the speakers then you’ll pay as much as for a better monitor without the speakers except in the case of phones they don’t come without cameras and that opens a debate for another time. (On this I’ll just say interconnect and integration)
I’d like to have the confidence to not need to go into a store and give it a go. There are people who queued for days before the release the iPhone (pick a number) and they did so with confidence that it would perform as Apple promised, delivering the features Apple announced. I say this due to my experience with my Nokia N97 and Nokia support services. On this topic it is as much to do the organisation as much as the hardware and software. The N9 might be perfect for me just because I’ve been waiting for MeeGo since virtually when I got my current phone.
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Felipe, this post shows a shocking degree of frankness which I’ve come to not expect from Nokia employees. Thank you for posting it! Do you not expect to continue working at Nokia for long?
As an owner of all four Maemo devices and a present N900 user, I am obviously quite tempted by the N9. But, I really want a hardware keyboard! It is too bad the N950 is not for consumers and lacks NFC and the AMOLED screen.
Also, I’m pretty reluctant to give a single cent to a company with that saboteur Elop at its helm. Thinking about Nokia’s proud history and shameful present situation makes me sad.
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The N9 cannot and will not succeed for one simple reason. Nokia/Elop will not fund the hardware production. I doubt that Nokia budgeted enough for HW production and supply chain forecasts to make enough N9 devices to satisfy what seems to be huge demand. With no N9 devices in the sales channel, nobody can buy them. The demand will go unmet with the resulting “disappointing” sales figures, killing the N9/MeeGo (for Nokia at least) forever.
Thus, Nokia’s management problems still continue. Elop and Nokia publicly dumped MeeGo and made it into a niche platform. However, instead of releasing a niche MeeGo device appealing to the (lunatic) fringe of N900 owners (me) for example, they released a phone with the most wide consumer appeal of all that has the potential to sell in the millions upon millions of units.
So the situation is now rather comical in the market and, not so comical inside Nokia. All of a sudden we have this magical Lazarus device in existence that craps all over the Elop WP7 strategy. The ecosystem issue is moot since if you have a device that tens of millions of people will buy within a month, the ecosystem will spring up quicker than a flash. It is simple economics. As we know developing for MeeGo is trivial in comparison to developing for Android for example, so there are no technical barriers ot steep learning curves either.
I still predict failure for the N9 due to inability to supply, but here is hoping…
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Felipe, thanks for this. The more I see, the less sense the February “burning platform” and WP7 adoption makes. As I posted in another forum:
In February, Elop pretty much derided Nokia’s platforms as crap and uncompetitive, alienated customers, developers, retailers etc, and lost billions in share prices and revenue. He pretty much screwed Intel, and sidelined Meego, and put Symbian on life support for a yet to be seen OS. In the Businessweek article, it was claimed that Meego was not ready for prime time, which was a factor in the February decisions. Now today we see a fantastic Meego device being introduced, also word that ten more Symbian devices are in the works. Now, apps for this Meego device and the Symbian devices will be done in Qt. This seems to be the Symbian/Qt/Meego strategy coming to fruition. However it’s been crippled by the February announcements.
I am utterly confused. Here you have fantastic, competitive devices being made that are, in effect, obsolete from their birth. Are developers going to develop apps for the Meego device knowing that it has no future? Seeing that Meego is full Linux, there would have been no shortage of developers. This is a device that really captures the imagination. Is this some sort of sinister plan to ensure that the Meego device fails?
The more I see, the less sense the February happenings make…
Can you please tell me what I’m missing….
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By the way the reason there aren’t any devices in the market with a direct lineage to the Psion Series 5 or Apple Newton isn’t poor design or bad software or lack of a customer base. It because the respective Managements decided to make a business decision to end these products. This shows what may be good for a business isn’t necessarily good for the consumer sadly.
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@Napier .., thanks for your Excellent write-up/comment.
I am asking thesame question in your last line and as confused!
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napier says “Can you please tell me what I’m missing….”
I believe that the key piece of info you’re missing is that Stephen Elop’s job is not to advance the interests of Nokia (shareholders, employees, or customers), but rather to advance the interests of a certain other company headquartered in the pacific northwest.
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Android’s on a zillion platforms. I assume Meego on multiple platforms isn’t any more of a problem than the former.
Or am I missing something.
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I just wanna say there’re still many maemo users in china, who’re excited to see the coming of N9 and N950.
Though not officially shipped here, same case of palm os phones, web os…
Hope this time, may be the last time, we are not to be abandoned.
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Hello FelipeC,
You said the following:
“FelipeC says:
June 21, 2011 at 23:39
@Christian That’s not true, I use the same binaries on my Nokia N900 and Nokia N9, that is because there’s a standard binary format for ARM called EABI, it should also work on Snapdragon chips and other ARM platforms. What you are thinking about is architecture.
However, MeeGo obviously aims to support both ARM and Intel architectures, so that’s not really an issue.”
My question, one that might not make any sense at all is this: Considering the similarities of the N900 and N950, is it possible to modify the N950 OneClickFlasher to install the N950 firmware on the N900? I am not worried about the inconsistencies such as different camera specs. I wouldn’t mind if the camera didn’t work or other things were broken. I am wondering if it could be installed, sort of like the Meego 1.2 CE for the N900.
Thank you for your time.
Deaconclgi
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@john, Android is a virtual machine by and large, the internal stuff can likely be changed much more easily without messing up the underlying adaption (to a point)
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I’m not a big fun of Elop or WP7 either, but …
It’s not only about the number of platforms or number of devices made on particular HW platform. There is important factor – time to market. You have to be on time to the market to sell your stuff.
MeeGo Harmattan OMAP3 adaptation work is brilliant. It is also late. And who needs OMAP3 devices anymore? Market is looking forward… Tegra, OMAP4/5, Snapdragon.
If Nokia would start working on adaptation of a new HW platform that’d mean another 1-2 years from now (and there isn’t any decent adaptation layer from chip makers available on the market yet). By the time they are done existing UI would go out of fashion, so they would have to change it too to stay competitive. Once again Nokia would end up in situation as in all OSSO/Maemo/MeeGo – changing the HW platform AND the whole SW stack. And being late to the market by years.
WP7 was chosen simply because they believe MS adaptation layer closer to the completeness on their HW platform of the choice than Nokia would be with MeeGo in 1 year. Is that right ? Intel’s chip is far from ready… MeeGo on ARM SoCs is a joke^Wdemo.
Nokia needs LOTS of new devices on the market ASAP. Or it will be too late.
Ready application frameworks, SDK, ecosystem and services – all this comes as a bonus. Of course this might be pretty far from reality, but check how cool it all looks on paper. Too good offer to pass.
IMO the real mistake they made by going with WP7 is the choice of business model and ecosystem structure. Closed, royalties based SW. Last century.
“Not to mention the fact that most of the hardware adaptation is already done by hardware vendors. ”
Name a single decent one ? Sure they try, but they are not quite there yet.
Ability to boot linux on your SoC doesn’t count as “adaptation”. Besides that’s only for SoC, without peripherals. Just adding a new USB transceiver to your device can generate some man/months of SW work in adaptation. Let’s not even start talking about power management.
“Another advantage of course is that MeeGo is already here (Nokia N9).”
MeeGo ? Yeah, right. Common ppl, for the 100th time N9 != MeeGo.
“…MeeGo is open source, and Linux is a synergetic endeavor”
From Nokia experience – synergy was seen only in a handful of open source components in OSSO/Maemo/MeeGo Harmattan. Adaptation contributions went mostly one way – upstream.
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Felipe,
Based on this, how do you see the future of MeeGo(Maemo) in Nokia? Is there any change of upper management changing direction more towards future MeeGo devices based on the fantastic reception of N9?
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It’s true that the vendors do the adaptation. I’ve got Ubuntu running with 3D graphics acceleration on i.mx515 (Freescale, ARM Cortex A8) and OMAP 4 (TI, ARM Cortex A9 dual core). TI has the biggest open source community following as far as I can tell. Then there’s the new company, Linaro, also working adaptation.
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@another adaptation guy says:
So why does Android run on so many platforms? The virtualization argument only applies to apps; the kernel itself talks to the USB transceiver the same way the meego kernel does (why wouldn’t it, it’s the same kernel)
“MeeGo ? Yeah, right. Common ppl, for the 100th time N9 != MeeGo.”
Why does that matter? Call it Maemo/Harmattan then. Maybe they’ll converge at some point, maybe not. I’d rather have a Maemo N9 today than a Meego N9 maybe next year sometime maybe.
If anyone can explain why they announced 10 Symbian devices, I am all ears 🙂
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Nokia ‘elop’ didn’t put the desired hw like dual core processor and any other on n9 because it may kill the sale of their wp7. That is also why n9 is only available now in selected countries.
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another adaptation guy:
“Nokia needs LOTS of new devices on the market ASAP.”
Oh, really? Apple has a single one and last I checked they were doing somewhat fine on the market…
“MeeGo on ARM SoCs is a joke^Wdemo.”
You must have tried it or worked on it a lot, apparently – or you have no clue. Either of those.
“Common ppl, for the 100th time N9 != MeeGo. ”
Come on, now you are losing it. The core of the adaptation work, which you of course know if you are really another hardware adaptation guy as claim, is in the kernel – and last I checked, maemo and MeeGo variants were both using the same almost-stock Linux kernel, so why do you think something like the *package management format* does matter _at all_ for hardware adaptation?
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As I don’t know much about meego or app developing I would like to know one thing:
– Is it easy to program apps for N9? (not for me but for programmers)
If you say YES, I believe that I will get apps what I want / need and I will buy N9 when available.
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@FILIPEC
“I hope the people out there like what we did with the Nokia N9”
We sure do. It seems a great phone and it seems a great OS.
I still hope Nokia will come around with it’s decision but if not, I hope others like LG or Acer pick it up for their smartphone and that Meego still keeps going on in the other platforms (tablet, netbook, in vehicle and home appliances like TV’s) since the whole “ecosystem” seems to me very very promissing. Much more than WP7 anyway.
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Henkka says:
“Is it easy to program apps for N9?” Yes it is. Not only easy, but fast!
Better yet, once you develop those apps you can run them in the multiple platforms (netbook, tablet etc..) so its very interesting for developers.
Its a reality today that some apps being bundled with the handheld Meego DE (Developer Edition) were actually developed initially for the tablet platform and they work perfectly on the N900 🙂
Take a look at the Meego tablets and netbooks hitting the market today (Lenovo, Asus etc..), you will understand the potencial in it!
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@another adaptation guy The hardware adaptation in Nokia has been ready since a looong time. The problem has always been the UI. Maybe not perfectly, but in a competitive level compared to current Android devices.
And no, WP7 is not closer to completeness. What makes you think so? See the list of chips supported by WP7, it’s basically only QSD8250, which is 2008 technology. That should make you think how easy it is to support different chips, forget about platforms, or architectures.
Sure, hw vendors don’t have perfect adaptation for Linux, but they have something which is better than what WP7 has; nothing. There’s no OMAP4, Intel, Tegra, Sh-Mobile, or anything else, not even booting. Not to mention the fact that Android kernels are already shipping, and most of that work can be re-used, as it’s still Linux.
I’m sure it would have been easier and faster for Nokia/Qualcomm to finish up the adaptation of a Snapdragon chip that it is for Microsoft to provide OMAP4 support, or even worst: Intel support.
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Pingback: Nokia engineer calls out Stephen Elop for killing MeeGo
I think Elop needs basic maths lessons. As in, 1 is bigger than 0, and that there’s currently 1 Nokia Meego device and 0 Nokia WP7 devices.
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I never bought that story, and I am kind of shocked that elop (and the other management) actually believes that this is a legitimate argument. Maybe this is just what they say to you? There are of course other, more relevant reasons for the adaption of wp7.
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@ the Madman
He does not need the maths lessons (although I would recommend it too 😉 ). He is the kind of a person who climbs up the ledger and becomes the CEO.
For that kind of thing one must have proper “moral, political and working qualities”, not to mention good connections. It would seem that prior to his employment in Nokia he (or previous employer) has somehow persuaded major stock holders that is their best interest to hire him. The funny thing is that he has not spent more than a single year on any major position he held.
So far it seems they are confident enough to keep him, which means they still think he will deliver the fruits of Nokia-M$ cooperation. In either case, if they are prudent enough, they will prevent closing of Meego/Maemo program, since betting on a single horse is a big no-no in this industry.
If he still manages to close Meego/Maemo program(well N9 is likely to be a success, even though I would prefer N950), and still survives as a Nokia CEO, that would mean that the things are much more serious then we are allowed to comprehend based on publicly known information.
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although i love maemo/meego and the n9. its the ecosystem that elop is worried about, and one of the key factors why its so limited at this stage. Yes you can slab meego on many different phones but at the end they are individual phones that are not part of the wider system.
Keeping meego as a primary OS would require undivided attention, and even then its not a safe bet. Nokia hasn’t been doing too well and cutting costs in this department whilst gaining royalties from microsoft is a plus?
i can see how an employee who has devoted so much hard work into maemo/meego is fustrated, and at the hands of a foreign CEO. but i think elope made the right decision in jumping platform (not necessarily WP7-but that’s another topic).
just my opinion anyways 🙂
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I’m still surprised how people keep trying to find reasoning for Elop’s actions while the real reason is in front of everyone’s eyes. Elop is from Microsoft. He’s just Ballmer’s dog and he’s gonna get paid big time for the profit he will bring to Microsoft. That’s all, that’s the way it goes. MS platorms are dying and this is the way they are fighting it, the scumbag way (instead of thrying to make a product worth buying). Elop had to find some reasoning for the 180 change in direction and some people believe it, because he’s a good at making people believe what he says.
But when facing the facts, there are very few areas where WP could be in advantage over Meego and many more where Meego actually has quite a big advantage. Like Nokia’s long-term investment into it, the experience and knowledge of all the Nokia’s employees, the fact that its opensource, the community, if I am to actually leave out the capabilities of the OS itself, which are starting to shine right now with the announcement of N9.
I hope N9 sales leave the WP7 in the dust and future Meego devices crush it completely.
And that Elop gets demoted and ends up making coffee for the Nokia engineers that are actually doing the work 🙂
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Pingback: Nokia engineer calls out Stephen Elop for killing MeeGo, says he has no idea what he’s talking about | Nokia Windows Phone
I’m so sorry man, you guys worked so hard and it looks amazing(!!!) really, new concepts and new look, just one big “wow”.
I do hope Elop will change his MS history and get his head out of MS ass.
And again, thnX for a great, amazing device and experience… I’ll probably get one 🙂
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Being an ex-Nokia fan I for one want them to succeed more than anyone. In recent times I have used many (current top) mobile OS and I can clearly agree why Nokia ditched symbian. As far as Meego, it’s way too early to judge how well it performs just looking at the promo videos.
I don’t consider myself a geek or a power user but I choose whatever works for me. Since iPhone revolution mobile space had changed dramatically. It’s NOT just about apps but providing the best experience – you can do it in 2 ways either lock down your OS aka iPhone or open your OS aka android, maemo, Meego, webos etc.
This is were nokia has failed tremendously in providing the best user experience as they have the funds to attract devs but with their meager hardware and software from past has even restricted from attracting devs.
Meego looks great and sort of combines the one handed user experience only possible with non-touch devices on a touch device. But how well does the default apps works?
1. Does email client even support MFE, multiple MFE?, folders, search on server? Calendar events invite?
2. Calendar support google sync, subscribe to other calendars, reminders, custom tones?
3. Contacts
4. Browser (n900 browser was great but Nokia’s false adver was pathetic – promising full flash?)
5. Apps
I don’t care whether my device can look red, orange or yellow (themes) or I can hack into my device or send Bluetooth files unless these basic features don’t even work. Why would you call your phone a smartphone then?
I have limited wp7 experience and didn’t get a chance to check all the features but unless it fails in these regard I don’t see how MS can defend themselves. But I would bank my money on MS to deliver on these front than say Nokia in terms of software and so i think it’s a right move by Nokia. It’s like symbiosis where both will benefit eventually.
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@oli Yes, that’s also my thinking; whenever the official reasons don’t make sense from any point of view, there’s probably some secret reasons. However for now that’s speculation.
What I am interested to see is how much people like the Nokia N9, and how much pressure does Nokia gets to continue working on MeeGo. I don’t know if anything will change, but we in the Maemo/MeeGo team did all we could to make the Nokia N9 a success, now it’s the turn of the consumers 🙂
@Anthony Well, that’s another reason that can also be debunked. For starters, “ecosystem” seems to me more like an invented term from Elop rather than something consumers are actually looking for, so it’s hard to tell exactly how important such a thing is, or even what exactly does that mean. Also, you have to remember that a few years ago Android didn’t have any “ecosystem”, which is exactly how all platforms start.
I believe MeeGo’s “ecosystem” would have been bigger than Windows Phone’s, in fact, if the “ecosystem” is supposed to be that important, why does WP7 has so small marketshare?
It just doesn’t make sense from any point of view.
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@a guy says
My point is not about Elop’s actions, it is about the board and the major shareholders.
Surely they must see some interest in endorsing the Elop policy.
Based from their view it may be because of:
1. future stock value, well, we now know that is not it, don’t we?
2. future company position, translates to value eventually, but still needs to be proven
3. induce fierce competitions between locally developed Maemo program and external WF7, this is already working, look at the N9 (or at least on the surface, until device actually reaches users. I can bet the Maemo team was working like crazy to bring it.
For some the above and/or unknown reasons they think the WF7 is the holy grail.
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It’s pretty simple: Elop is still mentally a Microsoft man and never has really cared what’s good for Nokia. Meego is dead as long as Elop is at the helm. So is Nokia itself soon enough. Just watch the stock.
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@Anthony
“Although i love maemo/meego and the n9. its the ecosystem that elop is worried about, and one of the key factors why its so limited at this stage.”
But with the multi platform approach (tablet, netbook etc..) and Intel backing this 100%, isn’t the ecosystem for Meego more promising than for WP7?
I mean, today the ecosystem for WP7 is almost nonexistent as well. At least Meego has a more promising future ecosystem.
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I think there’s also the opposite problem: most of you meego guys are simply Linux-men. Windows phone is already a proven platform, while meego is not. I’d love to see how many people actually develop software for meego in the end. So far it’s close to zippo… and that’s the biggest problem.
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@Siphon: the only thing windows phone has proven is that nobody wants it. They can’t even _give_ it away in the only market where it even _has_ anything of an ecosystem (zune etc).
Meego is just Linux; by far the easiest platform to code apps for. (not saying iOS or Android are hard or easy, but you don’t get much easier than Meego, you can do it from any platform, from a single all-in IDE with everything you need, for free).
So, no, “biggest problem” it isn’t.
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fully agree with @anon. Elop never wants(ed) to kill Meego. It is S60(symbian) which he wanted to kill off totally. s40/s30 will grow into the place of Symbian and Windows will replace Meego, but still lives as a back-up / planB. From whatever he says and his conduct, he seems a reasonable, practical and sincere person.
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Elop has done more damage to Nokia and Finland than anybody before. Meego had chances due to alliance with Intel.
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This was already posted, but just to remind you all
Petition “We want Nokia to keep MeeGo”
http://twitition.com/3c3ah
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Pingback: Nokia engineer calls out Stephen Elop for killing MeeGo, says he has no idea what he’s talking about | Galaxy S Phone
vote for meego
http://twitition.com/3c3ah
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Thanks Andre for your Android answer!
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Pingback: UniversoTek » Ingeniero de Nokia culpa a Elop por matar MeeGo y aparte dice que el CEO, no sabe de lo que habla
@Siphon
In what way WP is “proven” platform, in the sense that no one is buying WP phones?
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In the way that it’s out there, it’s responsive, it’s GOOD and has apps and development support for it. Meego has none of these things… yet. WP7 mostly needs marketing support above anything else to gain attention from all the androids out there.
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Having seen the N9 on the internet today, it seems to me that Meego is a lovely OS and fits very well with Nokia’s style. Until I see reviews I cannot comment for sure how good it will be to use and how many apps there will be for it, but as a consumer, it looks very capable.
From what you said in your post above, it’s clear that Meego is far more versatile and adaptable than WP7 and has very good reasons why Nokia should keep it.
I think they are crazy to dump Meego and take WP7. MS makes rubbish products, that’s why I use a mac. I’ve had Windows Mobile in the past, and it was crap. From what I’ve seen in WP7 it’s ugly and development is very slow; updates take very long to be released.
Meego I think is far better and if Nokia supported it for all their products, their loyal customers would definitely buy it.
I like iOS myself, although at the moment I have an Android phone, but the N9 looks much better than Android, so I think if Nokia used Meego it could easily outsell Android to be the number 1 OS with iOS in 2nd place.
Here is a suggestion: maybe you and all your colleagues who are probably being fired, could buy Meego and star your own mobile phone company in Finland using Meego?
It won’t be easy because you won’t have Nokia applications, but if it’s good, you could slowly build it up into a strong company.
After all, even Nokia started out small in the beginning…
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Seems like so many posters here are children. Does anyone really believe that Elop does not want to see Nokia succeed? You know he has hundreds of millions of dollars/euros at stake with stock options. If Microsoft wins or fails with Nokia it won’t make more than 10% difference to their stock price since the revenue is insignificant compared to the rest of MS business. Elop’s stock returns in MS will not be as significant as his Nokia compensation. Also his reputation is on the line, for executives at his level, this is more important than money.
Whether his decisions are right or wrong, the future will tell but it is childish to rant about conspiracy theories or he is a foreigner trying to hurt Finland.
I do hope Meego is successful and that does not mean that WP7 must fail. Both being successful is the best thing for Nokia (and Elop).
Killing Symbian for WP7 is very rational. WP7 is a good working platform with a good base of services and a developer community. It is less than one year old and already has extremely high user satisfaction. Sales numbers are not very high yet as it will take the Mango release to expand the market to Asia (language support) and add some more features. I suspect at that point MS may start to promote and advertise it outside the USA.
Compare Maemo to WP7 for ecosystem. WP7 shipped in October 2010 and is approaching 20,000 approved applications in their marketplace. What are the equivilent numbers for Maemo? In today’s smartphone market, it is the total experience that matters and applications are a significant part of that.
At this point, if WP7 with Nokia fails then Nokia is doomed and Meego is not enough on it’s own. So for Meego’s sake, you should hope that Nokia succeeds with WP7.
I personally believe it will work out. i bought Nokia stock because MS has very deep pockets and the tenacity to continue to drive until they win. Check the history of the Office products, Word and Excel were weak compared to the market leaders. How many of you are using Lotus123 or Word Perfect today?
Leave your emotions and bias behind and help Nokia succeed. Support Meego and WP7. Meego engineers, be nimble and efficient.
Disclosure – I’ve been using a WP7 phone for 4 months and it is the best smartphone I have used. If you want to say it is not good, please try it yourself first.
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@Son of a Finn
You really don’t understand. Please take some time to review the history of Microsoft. See if you can identify ONE company which benefited from working with them, apart from Intel. Microsoft does not cooperate, it plays to win. Trying to cooperate with (Godwin!) is not a matter of being mature and unemotional, it is a matter of being naive. They intend to EAT Nokia, and unfortunately, I think they will succeed, urged on by those like yourself who are simply playing the stock market. Your Finnish parent should be ashamed of your betrayal of Finland and free software!
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“For some the above and/or unknown reasons they think the WF7 is the holy grail.”
The problem is and has been the US market because of the operators or whatever. If you can`t make in there it makes you _invisible_. For android the problem is still there because there are _so many_ different manufacturers. By building their own ecosystem Nokia tried to be something unique and I still tries. I also hope that Meego does well.
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Yes, all of those, except search on server AFAIK.
Yes.
Yes, integrated.
Huh? The Nokia N900 had full flash.
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@Finn
There go your emotions. Calm down. I currently live in Seattle. I used to work for Microsoft though I eventually wanted to leave and did. My understanding of Microsoft is quite good, but if you have personal experience then please feel free to educate me.
Microsoft is all about partnerships. They do not make hardware or very many end products. Microsoft’s success has come from partnering with many many companies and enabling them to be successful. Every PC manufacturer and 93% of VARs are Microsoft partners. Every PC peripheral or PCI card vendor needs to be a Microsoft partner to succeed. The Enterprise business where Microsoft sells S/W direct to business fuels a much larger amount of business that is done by Microsoft Partners. The Microsoft developer community is the largest in the world. This does not mean that every company that works with Microsoft succeeds, they need to compete against the market.
Buying Nokia stock and wanting them to succeed is betraying Finland? How do you associate Nokia or even Finland with free software? Some wierd Cult of Linus? (though Mr. Torvalds lives on the USA and has made millions of dallars so that can’t be right either)
I have nothing against FOSS but I do believe that good software developers should be paid for their work. If Nokia, Microsoft, Siemens and Fujitsu didn’t get paid for their S/W they would not be hiring hundreds of thousands of S/W developers. Technology would be hurt terribly if we refused to pay for peoples intellectual efforts wouldn’t it? Contributing to FOSS can be a good business decision but it is not the only way to succeed. Passion, charity, ego can all drive FOSS efforts too.
I do try to stay on topic and be logical but I’ll admit even the stupid accusation that I “betrayed Finland” does make me angry. My grandfather fought on skis in the Winter War. I’m trying to convince my daughter to go to University in Finland. I have done business in Finland with Nokia and other companies. Most of my Finnish friends are smart, rational and contemplative so I am wondering if you actually are Finnish? 🙂
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One thought, though likely not original: I suspect that one of the main reasons that Elop went for Windows Phone and not Android or MeeGo is because that is what he knows and that is with which he is comfortable. If one is in trouble, one first turns to your friends and colleagues and for Elop that is Microsoft. Nothing sinister, just an issue of trust. Once that trust issue takes seed, it is very hard to turn someone from those that they know and trust and again for Elop that is Microsoft and not his underlings at Nokia.
When Nokia started Maemo, the predicted that the N’th iteration (I do not remember the value of N, I think it was 5 or 6) would be a good device. The N9 is that iteration and all reports for it are that it is a good device. Too bad Elop did not get that memo (or listen to it).
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1 Nokia’s so called new strategy is like the opening of pandora’s box. From that time on, Nokia has the chance to build a device of android, webos or any others, but not himself.
1.1 It’s easy to give N8 a dual core CPU with 1GB memory, but it’s harder to build a team to R&D Nokia’s own OS again – though there is problem in management before.
1.2 When Elop go away from Nokia, Nokia will build android phone. BUT ON THE OTHER HAND, THIS SO CALLED NEW STRATEGY WILL KEEP ELOP’S POSITION FOR LONGER, THAT’S GOOD FOR HIMSELF.
2 Nokia has different situation with Moto of that days. For though the market share drops. But it’s in a time of exploration of smartphone. So the profit can be kept as before – not increase thought- but this mean Nokia has time to change(not being “raped” by MS like now.)
3 Elop is no doubt a torjan horse. It’s meaningless to talk about others. While people talking about N9, what they said is:
3.1 It’s a really good device.
3.2 I will not buy it
3.3 It’s much better than wp7
Pains, me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
If you Finn deserves an OS in nowadays or just an OEM for NAM. Joke!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The north Europe little savages want to fight with elephant. They invite wild boar to help. The wild boar laugh in his heart: when breeding you, I will stuff scallion into your nose. Sorry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Come on, if you are man!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sorry for poor English, I have no mood to thing about it carefully!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Simple reason why Stephen Elop is Trojan Horse Inside Nokia For Microsoft
http://forum.dailymobile.se/index.php?topic=42289.0
Thinking in M-N ally: Logic behind(2)
http://forum.dailymobile.se/index.php?topic=42352.0
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Felipe – I must say that i agree 100% with you, Elop clearly betrayed Nokia by ditching Meego platform and his intentions are very clear and political. He holds 6% stake in Microsoft and his decisions are purely biased and cant be justified. No matter what Meego will emerge successfully and a strong contender for 3rd position and i only see WebOS as possible competitor for the 3rd position. Windows with its bullshit blue screens can impress customers.
N9 will win many hearts for such a beautiful smart phone and its awesome OS…. And since andrioid app support is guaranteed with Myriad’s VM…….
People will buy this as we already seeing huge positive reviews for N9 already and there are many enthusiasits waiting. I just hope that N9 will be priced competitively Galaxy phones. Thats all is needed.
Bottomline – If Nokia has to regain the market share , its time for board of directors to think about a new CEO who works in the interest’s of NOKIA best future and not for Microsoft’s.
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Sir Felipe I have some questions regarding n9. I am really a fan of it and specs are good enough for me, but lots of people including me are curious about it’s ‘missing or just unannounced’ hardware/software.
1. Will N9 support dlna or hdmi or any similar hardware for it?
2. Will it support full flash when it is released?
3. Is coding or making application for meego easy. Coding an ipa/android app/pc app to meego app? Can an app for n9 run in different meego devices without recoding?
4. Being an open source what types of extensions can meego run? .jar/.sis/qt?
5. Will landscape view of homescreens be available at the final release?
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i am wondering why N9 comes with only 8mp camera? is it possible to use meego on nokia n8? lols
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Does WP7 support multicore?
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All you open source lovers, all Nokia lovers, all spec lovers, and all anti-MS people… Take a step back and think!
I’ve been using mobile phones (99% only Nokia’s) since 90’s (NMT), every day and all the time. After year 2000, Nokia hasn’t produced a single well working and easy to use handset! Nor have they managed to make them work together with anything. After this kind of track record – can you blame someone if they just want to swipe the desk clean, and hope that customers forget the crap they’ve been forced to use for a decade now? To us common users it plays no role if the phone has 8MP cam, or 1.2GHz dual core, or android or millions of apps… as long as the fckn device is easy to use, doesn’t boot every two hours, and looks decent.
If MeeGo was the first well working platform for ages from Nokia – then my symphaties to the developers. But the fact is, that Nokia’s image needed as hard refreshing, as it’s phones needed.
I ditched my last Nokia some 1.5 years ago – NOW I’m hopeful that some day Nokia will be an option again.
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It is amazing that 95% or comments do not understand basic market(ing) facts. Today, we are not buying phones because they are great. At least smartphones. We are buying them, because other smart people can write amazing apps for them and there is big existing market of these great applications. It is called ecosystem. iOS have best ecosystem, Android have good one with their own great apps, even WP7 have something. I am not a big WP7 fanboy (hardly can be with my SGS2), but they have something to offer. Meego have to be a miles ahead technically (and in developer support) to catch the wind.
Even WebOS, which is technically superior to everything I mentioned before is loosing ground.
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No surprises here, I am afraid. Embedded Linux has been big problem for Microsoft all over the world.
And continues to be. As to why, one only needs to take a look at how easy it is to port it to another hw,
especially if the MCU/CPU family is already there. And when the port is done, most of the stuff works
already, precisely as you explain. [Yes, I work in Sy* part but have years of experience on the Li* (Un*x) part too,
lately some porting stuff as well.]
What I think is that with MS co-operation there is no real part for a strategy – call it disruptive or what – that
has any serious alternative. Symbian was set on fire (February) and Meego is buried alive. Meanwhile we
continue to see how it takes 1-3 months to come up with an Android phone – from scratch.
What Nokia is missing is the sw understanding of this part. And that not on the bottom level of designers
but the higher levels of mgrs. Unfortunately.
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It seems to me that the reason why Nokia turned to Windows Phone is the one (we) geeks too often dismiss or forget: Money. Quite simply, Nokia has said it is getting payment from Microsoft in the order of billions (or was it “more than one billion”, cannot quite remember the exact wording).
Abandoning Symbian only makes sense; that platform was rather horrible from a technical POV and has really been kept artificially alive for a number of years now. Maemo/Meego might have had a future, but it was quite uncertain and Nokia was constantly losing value. Now the future is not much more certain with Windows Phone, but really >$1B is nothing to sniff at. From a business point of view I can see this deal making a lot of sense from both Nokia’s and Microsoft’s points of view:
From Nokia’s POV:
1. They have been losing value and seen as a slowly sinking ship. At least from a psychological POV there is some advantage to making a clear change in direction.
2. They get a large amount of cash. I believe this is the major dealmaker for Nokia. For enough cash it would even make sense for Nokia to stop making phones and go back to making rubber boots. $1B is not that much, but I do believe it’s plenty enough to make it worthwhile to hop on the Windows Phone train.
From Microsoft’s POV:
1. For their $1B they get something they have tried in vain to get for a long time now and that they desperately need: Market share. Nokia is far more established than any player making Windows phones. My feeling is that $1B is quite a high price for this, but it seems to me that Microsoft has tried roughly everything else in their toolbox and failed, yet they are not willing to just abandon Windows Phone. Partnering with a major but seemingly sinking phone vendor is a good way to achieve this.
So, in a sense, it’s a marriage of two players who both are losing and who can find a mutually beneficial arrangement to compete against the winning players.
Don’t understand me wrong. I don’t *like* this. I doubt I’m ever going to buy a Windows phone (or a Symbian one for that matter) myself. So far all my phones have been Nokia phones, although the decision between N900 and some Android phones was not trivial. But many consumers are not as picky as I am. Just from a business point of view this deal seems to make a lot of sense.
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heh!
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@FelipeC
It seems you are being quoted in Finnish media:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1036803&highlight=felipe#post1036803
It would be nice if this snow-ball could be turned to avalanche.
Finns(this includes “traitors” as well) can you confirm this?
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Congratulations Felipe, the N9 looks like an amazing device (particularly given the “maturity” of the HW platform).
I am definitely interested in getting one, although since my country (the UK) is selected as one of the six selected for the Nokia WP launch, so I suspect it will not be easy: my country, and the others in the 6 selected for WP launch are all missing from the list of 23 countries from which you can register your interest in the N9 at swipe.nokia.com.
It’s interesting looking at those numbers though. WP has presumably been localized for 6 countries at launch. Meego/N9 for 23 …
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who care’s Nokia anymore?? who ??
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Why don’t you found a new company with all your knowledge about the hardware and software?!
There are hundreds of highly skilled bored engineers loitering around in Finland, who would be more than willing to kick M$-Nokia’s ass!
Dozens of Chinese have done it, you afraid you’re gonna lose?
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An interesting and insightful blog post, thank you. I don’t pretend to know what the future holds for Nokia or Meego but my personal feeling is that from the video’s and previews I have seen so far you and your co-developers should be commended for producing such a slick looking piece of software and UI. What with the apparent ease of use and other innovations coming out like the Dalvik application, which will instantly giving access to the whole of the Android Application market and the apparent ease to code new, native applications (because lets face it, the number and quality of applications are what customers are currently looking at when buying a smartphone today) I really hope the N9 and Meego takes off.
I do have one question about how the UI is implemented on the N9 (although I am not sure if you can comment) and it is regarding the events view, are you only able to add social network feeds (like facebook/twitter) to that or can you also add other RSS news feeds ect? In todays world where you have to go to several different sites/blogs ect to get your information “fix” it would be excellent if that was a one stop for all your updates, but I haven’t read anywhere that that is the case?
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Tom, any public RSS news feed will work fine — there is specialized feed reader application on the device and it also pushes selected RSS feeds to Events view.
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@FelipeC, sorry but another adaptation guy is right. First and foremost, Harmattan has nothing to do with MeeGo, and I’m still wondering how this marketing trick went through. Harmattan is a continuation of Fremantle, and just got the MeeGo label for marketing reasons. Ask Intel what they think about this. MeeGo until the end of last year didn’t even boot on Nokia hardware, and the drivers were pathetically late (yes, I worked with the MeeGo proto and cursed every day doing it, fighting with OBS to get builds out and more fun stuff). So when you’re saying MeeGo is great, you actually mean Harmattan. But that ship had sailed already early last year when Nokia decided (way before Elop joined) that working with Intel is the way to go, and Harmattan will be killed. So what do you want now? Resurrect Harmattan and keep yet another software platform in zombie state alive? And if you have the illusion that Harmattan apps would run on e.g. MeeGo 1.4, forget about it. Nobody is going to fund the continued development of libdui (again renamed in a stroke of marketing genius to libmeegotouch). Face it, the fate of the N9 and related Harmattan products was sealed early in 2010 when Nokia and Intel partnered.
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Ah fantastic Alexnader, many thanks for confirming that sounds exactly what I would be looking for! Am waiting for an offical release date and price with bated breath (I have seen the rumours of a sept launch)
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I hope there will be a hardware manufacturer that delivers hardware only. So that I can order it from Internet and install Meego. As it is possible to do with PC hardware. Then we are not dependent of Apple, Google and Microsoft spidernets.
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Dantius Palpatine says:
June 23, 2011 at 9:38
It is amazing that 95% or comments do not understand basic market(ing) facts. Today, we are not buying phones because they are great. At least smartphones. We are buying them, because other smart people can write amazing apps for them and there is big existing market of these great applications. It is called ecosystem.
—–
I would like to have simply phone that works with basic functions.
Then to install any applications. Like it is possible to do in Ubuntu.
I do not want to be part of ecosystems, where world is splitted by 3 companies: Google, Apple and Microsoft.
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Hartmann uses meego API. That is a fact. It will run meego apps, repacked. That is an other fact.
Everything written by the author of the post is true and full of evidence. @Crowbar RTFM! RTFM! RTFM!
Stephen Elop stills own quite a lot of Littlesoft share.
Stephne Elop Do not Know anything about mobile computer market, as he is proving every day.
Stephen Elop is killing Nokia, choking it on the behalf of littlesoft and US gov.
Stephen Elop is a lier. He saw the n9 and n950 one year before us and decided to terminate it because they were much better tha any WP7. Why you are not selling the n950? GET RID OF THE N8 or E7 CRAP. They are a shame for Nokia itself. You’re not doing it? Because you are a damn FRAUD!
WHAT THE HELL NOKIA BOARD IS DOING? FIRE THIS FAT STUPID TROJAN HORSE AND REJOICE WITH MEEGO.
And about this stupid word, ecosystem, which means nothing at all, Mr. Elop DO YOU ****ING KNOWS WHAT QT IS?
DO YOU ****ING KNOWS WHAT ALIEN DALVIK IS?
No. You only know what the other fatso Bellamar tells you to. Mindless slave
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Sara D: “He holds 6% stake in Microsoft”
LOL.
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Sorry Andrea if you can’t even distinguish between Harmattan and Hartmann, I doubt you are in a position to tell me that just repackaging is enough to get apps run on Meego. Plus what do you do when libdui^wlibmeegotouch is removed from Meego? This all all might sound nice from a hobbyist perspective, but you can’t run a devic businessand attract third party developers with a story like this.
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On se nyt perkele. Great Blog !
Why is it necessary to nail the company down publicly by management ? Never ever has it been done before in corporate history, where the shareholder value should be #1.
Resources at NOKIA are great. The right way would have been to enlarge the NOKIA OS portfolio and let the market then decide what they want to buy and have the roadmap in good balance with continuous offerings. Key thing is that prodoction lines rock & roll and feed the markets – ALL THE TIME 7/24 ! And then do the careful ramp-down decision(s) in the future when feasible and keep on feeding the markets. Simple as that ! Selling no show is the worst commercial mistake, because chain partners and end customers vote with their pocket.
I will vote with my pocket and buy the N9. The basic mainstream functionalities are as such so great that It is easy to decide.
Bad management communications have now killed the stock value down. It does not make any f… sense to communicate badwill to market and to sales chains. Next big voting happens when shareholders have the next annual NOKIA meeting. That is the final dead line for NOKIA bord of directors: http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia/corporate-governance/board-of-directors
– Hopefully the N9 “Turbo” will hit the markets like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH4Yn36fh7o&feature=related
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Watch this.
http://www.technet.hu/telefon/20110624/exkluziv_video_elop_bemutatja_az_elso_windowsos_nokiat/
It looks so fake. The clapping sound is heard, but I don’t see people clapping, just people standing there.
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@Guest It doesn’t. I heard there’s a new WP release that does support it, but that hasn’t shipped on any phone yet (AFAIK).
@Dantius Palpatine I call bullshit on that. For the ecosystem to matter, first you need good phones. If your assertion was true, WP7 would be gaining market, not loosing it as it is.
@crowbar MeeGo, Maemo, Harmattan, who cares? The software is good. What I want is to see the consumers buying the device like crazy. Sure, it would have sold much more if it wasn’t the last of its kind, and there was a believable developer story, but it’s still a great device (specially if you compare to others in the market).
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N9 is an outdated hw platform – minor upgrade from N900 – how competitive it will be next year? New hw platforms are needed urgently if Meego is to survive as a Nokia device.
Decisions about Windows Phone were made last fall. I was told Meego looked like shit back then – like upgraded Symbian OS. Maybe it was a bit of a surprise – even to Elop – that Meego looks so promising now. When all the hope was lost, Meego rose like a Fenix from ashes.
Nokia should go as planned with Windows Phone devices, but should also maintain Meego as an alternative OS. WP for businesses – Meego/S40+ for consumers.
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Just finished watching the above (Elop presenting WF7 phone to nokia employees).
He is so cynical!!!
It is so ridiculous compared to N9, even though it has haptics support.
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MeeGo is my favorite mobile OS. It’s better than iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Elop said, that he decided for Windows Phone, because it would last too long, to make MeeGo or Symbian as good as the competitors. But it’s better than all these. And that today.
I think, the main reason is the money, that Microsoft paid for it. But for me that’s the biggest mistake that Nokia ever made.
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Steve Ballmer/Microsoft mentality:
Linux = MeeGo/Maemo = Virus
He has referred to the free software Linux kernel as a “[…] cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” Ballmer used the notion of “viral” licensing terms to express his concern over the fact that the GNU General Public License (GPL) employed by such software requires that all derivative software be under the
GPL or a compatible license.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Ballmer
The worst enemy of nokia is Ballmer’s friend: Elop.
Microsoft hates linux and Elop ows 6% of Microsoft.
Finns should protest and request Nokia to fire Elop and void his visa to enter Europe.
Second, Nokia should mass produce different phones using MeeGo.
Third, Scandinavians should create a new VOIP company such as Skype, who used to be Scandinavian and now it is owned by Microsoft.
Nokia is too important. 23 percent of tax revenues in Finland government are provided by Nokia.
MeeGo is already a good software, Elop gives shit abouth that, he wont allow the production of more phones using meeGo because he wants microsoft to take the European market. That is all, more money for Microsoft.
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One thing to mention: St Elop is a Chief _Executive_ Officer. If you blame him, don’t forget to blame the Board of Nokia as well, they are together in this game. Either as ones accepting Elop’s M$ proposal, or the ones actually hiring Elop to execute a previously agreed shift to Microsoft, and seemingly kill everything else. Choose your version, there is no more. From many angles though it seems that the board was divided, but when Elop was selected against Vanjoki, the game was over. Since then, everything was just showing face. Fortunately it seems that the N9 was allowed to be completed.
So Felipe, IMO this was an argument with the wrong guy: Elop is just the most sympathetic executive butcher they could find, a public face taking the blame, but the real decision makers are sitting silent in the background, perhaps thinking “after all, we’ve f*cked it up”.
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Elop is a microsoft man. Microsoft people don’t like Linux.
What did you people expect?
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Why can’t they release MeeGoo ROM hack for android phones so public can try MeeGoo for themselves?
That will quickly spread Meegoo across the internet geek. (that is how a lot of Android hack spread underground) There are more than enough TI based android smartphoones which has unofficial ROM (eg. the source code is open and the Nokia Meegoo team can hack meegoo on the phone)
Also release Nook color MeeGoo hack/source code (the youtube was on the net the other day)
I am sure some part of underground android community is happy to help an open source OS like MeeGoo survive.
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Stephen Elop rules out possible comeback of MeeGo
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Nokia+CEO+Stephen+Elop+rules+out+possible+comeback+of+MeeGo/1135267179932
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Microsoft is a proven loser in mobile with a ten-year track record of not being able to build a competitive mobile OS. Nokia owners did an incredibly stupid decision in inserting a Microsoft stooge at the helm of Nokia. He has destroyed Nokia’s all future products, reputation, ecosystem, R&D, carrier relations and now its market share is in a free fall. Stock has lost half its value and will lose a lot more so the owners are getting what they ordered.
Even Seekingalpha guys were scratching their heads how unique the situation is for a global company: why Nokia until last quarter or so at the same time still market volume leader and so down in its stock price. The above explains why.
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Not only is MeeGo an excellent system with great features, great performance and great usability. But it is also Open Source.
And it is not only about MeeGo:
with QT it is easy and fun to develop great apps for MeeGo and many other systems.
That Elop decided for Microsoft can’t be of the facts, but only because MS payed much money and Elop was a MS-Manager before he came to Nokia.
My last hope is:
in 4th quarter Nokia brings the N9, a smartphone with MeeGo. It looks great and MeeGo works fine on it. My hope is, that this will be a big success and the Windows-Phones from Nokia won’t sell. Then Nokia has to decide between using MeeGo or go bancrot with Windows-Phone.
MeeGo simply is the best system.
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Dear Felipe,
Thanks for the N9 after last few years of mockery from my pals using iphone nad me a dedicated Nokia user, Now I feel I have something to talk about. Even these guys are saying wow thats hot buddy and we will have one , some one is even now counting iphone flaws. I am so delighted but my real point is only one point and u are the right person to answer as told by Elop will Meego development continue as shown in the R&D slide. I mean will Nokia Meego internal development continue….. simple question and plz give a honest answer.
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N9 will not be successful. It looks amazing and I want one, but there are too many Nokia officers and board members who need it to fail so they can prove their decision to go with WP7 was the right choice. It’s easy for them to make sure it fails by manipulating inventory levels and wholesale pricing. I know it’s a cynical view, but this happens all the time. I hope I’m wrong. Wall Street’s confidence in Nokia’s officers and BOD is very low. Imagine what would happen if N9 was a huge success and showed and the world management and the BOD don’t know what they’re doing.
Also… what a bizarre reply from Stephen Elop. He “chooses” to disagree? O.o?
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All the tech people working in the mobile space knows Meego and it is best known for its robust kernel architecuture…! One such robust WebOS is dying…Lets not make the same happen to Meego…..Guys ..Ecosystem for meego will soon be created with Intel backing it…So stop thinking about ecosystem and lets embrace N9 and Meego and make the world a better place for mobiles and open source.
After all, we are the integral part of ecosystem…!
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And again – what people don’t realize is that N9 with Harmattan was already dead when Nokia decided to team up with Intel to form Meego back in 2010! And precisely this Meego platform which so far has not been running on any phone is what Elop killed. He didn’t need to kill Harmattan, that was taken care of way earlier under OPK. Don’t people remember the N900 and how fast the gtk-based Fremantle OS was abandoned? Same story with Harmattan – dead as soon as Harmattan with Qt was on the radar for Nokia. If you don’t believe this, how would you get the Debian based apps which run on the ARM based N9 run on an Intel based OS which uses RPM and has a completely different OS layer? Did you ever read a plan from Nokia about this pre 2/11? Nope, and guess why – there wasn’t any. Stop barking up the wrong tree and peddling conspiracy theories which make the OSS world look bad.
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where are all the meego Devices ??????????
not seen any of them in wild. you need too long ton bring an enduser device. Thats the facts.
Bye Bye Meego
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I think we should contact Nokia board and demand some kind of explanation for this Elop madness. There is no valid reason, business or otherwise, to do these things he does. I mean he is working for Nokia – right? The board are responsible for to watch over the CEO so that CEO executes the strategy in a way that is best for shareholders.
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@ Harri V
Precisely, CEO executes the strategy that shareholders perceive that is the best for them. Otherwise CEO gets kick in the butt.
Be advised: in the today’s historic speech, Elop refers to blogsphere (which is inherently not the part of the eco$i$tem) and certain Nokia employees are advise against taking pictures.
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Prediction: N9 will still sell more units than all WP7 phones to date (if they make enough of them). (Wanted to add something optimistic after re-reading my previous comment.)
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@jens Are you insane? It takes time to develop phones, and it takes even more time to develop a platform.
I’m sure back in 2009 you would have asked “where are all the Android devices?”, but as I predicted back then, the devices were on the way. And that was months after the original Android announcement.
And that’s 3 years after Google purchased Android Inc. who knows how much time before that the Android team was working on the platform.
I say it’s a miracle that Nokia’s Maemo team was able to produce Harmattan in so short time-frame (certainly shorter than Android). And as Android demonstrated, it’s never too late to take over the market.
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Crowbar seems to know what he’s talking about. I was previously working in the Maemo Harmattan (aka. Maemo 6) project, and the N9 clearly has an UI layer that is a product of the Harmattan project. So, UI wise the N9 is not Meego but descendant of the Maemo Harmattan.
When Elop said that Nokia wouldn’t be able to produce many Meego devices before 2014 I’m sure he was correct. I’m also sure that when the first actual Meego device is introduced, it heavily is influenced by the Harmattan UI concepts. Also, I’m pretty sure that the mobile Meego UI will use plain Qt instead of the libdui/libmeegotouch libraries.
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@jii – Elop might have been correct about only being able to put out 3 Meego devices before 2014, but what he missed is why that doesn’t matter. That’s one device per year. That’s more releases than Apple, and it seems to be working for them. Having only one ‘flagship smartphone’ model would be less confusing for consumers too.
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I don’t get either why Nokia tries to market the N9 as a MeeGo device – Elop said they don’t have any plans to work on MeeGo any more. So why decorate it with a false image that benefits MeeGo which is now competition to WP7? It is both false and stupid, from Nokia’s point of view. Unless they have some hidden plans… …
Besides, MeeGo is not anywhere near in quality to the N9 SW, if you look at the tablet presented earlier this year, and I don’t expect it will match it any time soon. But after all, the critical mass of key developers matter most, and most of the Maemo developers will work other Linux based work rather than WP7, and many of them might end up working on MeeGo. If there will be enough brainpower behind MeeGo, it might still catch up – and there is some market need for it, since not every operator and handset vendor is fine with Android, or will be fine with WP7. So don’t bury MeeGo yet…
As for Maemo, unfortunately it seems to be strangled to death – but it had a nice life, a good fight, and a glorious, heroic end. I will buy the N9. It’s more than the coolest device on the market – it’s an icon.
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Guys! The “We want Nokia to keep MeeGo” petition just achieved its 2000th petitioner signature 🙂 And this was done in just 33 hours.
The 2000th was signed by @oddbubble
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I am wishing so much that S^3 would get something like that in meego/harmattan UI. But very nice job for pushing that baby out in so short time, thats damn impressive phone / os.
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http://twitition.com/3c3ah
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The petition just passed the 2000 voice mark!!!
http://twitition.com/3c3ah
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Arrgghh. I should stop reading this as the children do not understand finances or business but type info that others then repeat in their ignorance.
@ Sarah D said: – “Felipe – I must say that i agree 100% with you, Elop clearly betrayed Nokia by ditching Meego platform and his intentions are very clear and political. He holds 6% stake in Microsoft and his decisions are purely biased and cant be justified.”
As of his departure from MS, Stephen Elop owned 282,459 shares of MSFT. (due to trading laws, he could not sell any until all negotiations with Nokia/.MS are complete)
Source: http://www.tracked.com/person/stephen-elop/insider_trades/?y=2008&ts=MSFT
There are approximately 8.43B shares of MS today (Yahoo finance report)
Elop owns 0.003% of Microsoft. About $7M USD total.
He is also not allowed to buy Nokia shares yet but his Nokia 2010 compensation package was $6.6M USD (not counting future gains or losses on his Nokia stock options) so his 2010 compensation from Nokia was about equal to his total holdings in Microsoft.
People need to be pretty ignorant to think that he can profit from Nokia failing. Of course if Nokia fails then his MS stock will go down also. And his chances of getting another job.
It is perfectly legitimate to question the strategy and support Meego as a future technology but when the people who promote this idea, show their stupidity then I think rational people will tend to think that their ideas on strategy must be stupid too. I certainly would not trust any other “facts” that they declare.
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Strength to you! EFlop seems to be Microsoft rat who is destroying Nokia so that Microshit can buy it cheap.
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Good post Felipe. Do you know if the number of N9 devices will be limited or it will depend on sales? I hope Nokia promotes this phone with operators because the biggest amount of sales comes from operators, with that in mind, if N9 is promoted the same as N900 it’s impossible it will be a big hit.
It’s hard to make a great phone, but it’s easy to destruct its sales.
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@Sarah D/Son of Finn: Elop says he sold all his MS shares in 02/2011 and bought Nokia shares (http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-ceo-elop-sells-all-microsoft-shares-buys-nokia-2011-2).
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@Pat: Thanks for the facts. I didn’t think the SEC would allow him to do this until after the actual Nokia/MS contract (not the MoU) was signed and that just happened. So he is 100% committed to Nokia success. I’ll keep buying Nokia shares at their low price and hope that he succeeds not only for potential profit but I want to support Nokia.
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@jii Great, a statement without any argumentation. What makes you think so? How difficult do you really think it would be to take the software of the Nokia N9 and put it into another device? I’ll tell you how; not at all, it can be done in a few months.
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@Son of a Finn: Do you think Nokia stock has bottomed out? I can’t decide if the recent “Q2 will be substantially below” announcement was made to prepare investors for a big surprise, or make some small dip seem not so bad. (I’ve see a ~$150M loss Q2 and $200M loss Q3 prediction.) I think the stock will keep getting hammered down until Q4 when Nokia have a WP7 phone and something forward-looking to talk about.
The saddest part of Nokia’s current situation is it could have easily been avoided, and Stephen Elop should have known better. There are two very famous US business case studies involving failures launching new products. They’re so famous here people use them as examples because you don’t need to have gone to business school to know about them. Elop did both of them:
“The Osborne Effect”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Osborne_Effect
“New Coke”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke#Backlash
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@FelipeC (re: only 3 Meego devices before 2014) I know you said Meego wouldn’t be the bottleneck if Nokia wanted to put out tons of new models. What’s your opinion about needing more than the 3 devices in 3 years that Elop claimed was the problem? Apple has been doing well with an average of 1 new iPhone model a year. I look at the N9 and can’t figure out what hardware would be outdated before 2014. Maybe a next model with a sliding keyboard, but what beyond that?
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@Son of a Finn
Of course he wants Nokia to succeed, but he wants it to succeed based on his own decisions. Do you really think he would say “you know what, I was wrong, this WP stuff is not going to work”? That’s not going to advance his career.
Most of what people call “conspiracy theory” can be explained in systemic terms. Maybe Elop truly never thought on crashing Nokia so it can be sold cheaply to Microsoft, but humans are social creatures, we rarely make big decisions without talking to other people — I’m sure he talked with some friends in Redmond, and they tried everything they could to sell the idea of WP7. They might have thought about the possibility of Nokia crashing, and they didn’t care, they pushed Elop to make the move that benefits Microsoft the most, even though it’s the most risky for Nokia.
At the end of the day Elop’s intentions don’t really matter, what matters is what he does, which is most likely influenced by a lot of hidden agendas of other people.
The real question you have to answer is: what happens if Windows Phone fails?
Really, what would happen to Nokia? The stock price is already in ruins, and that’s just because of lack of good news, imagine what would happen when really bad news arrive. What would happen to Finland?
It is rarely a good idea to go “all-in” like Nokia is doing with Windows Phone. It only makes some sense when you are completely sure, but look around, everyone is asking the same question — Why WP7 when you have MeeGo? — that alone should raise some questions regarding the “all-in” position, and then the next question arises — Why not try both?
Let’s suppose Elop is right and I’m wrong; it would only be possible to develop a few MeeGo devices in the next coming years. Well, even if that’s the case there’s nothing wrong with that, it would be a good backup plan if WP fails. Somebody might say, but it takes too many resources, but that’s not true, the Maemo team never took that many resources (it’s kind of efficient), and with a reduced scope, resources could be decreased.
You call that “partnership”? Then I guess mafia bosses “partner” with their debtors, and when somebody becomes somebody else’s bitch on jail, that’s also a “partnership”.
Strictly speaking they are partnerships, but that’s not what everybody would consider a good partnership.
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Wellll said Felipe…….Guys think about it for a second…i dont find any good reason why Meego had to be scrapped….and i wont buy the argument of Mr.Elop that its expensive to make more devices…. MSFT bought nokia with money….. i really pity Nokia…falling in to traps of MSFT….Yuck i cant imagine a WP7 running on Nokia…..PEople who support it,….have a good time with blue screens…. but remember the word ‘Linux’ will never die ….in some or the other form it raises as Phoenix.
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Fact is fact, by now, Elop is still the 7th largest invididual share holder of MSFT
http://www.dailyfinance.com/company/microsoft-corporation/msft/nas/institutional-ownership
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@meee – I don’t think there’s a way to know how many shares Elop has atm unless he tells people. He’s no longer an MSFT employee *cough* so he doesn’t have to file with the SEC when he trades MSFT shares. That information is likely outdated, based on filings when he was with Microsoft. (What is odd is I don’t see SEC filings around the time he announced he was buying Nokia stock. Maybe he bought shares on the Nordic Exchange.)
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F$$k you, Elop. You’re about to kill so good platform. See ya in hell. And don’t forget your silly WP7 as well, doh. I never seen more stupid platform than WP at all. iPhone targets casual users but it’s at least haves style, decent materials and glamour. Nokia haves nothing. With WP7, they’re doomed! They will fail
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@FelipeC
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When Elop joined Nokia, the direction of N9 development got totally lost. One day the management wanted to push us to one direction and the next day they wanted something else. And this continued for a very long time. We wasted months, several months. Of course, I cannot be sure who started this all, but the timing at least matches with the join date of our dear Mr. E.
Also, just like FC mentiones, the reasons Elop gives for the death of Meego in Nokia are total BS. I made my conclusions based on the BW article and decided to leave the company after 15 years. Either Elop lied on purpose or then got wrong information to back up his decision. It doesn’t matter which one is correct, either is such a bad screw up that I cannot work for a company having such an incompetent CEO.
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> Fact is fact, by now, Elop is still the 7th largest invididual share holder of MSFT
So he is going to sunk Nokia to give MS at least some slight chance, huh? And how the heck he was allowed to be CEO if there is such a huge conflict of interests? Are Nokia stakeholders retarded so much? oO Then company is doomed if it managed SO badly. Nobody can survive bad management, that’s fatal.
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I am afraid they are not retarded but subdued by the deal they have with M$. There were sporadic rummors about north-american investors pushing for north-american CEO. In that light, Nokia might be already de facto (if not de jure) M$ division. All of the events indicate that.
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MeeGo works so well on the Nokia N9. I’ll never understand, why Nokia (or should I say Elop) has chosen Windows Phone.
MeeGo is more powerful, more stable, more secure and more open than Windows Phone. And its User Interface is much clearer and looks better than Windows Phone. And it has a much better usability and user-experience than Windows Mobile.
I strongly hope, that many people choose for MeeGo, if they buy a new cellphone.
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@ johnnyBGood, the confusion started right after Meego (the actual one, not Harmattan) was announced and work on it started, around April 2010, and it was really unclear whether the N9 would get Meego officially, whether Meego or Harmattan was more important, which UI framework to use and so on.
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@Son of a Finn
June 22, 2011 at 23:00 “Seems like so many posters here are children.”
June 24, 2011 at 0:49 “Arrgghh. I should stop reading this as the children”
Quite honestly, its your arguments that seem lacking maturity to me, as well as being very arrogant.
As you say, lets consider that some of the posters are indeed children, aren’t they also big consumers? I think they are. I believe it were the youngsters that allowed the iPhone to be the success it is today, and not the corporate clients. Angry Birds? Fart Apps? Well.. call it childish (I will agree) but it worked for Apple.
In that sense I think it would be wise to read into those childish posts and understand what these “children” want.
Those children seem to be saying they prefered MeeGo to WP7.
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I have always respected Nokia for what it does. The quality of hardware, robustness. Though it always lacked in software. I am not a great smart phone user in the sense I dont use thousands of apps that are available in the app store but I use very basic ones like email, calendar, chat, video and songs. And I havnt been able to think of any mobile for buying since my last one which in Nokia N97 mini(bought it because I wanted touch screen and was sure Nokia s touch interaction was not good so made sure there was a keyboard to help me). I saw N900 and was initially happy as it was a linux based open platform mobile(Maemo). But later was disappointed with the performance. After I heard of Meego, I had my hopes built and am quite happy to see the previews of Nokia N9. I would shell out any amount of money to buy it, if it is not like N900. At the least it does not look to me like that. I am also a software developer in Graphics/Computer Vision but develop for systems like clusters and GPUs. And I do know know much about the development that goes on mobile handsets. One very basic question I have for you is, how tough would it be to write my own app for Meego based mobiles esp Nokia N9. If I am not happy with the apps, do I have the freedom to write my own apps which suit me.
And yes I am very disappointed about Nokia s decision of shelling Meego and going the Windows way. If that is the direction Nokia wants to go, N9 might be the last Nokia mobile that I would think of buying.
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@Pat That’s a good point, I think Nokia could have done the same as Apple, and concentrate on a few excellent phones. Regarding hardware I would add a sliding keyboard, but also a camera button, and micro HDMI, probably with a dual-core Snapdragon. Something more interesting would be to have a docking station like the Motrola Atrix, but helped with the fact that MeeGo already runs on laptops and so on.
FTR I didn’t claim Elop said 3 devices in 3 years, that was just an example.
@Fran Excellent question! That is something everyone should ask Elop.
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@Pat LOL! Where did you find that? It’s the bomb.
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@FelipeC – Read my postings carefully, you will see that I agree with you that Nokia should continue to invest in Meego (as Elops R&D chart shows). I would love Meego to succeed, though I have doubts based on the mobile operators not wanting another platform to support (regardless of the OS being great or not).
Where I differ from most posters here is that I believe if Nokia is not successful with WP7 then they will not survive. Yes, it is an “all in” bet. Success with WP7 will generate the cash to support investment in Meego, failure leaves no hope for Meego at Nokia.
We won’t know if it was the right bet for a couple of years but it is done so anyone that loves Nokia should support it however they can.
Lowering expenses at Nokia and taking the billion dollars from Microsoft was the way that the Board of Directors thought they could save the company. Right or wrong, it is done.
My disagreements with the posters that I called “children” is when they say obviously stupid things that distract people from having an intelligent discussion or debate:
– Elop is a trojan horse who wants to destroy Nokia
– Microsoft is evil and only wants to destroy Nokia
– WP7 must be terrible and blue screen crashes will happen
– Elop will profit from Nokia failure
– Elop owns 6% of Microsoft!
– the US government wants to destroy Nokia and Finland
Also, my definition of partnership is when the parties work together and mutually depend on each others success for their own. The examples I gave fit that. PC vendors can and do make PC’s with Linux variations, they can choose to work without Microsoft if they wish. Microsoft would die if no PC vendors used Windows. The truth is that they need each other and are partners.
Nokia and Microsoft’s Windows Phone division (the new name for the Mobile Communications Business division) also need each other and are partners. Nokia has a strong position in this relationship and I expect them to use that to their advantage.
Filipe, use the Meego platform to build great phones. If you have the budget to only do 1 per year then make that the best device on the market. Bring innovation and new thoughts to these phones. Find a niche and own it. However, help your WP7 comrades too, the revenue they bring in will be your funding until you have a strong stand alone business.
Good luck!
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@Claudio Gomes
If they were real children expressing market needs, I’d certainly listen. See my posting above to
Felipe where I list out the types of stupid comments I was referring to. I called them children since they are certainly not mature.
However, you are correct, and I formally apologize to any actual children who are posting on this blog. I am sure that you are much better behaved, with better manners than the posters whose point is made by swearing and senseless accusations.
Your comment to me was logical and made good points. I agree with you and I regret that my point was unclear.
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@Pat
Your comments are magical!
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@Son of a Finn
Operators want a counterweight against Android. I don’t think they care if it’s WP7, or MeeGo, but something.
Let’s concentrate on the idea that WP7 fails. If that happens either Nokia starts from scratch, or somebody buys it (for cheap BTW), and given that Nokia already transitioned to WP7, it would be an interesting option for Microsoft. BTW, I do believe that a merge between Nokia and Microsoft would produce decent WP7 phones, because all the traditional barriers for collaboration typical of Microsoft would disappear.
Do you seriously believe that if WP7 fails, Microsoft would be in serious trouble? Nokia is betting the house, but Microsoft is not risking anything; WP7’s humble marketshare is already decreasing. Not that their mobile division is that important, they can survive comfortably without it.
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@Son of a Finn
It’s good you balance the picture from a viewpoint that knows Microsoft, but I’d like to re-balance still:
– it was a huge mistake to kill Symbian with one sentence, and yet state it will be still 300 million pcs sold. Actually this is a simple trick to butcher Symbian, since people hear the first sentence, and ignore the new sales target. So this was clearly against Nokia. The market has proved this, and no one wanted Nokia any more, although the current Symbian phones are much better than they have been. But Nokia usually discontinues products when they start to work well. The likely trigger in this decision was the ecosystem: building one on Qt vs. getting one from M$. The short-term interest won, and ironically, it caused Nokia stock collapse.
– nothing else can explain for discontinuing MeeGo than the contract with Microsoft – they wanted it, Ballmer wanted it, and it’s not in Nokia’s long term interest. Which CEO and which company discards a plan B (which is profitable in itself), just to stick with one single bet for the future? One that is cornered and forced to do so, or one that has been betrayed.
However, after February 11, you are right that Nokia’s fate depends on WP7. If WP7 is a few months late, Nokia goes down. Now it is on the verge of chaotic oscillation, and anything can happen, from aggressive buyout to going bankrupt. MeeGo is not anymore in the scope, so the success of WP7 won’t help MeeGo, actually quite the contrary: there will be a fierce battle between the two now. Elop expects operators embrace WP7, but the N9 might actually turn the trend. The fact that MeeGo is open source, and it is so easy to develop apps with Qt Quick, while permitting HTML5 integration later on, might turn many vendors and operators to MeeGo. Interesting times are coming. Microsoft has good chances to be successful here, especially because what you said, deep pockets and perseverance in pushing things. But I find WP7 boring, even compared to the N900. Hopefully Windows 8 will be much better. And hopefully MeeGo will become also much better, and cheaper too.
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@FelipeC
Operators now need to support:
Android
iOS
WP7
Blackberry OS
Soon need to support
QNX
WebOS
As well they have numerous others like Bada and Brew that are beyond an RTOS and more like a weak smartphone OS.
You are right that MO’s want to make sure Android does not become too dominant since they fear Google’s future driections may not be good for them. Apple is even worse so that is why the majority of the major MO’s told Nokia that they supported an MS/Nokia partnership.
Meego can displace WebOS (which is also a good OS but I would not bet on it) but it will be a very small player for years. The MO’s want to save costs of support and would like to limit the platforms so I predict it will be uphill to get good MO marketing for Meego no matter how good it is.
Yes, it is possible for MS to buy Nokia if they plummet in market cap but people have also predicted that RIM will be bought by MS for years too. The reality is that MS does think of itself as a partner company and it wins by breadth plays with multiple H/W OEMs.
Xbox is the exception because the OEM must lose money on the H/W and then make it back in game sales and licensing royalties. No OEM will take on a money losing business so MS had to drive that in the same model as sony, Sega and Nintendo.
Buying Nokia sends a signal through all MS partners that the game has changed and that is too risky on the PC side.
You are right that MS corporate will hardly feel the economics of a Nokia failure beyond any emptional stock price changes. I was referring to the Windows Phone division, run by it’s president Andy Lees. Nokia failing will bring down that division. That is why Nokia has power.
Due to shareholder dissatisfaction with Ballmer, a failure with Nokia could also be the trigger to have the Board lose confidence in him so corporate will keep funding the effort as long as there is hope. Ballmer has publicly said that Mobile is critical to the companies future.
I still predict WP7 will gain marketshare. The decline reported now is the Windows Mobile customers replacing their old handsets. Remember that Windows Mobile was the 2nd most successful smartphone OS after Symbian so there is a large installed base. Since most of those sales are in areas where WP7 has no language suupport (until after Mango release) and the applications are not compatible anyway, they are buying something else.
I am not as optomistic as the various analysts who are predicting WP7 to surpass iOS in sales by 2014 but I think it will be a strong 3rd place.
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@FelipeC: Thanks. I wanted to channel my MeeGo frustration into something constructive but instead I made that strip.
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@Gilles Monterey
I agree that the way Symbian’s death was announced was contrary to the goal of selling 150M more units. (I don’t remember hearing 300M) However if Nokia had a plan to cut 7000 developers and transfer many of them to Accenture and other companies then they had to announce that publicly. The only rationale that I heard was that Symbian sales were primarily at the low cost market in developing countries where buying an expensive smartphone was not a real option. I think that low cost (low performance) Android phones got pushed by MO’s instead.
I know that QT is pretty cool but that has to be balanced by the Microsoft Visual Studio, (XNA, Quicksilver) tools and technologies that are widespread and acknowledged even by many MS haters as great dev tools.
Mango will have full IE9 implementation and support HTML5.
Different people have different tastes. i understand you don’t like WP7 and I do. One fact that is relevent is that 3rd parties have surveyed end users for satisfaction and iOS and WP7 are about tied will great numbers. Everything else was lower. WP7 has been restricted by lack of language support and poor retail support but people who use it are very happy with it.
I’m looking forward to my Mango update but I could also be very happy to just continue using WP7 as it is. I really like it. I’m curious Gilles, have you used WP7 for a period of time or are you referring to just the start screen tiles?
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At this point, I think it’s a lot healthier to root for MeeGo on its own terms and just expel Nokia out of the equation.Well not now mind you that it’s absolutely essential for the N9 and N950 to rake in the numbers successfully.At the very least to prove a point…
As far as any Linux distros go, I find it completely frustrating that MeeGo’s not getting any stronger collective rallying support from other upstreams’ knowledgeable people.This is the only project that I know of that aims straight for multi device ubiquity.
Crucially even, MeeGo needs the necessary financial support to further the cause and with a good product pipeline (product(s) in this case;the OS, dev tools etc) THEN perhaps MeeGo can present a much much stronger case for adoption to other major device manufacturers namely Nokia’s competitors.The world is a lot bigger than Nokia.
What the hell are Intel and the other MeeGo major backing MNCs doing in this regard?
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Some people differentiate Users from Geeks. This whole discussion is predicated around Mr. Elop’s reasons for choosing WP7 and abandoning both Symbian and MeeGo, even not opting for Andriod.
As a Geek, I’d say Symbian based on the epoc 32 operating system developed by Psion is brilliant and has many wonderful technical features which shouldn’t be ignored as they have been. A new User Experience could created as easily for Symbian as anything else. That is assuming competent programming practises have been maintained. Maemo/MeeGo on the other hand offers a whole new potential, comparable maybe to Symbian’s (epoc 32) original purpose (a computer in the palm of your hand). An application developer or power user or Geek, looks at this chunk of doped up silicon and sees this potential with a desire to do something slightly different. This person has a need that just isn’t quite met by the stock product. IOS, oh yes application developers do like to make money. Andriod, seems to be cool because it’s not IOS (and other things). WebOS and Blackberry OS I don’t know enough to reasonably form an arguable opinion. WP7 is a Microsoft product that has the name Windows in its title so that’s rather a branding thing as far as I can tell. Okay so I’m not as smart as I’d like to think.
I’m also a User. I’d like a smart sexy attractive phone. Without referring to the gratuitous list above, I have needs for longevity, versatility, responsiveness, the ability to customize and personalize it. Just like everyone else I NEED to creatively differentiate my phone from the one that sat next to it on the shelf of the store where I bought it. Adapt it to suite my circumstances. Use features, tools and app.s to over come problems that life presents to me. At the end of the day not worrying about can it connect to my other gadgets and gizmos…
So back to the core of this discussion, Mr. Elop’s choice of WP7 and leaving money as side for the moment (his or the Microsoft – Nokia Deal). Geeks don’t buy phones, Users do . More Geeks are Users than Users are Geeks and that could get confusing. So WP7 and MeeGo are presented to market of Users where in Nokia is banking on WP7 performing well against the defunct MeeGo (If I’m writing anything you haven’t already read elsewhere do stop me). I have noticed two things which are curious; The unannounced WP7 fits neatly into the same form factor as the MeeGo phone, not much of a surprise but worth mentioning. Also the market for the WP7 is protected from MeeGo because it is precluded from those regions. So to the money, Mf. Elop first, none of my business, thus I must conclude with his integrity in question then Nokia expects to make money. The nub of this discussion then is will Nokia make more money selling WP7 than it would have if it had stuck to MeeGo or even if they’d just launched a re-branding campaign on Symbian and reworked the UI from the ground up.
What would be interesting to learn is, what can WP7 do that MeeGo can’t and visa versa? Where do they coincide? For example they each have an eye catching UI and sport developer friendly APIs and SDKs and IDEs.
Since, where I am the N9 isn’t going to be made available, I need to know how is it possible to put Maemo/MeeGo on it, how?
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There are years of work and millions of dollars in the development of Meego. It’s simply stupid, to waste all that!
And because Elop says, it would last too long, to make Symbian and/or Meego ready for the market:
Symbian I don’t know very good, but Meego is on a very high level already! Today! More advanced than Windows Phone, Android and iOS.
If Nokia would have decided for Meego as their main OS (for cell-phones as well coming devices like tablets, netbooks,…) the open (!) system Meego could have been number 1.
It’s a shame and very stupid, that the ex-microsoft-manager Elop decided for Windows Phone.
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Felipe, Tobias Hanser et.al.
10 years of Meego/Maemo development is just nothing comparing to how much Nokia loses when software update fails, considering returns, infrastructure, pr etc. And it is because of volumes.
Just take the fact that Maemo effectively made suicide and live with it.
It has nothing to do with how perfect Meego/Maemo is now, it is actually irrelevant to the OS. You guys just made one important feature incorrectly, because it is boring and hard to make it right.
Hope you understand it now.
And say grand thanks to Elop for letting you release N9.
Regards,
Roman
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@Roman, before we could finally understand things: could you please repeat your point in more detail, because it is not clear at all. What do you mean by this suicide thing and which important feature did you mean was not made right, etc.
Now about thanking Elop for the N9 is a completely erronous point, it was not because he was merciful with poor Maemo people, and let them finish their beloved creature, but because it will make a lot of money for Nokia, and maybe because Nokia might have contractual obligation to release a MeeGo device –likely this is why the N9 was labeled as a MeeGo device.
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@ crowbar, not really. There was a lot of discussion between Nokia and Intel about the technologies used in Meego. However, it didn’t affect N9 or Harmattan work. N9 was planned to run Harmattan already then, not Meego.
And I was not referring to this confusion, but to lack of direction from management concerning N9 and N950. That had pretty much nothing to do with Meego per se.
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@Roman Livshits:
1.
“10 years of Meego/Maemo development is just nothing comparing to how much Nokia loses when software update fails, considering returns, infrastructure, pr etc. ”
If this is true, there would be no Nokia N9 with Meego this fall. If this N9 will fail, it is the problem you told. No matter if there are also Nokia-phones with other systems.
And if you’re false and the N9 works fine (and it seems so), there is no reason to use another system than Meego, because than the N9 is the proof, that Meego works fine.
2.
“Just take the fact that Maemo effectively made suicide and live with it.”
We’re not talking of Maemo, but of Meego, that’s a fusion of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. It’s hosted by the Linux foundation, so you can be sure, that many people will remain working on it. And if I see how many people at Intel and other companys work on Meego, I don’t see any death of Meego. Companys like Intel sure won’t work on it, if it is death.
Meego is alive, with or without Nokia. But with Nokia some things would be much easier.
3.
Meego already is better than WindowsPhone.
4.
Besides Meego is better than WindowsPhone Nokia makes one big mistake:
There are many people who don’t like or even hate Microsoft. They won’t buy anything from Nokia since Elops decision. They won’t even buy the products that don’t use Windows Phone like the N9 with Meego or the simple phones with Series 40/60 or anything like that.
And for those people it does matter, what system Nokia prefers.
5.
What happens if Meego is a big success and will be number 3 besides Android und iOS. Than Nokia has a big problem. And even if they then correct their direction and switch to Meego completely, they will always be the company that didn’t recognize the potential of Meego and decided for a bad OS like WindowsPhone.
If Nokia had choosen Meego as their main OS, they would be the leaders in this market and they could control the future direction. But with Nokias decision they will always follow others and be dependent of others: first the follow Microsoft and even if they switch to Meego later, because it is a success and WindowsPhone isn’t, the follow other companys, that were smarter and recognized the potential of Meego.
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I watch the videos of MeeGo on Nokia’s N9 (coming end of this year) and I simply see the most advanced, most sophisticated, most powerful, most beautiful and most usable mobile OS I’ve ever seen.
It is not understandable why Nokia didn’t choose for MeeGo completely.
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@ another adaptation guy
“Time to market” – Micro$oft seem to have the most abysmal record in this regard. Windows releases tend to fall years behind schedule – and even then end up being released with features missing.
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@Son of a Finn
The reality is that MS does think of itself as a fierce competitor, and they would rather screw their own partners rather than loose their competitive advantage. They have done that over and over.
It’s still better than giving up on the mobile market. With WP7 as a failure, and Nokia’s value destroyed, the best they can do is buy Nokia. What else can they do?
You can’t compare the risk of loosing a division (that is failing already) to loosing the whole company. The table is extremely tilted in one direction. How much value do you think Microsoft would loose? Certainly not more than 50% which is what Nokia has lost so far.
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And here’s another idea that people have not considered. As a developer, by knowing the inner guts of systems, you see possibilities that other people don’t see, or consider unfeasible.
I have been working both with Maemo, MeeGo and Symbian, and I see a lot of similarities between the three, specially now that Symbian also uses Qt. Now, the remainder difference is that Symbian uses a different kernel, which is real-time, but nowadays it also has a C library, so it’s easier to port a lot of Linux software.
Also, consider the fact that Linux is now very close to get full real-time support (in upstream), so a lot of the advantages of Symbian can be re-used in Linux.
So, it should be possible to slowly merge Symbian and MeeGo. In fact, some of the MeeGo technologies, such as GStreamer, already work in Symbian. I am pretty sure I’m not the only one who has thought of sharing more technologies between MeeGo and Symbian.
When you have teams driven by software development, there’s a lot of ideas like these that could be explored, but by picking WP7, all those possibilities disappear, now what can or can’t be done on WP7, and even Symbian, is hindered drastically by politics, not only because we are talking about closed software, but also because Microsoft is a very insulated company that is hard to collaborate with.
For this, and many other reasons, I say that if you don’t use Linux, and you don’t support open source, you have no place in the future.
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I will definitely buy N9. Why? Because what it is. It is the most beautiful mobile phone in the market (I know it is not in the market atm). It also comes with really beautiful idea behind it (MeeGo). I for one like my freedom. Freedom to choose where I buy (or in MeeGo’s case download, because many of the really beautiful apps are created by those awesome open source developers) my apps or other content. Freedom to being able to develop and install my own apps easily. I also like the idea of different organizations being able to work together towards the common goal.
But then again it seems that most of the people don’t care about the ideology behind the products. It looks like most of the people buy what ever they are told to buy. Told buy marketing machines or some “experts” with unclear agendas (advertising revenues…). I guess it is easier to “make” decisions that way (more like let some body else make it for you). I just wished that people would start to care about ideologies while there is still some left to care about.
Where we spend our money is only direct way of making a difference in modern world (unless your are a very active person politically or otherwise). People will get what they pay for. I would like to be able to buy MeeGo mobile phone after N9. That’s why I will try to promote (vote with my money) N9 and MeeGo as much as I can.
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@FelipeC
I don’t know if you’re high enough up to know this (and Elop has already, stupidly, said Maemo6/Harmatten 1.2 is dead even if sales are great) but Nokia signed a very in-depth agreement with Microsoft. The most obvious example is the combination of Ovi Maps and Bing Maps (+ related POI data).
If Elop forced a hard deal, it’s entirely possible that the “ecosystem” (which, yes, I believe in) of MS is open to Nokia entirely. After, say, a year or two, it’s quite possible that Xbox Live/Skydrive/Office 365/etc… would be open to non-WP7 phones if they are made by Nokia. That would justify all kinds of short-term pain.
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@Zoltan Kis & Tobias Hanser on Maemo suicide:
Sorry for being unclear. Single Software Update (SSU, see http://wiki.maemo.org/SSU), be it apt, rpm/yum is not fail-safe. Phone manufacturer cannot afford this risk, because massive update failures cost a lot. Maemo/Meego could not undrstand this simple idea so far, that’s why it effectively killed itself. Adding fail-safe update to Maemo/Meego: doable, but hard, expensive and too late.
When I studied in Политех (Politech) in St-Petersburg, Russia, we had military cources. S-300 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_(missile)) sw and hw architecture was the thing we studied there. S-300 has 3 times (or even more, this was long time ago) reservation for memory! If one memory fails, others are ready to serve immediately. And this is hard to fail for this type of memory (oxide core), even under very agressive conditions of the modern battle, like radioactive irradiation, high temerature, vibration. And this is one of the reasons why S-300 is still used, even as a preventive method, because usually attacker even does not try to pass on the zone that S-300 controls.
Back to N9: there will NOT be problems with N9 updates, because Nokia will test each update for this particular device so carefully, that no end user will see any problems during whole N9 lifetime. We will do it for our dear customers.
SSU thing is solely specific for this particular device and does not affect ANY other Nokia phone, believe me, I know it, it is my part, it is well tested and works.
@Tobias Hanser on WP7 vs. Maemo/Meego: user does not care what is inside. Users need a good phone that connects them to each other. Jurnalists, market jobbers, buzzy bloggers, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Maemo/Meego are those who care, not a user. WP7 is good and stable OS with nice user experience and state-of-the-art development framework and tools. Qt is good as well, in other way. Nokia will offer both best alternatives, no changes in our strategy.
This is how Nokia applies “Connecting people” mantra and makes people connected.
@Tobias Hanser on people who elope from Elop: if you mean ordinary people with standard budgets, visiting shops for finding best use for they money… Hmmm, I believe, Nokia phones will make the best match anyway, whatewer they think about Elop. People will make the best choice based on own impressions.
Do you now understand?
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@Zoltan Kis on thanking Elop for the N9: nice to know that “Nokia might have contractual obligation to release a MeeGo device”. It does not change anything now after N9 got public, but we all like rumours and speculations, right? If I were Maemo, I’d thank Elop anyway, just in case.
“likely this is why the N9 was labeled as a MeeGo device”
So far I haven’t found any mentioning of Meego/Maemo in Nokia N9 press kit. Did you have more luck on it?
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Pingback: Nokia N9 - Page 4
Felipe, if you have the right connections in the right places; I will make everything possible for Meego to turn Nokia around. I’m serious, I will lead Nokia as it’s CEO and I will do it for less than a million year salary. I say that, because I still want to get paid something, after all I have to afford a life. I’m tired of the lack of leadership and direction and of the ignorance that is made to what consumers want from Nokia. I have nothing against Microsoft or their Windows Phone OS, but they are not what Nokia is about. Nokia is Meego, Symbian and S40; and Qt is the foundation that will make this trio a success! Meego on the Super High End, Symbian on the High End, and S40 for entry level.
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Pingback: My disagreement with Elop on MeeGo (via Felipe Contreras) | Rafael Roque's Blog
Whoa, MS declares HTML5 support. And guess what?!
While N9 beats those silly ipads and androids with HTML5 support (http://thehandheldblog.com/2011/06/23/meego-android-ios-html5-test/) and gets 257 points + 14 bonus, now let’s look on WP7… and… http://html5test.com/results.html – WOW, it scores 25 points!
This definitely proves that Elop is not neutral at all. If MS serious about HTML5 support, the best they can is to trash WP7 and adopt MeeGo :D. It’s THEIR platform burning and it’s Elop who sets Nokia platforms in fire…
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And well, Elop rules out meego regardless of sales results? What a strange move. He has already decided to crash Nokia and can’t allow anyone to prevent it?
Source: http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Nokia+CEO+Stephen+Elop+rules+out+possible+comeback+of+MeeGo/1135267179932
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Pingback: Meego Interface to be Ported to Symbian S40, 1 GHz Devices
@Roman Livshits
I don’t know what filesystem the N9 uses, but Meego uses BTRFS which has snapshotting capabilities; it is trivial to snapshot the system partitions, perform a sequence of SSU’s and roll back the snapshot if any update fails for any reason. Similary, it is trivial to roll back an upgrade by reverting to an older snapshot.
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Pingback: Un ingegnere MeeGo esprime tutto il suo disappunto per le scelte di Elop
@felipec
hmm seems a birdie said something about an internal investigation of mr elop by board has been launched for sabotaging n9!!!
personally speaking whatever Elop did for delaying n950 phone is now hitting him in full swing
wait till those 92000 piece’s goes to developer’s like me.
secondly do agree with you about hardware specs (whats point of having fuelguzzling racecar if you cant drive it for more than 15 minutes!!)
Ps :even if ui is ported to series 40 even that will win over wp7
n9 meego ui makes wp7 ui look oldschool!!!
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Note: All what I wrote above is my own personal opinion, and, as you could notice, it’s based on publicly available information. The real situation might be different since I have limited view of ordinary software developer.
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@Don: thank you for clarification. If N9 and Maemo 6 have fail-safe update, I see no problem on my front. Other problems might still exist, anyway. I also want to know the truth, like you.
(this is my own personal opinion and it’s based on publicly available information)
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Pingback: “Non ci sono ragioni tecniche per preferire Windows Phone a MeeGo” - Nokioteca [Nokia] Blog
@Roman Livshits
You alone proved your point
see all windows phone software update failures and Windows desktop software update failures !!!
infact seeing it as a very positive thing for maemo/meego against an os that has been known!!! to cause update failures in their very first update !!!
Can see headlines now
“Windows phone with nokia numbers of distribution Bricking more than a million people’s devices”
“catastrophes on large scale”,”Dont teach old dog new tricks”
Bet endgadget already has a dozen more headlines and is waiting to use should ms now flop another phone
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@Bhairav: that was in the past, companies use to learn. Let’s don’t use speculative arguments.
I fully understand you guys, protecting your treasures and values, N9 is a killer phone. The question is how expensive it will be in manufacturing and support.
Anyway, I shall repeat my point again: phone OS is a small thing, whatever Elop wants to have in the phone. Factories, support infrastructure, distribution network and brand are core Nokia assets, not the phone OS, sorry, but it is the reality. Cannot imagine why Microsoft might need this burden, really.
And even if Microsoft will buy Nokia (cannot believe), it will be good for the mankind. I am really sorry to say it here. Microsoft makes right things now.
(this is my own personal opinion and it’s based on publicly available information)
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…forgot to add intellectual property to the list of Nokia true assets: this is how Nokia gets money from each sold iOS device. Quite sad omission, really sorry, my respected IPR colleagues.
(this is my own personal opinion and it’s based on publicly available information)
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great article.
stephen elop is thoroughly unconvincing.
who brought in this guy ? he’s completely messing Nokia’s good work over the last few decades. agreed that symbian was floundering and Nokia made a strategic mistake by not adapting to the touch interface, but with the arrival of meego, the mistake has finally been rectified. however elop’s decisions reek of an MS bias. being on the MS board for long, he’s probably got only one bent of mind, all problems could be solved only with MS technologies. given how good meego is – roping in some of the best minds would have costed only a billion dollars probably. however the damage elop has done is in the tens of billions of dollars. I have not known ANY single ceo who’s scuttled their own boat so badly. who on earth in their right minds will buy a symbian phones after elop’s grandiloquent announcement of killing symbian ?
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I’m yupeng of platomix ,one of Application developer from china. I think N9 is the finest device of Nokia over the past 2 years . We will do our best to porting our Qt application to N9 .it’s all we can do for Nokia !
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You cannot blame everything on Elop.
Meego – After N900, it took close to 2 years where is the phone.
Symbian – Its a Ugly OS. It took another 2 years and we still do not have Symbian Anna widely.
How come I will bet on these horses, when Windows platform could deliver. Without emotions if you look at it, its a good bet than betting on the old horses which has failed to deliver.
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Pingback: Nokia pasará de MeeGo y del Nokia N9, pero ¿por qué?
What is happening in Nokia is so perverted and shady that a good writer might well create a great novel from it.
There is a burning platform, it is WINDOWS PHONE7. We are talking about less than 2% of the market, well behind WebOS, not mentioning real Ecosystem.
The UI and the very concept of WP7 is old and flawed. An infiite vertical scrolling of stupid ties you can not remove, ties that are bad disegned and orrible to look at (winzoz 95 look). If you compare searay with n9 it is like comparing and old CRT television with a modern SuperAmoled. I mean, it is an epic fail, as epic as Winzoz Vista, if not bigger.
All the apps (little as far as I know) cost three time than in Gmarket or Appstore and are slower and poorest.
Mango update just make me laugh, it is like iOs3 or Eclair… just with 2 year of dealy. And will it be possibile to install it to all terminal or there will be something not working with Samsung or other OEM? Like the last time…
And more, if you RTFM (RTFM, READ THE FU@#ING MANUALS) you will suddenly understand 3 main thing:
1) QT will not ever support WP7. Symbian has million of app Nokia will just throw away. Meego support QT.
2) Hartmann is build on Meego API, all the meego and maemo app are therefore compatible
3) Android is based on a virtual machine, dalvik, and we already have an alien dalvik machine that support and allowed N9 to run android app nativley.
As you can see NOKIA has NO NEED OF MICROSOFT AT ALL! But Microsft need Nokia as all other OEM are just disgusted by stupidphone7.
But as it is possible that the BOARD of NOKIA call a MICROSOFT executive who still owns 6% of their shares, to guide a rival-like company? ARE YOU NUTS? NOKIA create software!!!
For this I don’t blame Elop, he is just a mindless slave remotely controlled by Littelsost and he act as any manikin would do. His mission is to make Nokia price drop so that the Evil Empire can take over with little or no expenses at all. And It is so uncovered that even my 10 years old school got it.
Nokia is not even producing Wp7 in its factories but it is using other company plants… so that the production of WP7 can not be controlled, stopped or destroyed if Nokia goes in deafult thanks to Elop’s strategy.
I really hope that Nokia board is not like the ancient Roman Senate, useless and corrupted, and it will fire the mankin at once. But if not, We will appeal to European Institution, Antitrust, and Finnish Gvt. BTW, Where the féçK is the Finnish Prime Minister?, will fu@#ing defend Europen and finnish jobs?
And yes I OWN a WP7, HD7. It makes me shit from the mouth.
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@crowbar
Maybe you are not getting the point here. This is not a grammar class, nobody cares how hartmann is correctly written, or at least is very strange to define me as an hobbyist for this.
Anyway, thanks for your precious wisdom, I would like to give you a suggestion too, as other already did, RTFM.
You can start from here: http://wiki.meego.com/Quality/Compliance
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When Nokia hired Elop thought “Does he understand how opensource and opensource bussiness work?”. Nokia should have hired someone from a successful company that did, like Red Hat or IBM.
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@Roman Livshits That’s a huge error in logic, the fact that (some) companies do learn doesn’t mean that Microsoft would. You are the one doing the speculation that somehow things will be better based on nothing but wishful thinking.
If 100% of the updates have had failures, why would anyone bet that the next one will work?
Perhaps it will work, but then again, there’s nothing to hint that the MeeGo one wouldn’t… So your argument that WP7 is somehow better in this area is invalid.
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Facepalm! It would have been possible to launch an N910 after some months… with the same platform. The problem is when creating a new platform. Do you have any idea how much time it took for Google to create Android? (hint: at least 6 years) But after launching the first phone, the rest came easier; because they used the same platform.
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@MrX
“You cannot blame everything on Elop.”
Ok.. Perhaps you’re partly correct that at this point pointing fingers can’t reverse the WP7 billion dollar tie-up.Train have long left that station. Granted. But if anyone has to go down in Nokia’s history should something massively goes wrong with that sooner or later then unfortunately there’s no one else more qualified I’m afraid.
“Meego – After N900, it took close to 2 years where is the phone.”
You’re not getting the gist of all this. It isn’t just about some niche hardcore N900/Maemo tweakers. This isn’t about some overzealous anti-MS thing going on (Ok we do have that going on but it’s not the point). This is about those of us wanting another “open” option in addition to Google’s Android. We can wait for WebOS sure but no one in their right mind would jump on a HP Veer right now (no one’s that insane yet) and God knows when HP Pre 3 will make landfall.
“Symbian – Its a Ugly OS. It took another 2 years and we still do not have Symbian Anna widely.”
There’s nothing wrong with the OS conceptually and/or the devs and apps. If anything it’s Nokia themselves who’s responsible for carving the tombstones by stubbornly sticking with ARM 11 and lower based SoCs for cost control/overpricing purposes (Want proof? Google for Nokia N5 right now. Voila another ARM 11 phone circa 2011). Ask any Symbian hardcores out there and they’ll tell you that according to Symbian Foundation’s own hardware reqs/recommended on the old wiki (conveniently you won’t be able to find those docs now), mid – top end Symbian S60V5 phones should have gotten to Cortex generation SoCs already. Only with that added firepower could the devs push the UI envelope faster. It’s obvious that biz politics hindered Symbian’s innovation
“How come I will bet on these horses, when Windows platform could deliver. Without emotions if you look at it, its a good bet than betting on the old horses which has failed to deliver.”
“When Windows platform could deliver”??? Explain to me how? How’s WP7 working out so far for the rest of its current OEM partners such HTC, Dell, Samsung and LG? These phones are on deep discounts with the highest price of USD149.99 on contract for HTC Trophy. You can check that on WP7 official website. Here’s a hint; Let’s not even bring Android into this, WP7 aren’t even giving BBs a hard time? OK NoDo fiascoed because Samsung tanked the updates 1st. And most WP7 users now complain that current WP7 OEMs cut corners thus some phones are crap to them. I call BS on this. Especially if most BBs out there are way way outdated by specs on paper alone. By the above-mentioned does the 20k apps tally amount to anything?
So basically right now the assumption is that the upcoming “fastest gunslinger in town” are Mango and Nokia is its prime pedigreed horse. For something that’s literally the same as MeeGo as far as untested waters go, how is it fair that MeeGo’s getting the unwanted inbred treatment?
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Felipe.
Do you see any way this ship could still be turned around? A petition (on Tweeter) is already on place and on the top 10th petitions this month.
Can’t the Finish Government be compelled to do some pressure on the BoD? After all, there’s a lot at stake here for Finland (and even Europe)
Do you think there’s any chance that the Nokia’s BoD will do something?
I wan’t to do something… Greenpeace style…. What can we do?
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I have started to draft a letter to Nokia’s top management(maybe to the board only) addressing issues around Nokia. I would like to collaborate on this with anyone interested.
I am publishing the very first initial my thoughts only version here and now. If someone else is interested then, where would be good place to do collaborate on this? This should be done quickly and out in the open. I think good way to present it would be to publish some where it as an open letter and then send it to the board with link to the published version to give them possibility to reply out in the open (I know they won’t in all likelihood do this, but I think it would be important to offer this chance). I also think it is not productive to rant about these things to those that are not responsible for this mess and can not do anything to change things (eg. conversations.nokia.com). Even though ranting is all ways fun, albeit often not so productive.
**************************************************************
begin letter
• Version history:
∘ v.0.1
‣ Initial version with single author
• todo:
∘ title
∘ peer review and collaboration
∘ writing style changes
‣ if someone else wants to sign it should be we not I
∘ factual checks
∘ clarifying the structure
∘ more examples ?
∘ publishing place in the internet
∘ is language polite?
∘ should CEO be included in the recipient list
∘ suggested actions list. prioritizing…
**************************************************************
to the Nokia board,
I have been Nokia customer since 1996 and would like to give some feedback to you concerning the direction Nokia has taken since last September. I am not Microsoft hater or Nokia fan boy (I won’t buy everything just because it says Nokia on it), but I must admit that I have grown to respect Nokia as a company. That is much more than I can say from most of the companies around.
I am truly worried about the strategy Nokia has decided to follow. For me it does not make much(try any) sense at all. And I want to stress here, the company that I am worried about is Nokia. I guess Nokia and, it’s customers and shareholders, should be your main concern also. Just wanted to make it completely clear that I am talking about Nokia here. It might not even be the strategy that is solely responsible (though there is some very big holes in it in my honest opinion) for me being worried, but the way it was announced back in February and the way it has been executed by your CEO ever since.
I feel that Nokia, everyone knows and loves, is really vanishing in front of our very eyes. I also feel that we as customers have responsibility to let you know how we feel about it. I think by letting you know how we feel is really important to Nokia. It certainly is better than silently jumping ships (to where?) at the first sign of trouble. It is my hope that Nokia will find a way to communicate with their customers out in the open about these issues. By communication I mean the very top management speaking with the customers (many of them shareholders) with out the FUD machine turned on. Nokia’s employees have done a very good job with the communication, even if it feels like their hands have been tied with many issues that concern us. We feel that these issues should be brought to your knowledge, and not to put more pressure on those customer relations employee who have been left alone (unfortunately by you) to face the music.
I wont be speculating about Trojan horses or any such thing. I hope that time of speculations would be over and you would just make a clear message to your customers. That message should clarify at least all of the issues mentioned below. I suggest that you take a good look around the web and see for your self what is happening around Nokia and decide on further actions if necessary.
Below is a list of some key points that concern us:
• N9 and MeeGo has received almost pure praise from the press (after they have had some hands on time with it. I might add)
∘ Almost only thing clouding the praise has been your CEO. I some times honestly think that I have entered to some weird parallel universe where one can crush one of the most valuable brand on earth and it seems to be a thing that you make really good money out of (as of being paid to do it by the very same company that brand refers to).
• On the issue of “ecosystems”
∘ OVI store has more than 6 000 000 downloads per day. What is really amazing that this is with the OVI app that doesn’t work(does not install the app, slow, crash…) in many of the phone models(I have had quite bad experience with S60 3rd edition). I wonder what is the download rate after successful launch of N9 and Symbian Anna… Here we come AppStore…
‣ I also wonder what the number would have been without the burning CEO…
‣ I would have prioritized fixing OVI app on EVERY OVI capable phone. I mean how can you sell software if your OVI app does not work? As an software developer I think it would have been really easy thing to do. At least by those developers in MeeGo team. I am not trying to dis Symbian or Symbian developers, but praise MeeGo developers instead (just awesome work with N9).
‣ OVI store brings revenues to Nokia doesn’t it. This good for Nokia. Not so good for Microsoft.
∘ With MeeGo participation, Qt playing major role here, Nokia ecosystem could cater to much larger audience in the future (tablet,laptop, tv, IVI).
• Qt is really really really beautiful peace of development environment. And it has potential to be worlds leading application development platform (if given a change and support). It already is really big threat for those that want to tie developers to single “ecosystem”.
∘ Your previous strategy: Qt for everyone. Really made sense for me. I really think that it would have been far superior strategy for Nokia (maybe not so good for some other companies). N9 is showing this HUGE potential of Qt based development.
∘ I think you should take one step back and support the Qt for everyone strategy. It does not prevent Nokia from producing WP7 phones. It just makes Nokia’s strategy really stand out from the rest of the competitors.
• Take a look how Nokia’s CEO talks about things. Do you really think that Nokia’s CEO should talk and behave like that? I am certain that at some point his behavior will be investigated and…
∘ “leaked” burning platform memo.
‣ Here the timing is also really bad for Nokia. Nokia released 4 really nice Symbian phones (N8, E7, C7 and C6) around the time of this “leakage”.
‣ Symbian based phone sales have been hurt by this I am sure of this.
‣ Question is what should the CEO have done instead? Maybe try to build up some hype around these masterpieces of a devices (lacking in some areas, but then again show me one phone that has it all). These devices were a HUGE step in the right direction for Nokia…
• I wonder what Steve Jobs would have done here. Not this I am sure because he has consistent and unwavering support toward Apple products. And it seems to work.
∘ I just use him as an example building the hype around the products. There is much I don’t like about his way of handling things.
• For the record: I think Nokia’s Symbian phones as a whole are better devices than Apple iPhone. iPhone has it’s strengths but for me those strengths weight less than weaknesses.
∘ “lean against the emptiness” strategy announcement.
‣ I would call this quite courageous move by Nokia.
• Have you seen TV-show “Yes minister”? Courageous is not in the interest of Nokia’s shareholders.
‣ The way it was announced was not in Nokia’s best interest.
‣ The sales and stock price drop has resulted from this was not at all necessary. Could have been avoided easily.
• This one is really important thing in my opinion (and I think the shareholders will agree on this).
‣ Many people fail to see what Nokia gets(if anything) from this.
• When I watched the announcement by Nokia CEO and Microsoft CEO, I got the same feeling that I get in the market where those guys try to sell me that, way past expiration date, candy by adding more of the same thing to the bag.
• I think there is no possible way to justify the strategy and the way it was announced by those two buddies. Not to the Nokia shareholders at least. On the other hand it is more like dream come true to Microsoft shareholders. But you should probably care only about Nokia shareholders interest. Funnily enough so should Nokia’s CEO.
∘ Announcing N9 with out CEO putting any hype to back it up (see Steve Jobs for a reference).
‣ This major “mistake” by the CEO was fortunately greatly compensated by really accomplished presentation from Marko Ahtisaari.
• I must say that he is THE hire to Nokia management lately.
‣ Nokia marketing team around MeeGo also deserves high praise for the job that they have done so far. It must not have been easy to do such a awesome job under current leadership.
• swipe.nokia.com
• conversations.nokia.com
∘ Ian
• aani.nokia.fi
∘ Heidi
‣ Quim Gil has also done great job at MeeGo forums.
‣ And to the MeeGo developers and designers (I assume in this case the managers also managed to stay away). Gifted bunch I would say.
• The documentation right from the N9 announcement is nothing short of impressive.
• I really hope Nokia wont loose them to the competitors (for Nokia’s sake).
‣ Much of the beauty of N9’s UI is made possible by the work done by Nokia’s Qt team. So kudos to them too. Qt is really important for Nokia. It is unique.
∘ Couple days after N9 announcement hype had all ready started to build up around it. Build up real fast. And hype around high end devise like N9 is really good thing for Nokia. It predicts strong sales (and promotes the now badly damaged brand image).
‣ How Nokia CEO reacts to this. He “leaks” Nokia WP7 to the Internet…
• You could (and should) ask why on earth he did that? Smells fishy to me.
‣ If this was not enough he makes a statement “no more MeeGo from Nokia even if it’s huge success”.
• What is this? I demand to know? There is no logic what so ever here. This really is the last point where Nokia board should react and react quickly (to be honest, for you to have been competent in your job you should have reacted a looooooonngggg time a go). Lets remember that you are responsible to the Nokia shareholders. If you don’t feel competent enough to handle this situation may I recommend that you step down from your position.
• I have never seen such odd (it could also be called something else) behavior from a CEO of a company. And we are talking about WORLDS LARGEST MOBILE PHONE MANUFACTURER.
∘ With current strategy and execution Nokia has lost billions of dollars already and is predicted to be relegated to one of “those” with oem status. Nokia had one of the most valuable brand in the world. It should be cherished not desdroyed from the inside. It is valuable thing to have you know.
‣ I wonder how much, this loss of hard earned brand value, has and will cost to the shareholders. This is not good.
∘ N9 is not released in 6 major market areas. Why is this (there is a theory around some body being afraid of a little competition)? I would like to hear it from you.
‣ These include the following:
∘ On the whole Nokia’s CEO has not said, done or even implied anything that could be harmful (not eve slightest) to Microsoft. For me it is a bit strange. In the past Nokia has not been afraid of stepping on Microsoft’s toes.
I would like to remind that you have legal obligation to look after the shareholders best interest. To further clarify the issue, by shareholders I mean Nokia shareholders. Only after annual shareholders meeting (again Nokia’s) you will (or might even not this time) be discharged from liability.
If there isn’t something really amazing in the works inside Nokia CEO’s head that nobody else knows or gets (or can predict)… At this rate I predict quite stressful annual meeting next spring (might even be a bit sooner) for top management of Nokia. And I really think if it comes to that things should be thoroughly investigated and everyone involved handled with due diligence. I honestly think criminal prosecution will be the only possible outcome from this investigation. I think this is very serious matter discussed here. It has already had large scale repercussions affecting many employees and shareholders. I really hope that this parallel universe type of behaviour from Nokia top management is put to an timely end.
But lets not jump ahead of time here. The reason I am writing to you instead of the authorities, is that I think there is still one last chance to avoid pulling legal issues to this matter (at least concerning Nokia board. I am not that certain about CEO anymore). But this “thing” must be resolved post-haste. And by the “thing” I mean force feeding WP7 down to peoples (customers and developers a like) throat. It can be an alternative (valid even in some cases), but relying solely on it and not giving any alternatives is pure madness. I think you really should use basic SWOT analysis on these scenarios and decide based on the facts (look SWOT analysis from wikipedia if you don’t know what it means).
Suggested list of action (every point should be executed in a manner that leaves no room for interpretations. message should be clear to everyone):
• Make Qt clearly the platform of choice for Nokia
∘ This is one of the key points
• Start visibly supporting N9
∘ Release N9 in every region with great marketing effort
• Release N950 for consumer market or publish the reason why not
∘ Your goal is to sell as many devices as possible – right?
• Announce continuous support for MeeGo
∘ This is one of the key points
• Start visibly supporting Symbian based phones
• Make WP7 as an alternative instead of the only choice
∘ This is the most important point for Nokia
∘ Let the customers tell what they will prefer
∘ Start the discussion of getting Qt to WP. You are the one having all the bargaining chips here.
• Start respecting your customers by listening what they want
• Focus on OVI client app on every supported platform (make it user friendly)
• Start respecting your developers (inside Nokia and Partners)
∘ Don’t move away from Qt and OVI right when it is starting to get profitable.
• Start the process of searching new CEO
∘ This seems to be impossible to avoid. His “mistakes” has cost too much all ready. In the some body’s head(s) is going to roll.
∘ I think his actions should be investigated and moved to criminal justice if necessary (and it really seems from the outside like this is the only way this should be handled).
∘ Mean while do as much damage control as you can.
‣ N9 and Marko Ahtisaari could be quite good combo here
∘ This time make sure it is clear to the new CEO that he is signing contract with Nokia, and what it means for CEO (this should be common knowledge when talking about large corporations – shouldn’t it).
• Organizational structure should be analysed with the new CEO and changed accordingly
Sincerely,
Harri Viitamäki
**************************************************************
end letter
**************************************************************
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Agreed with Felipe on everything here, but I just don’t see the benefit of open sourcing Maemo/MeeGo/Nokia’s OS in general. Of course in some cases the copyleft may force that, but voluntarily open sourcing Nokia’s OS I don’t understand.
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I am glad to have versioned my letter with version number 0.0.1. There is still some work to be done with it (proofreading not being the least important thing).
As a disclaimer to that letter. I am not saying that some body has broken the law, simply saying what it all looks like from consumers (mine) point of view.
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I wonder if the best thing now is to let Nokia’s upper management lead the company where they intend, without much disturbance. It is really strange to watch, but rather than trying to rescue Nokia, getting other vendors to pick up the ideas and good work is much more fruitful. And I say “vendors”, not vendor – for the real synergy effects will turn up when there is a good mix of cooperation and competition, and no one is able to dictate the direction, only influence it.
In the actual N9 case, if there were a second vendor making good profit on the same concept, for instance with more updated hardware, it would be impossible for Elop&co to kill the thing the way they are doing now – at least using the arguments they currently use.
I don’t think there is a question about the future sucess of Meego (maybe in some morphed form, though) – the question is when. I think the N900 “lineage” will show up strongly in future mobile devices, and that there are several unique advantages to the approach, not the least that it can give very good control over hardware resources, which will always be “scarce”. Successful Android devices are, to me, also proof of this concept, because the OS kernel is basically the same, and we can always go from “basic” Linux to specialized cases like Java machines. But it may be much harder to go the other way – so, for example, the success of the N9 does not in itself prove the hardware would give the same performance with Android 2.3.
And this ecosystem thing – the really great ecosystem here is everything organized around the Linux kernel, which tends to be an “integrative” thing – I take Qt as an example of this. Apps? Well, there should remain something of the “write once, run everywhere” premises of Java, shouldn’t it?
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@Trond
Exactly…
Which was why my 1st post here centred around moving on past and away from Nokia at post N9 + N950’s “success” (TBD hopefully by the upcoming sales numbers) and I strongly urge that energies be pooled to focus on positioning MeeGo as 1 of the (if not) 3 world’s most viable and open smartphone OS. I wish that I could include Symbian in the mix but reality is now, all the other OEMs (including former Symbian OEMs; SE and Samsung) have simply given up on it. If I have to vote which should go on between MeeGo and Symbian the choice is clear and that will be MeeGo.
I don’t know… I mean it’s all about devs, devs and more devs these days. By this logic I simply can’t see the logic of Symbian guys going on along on this trust that Nokia’s Symbian strategy are extended 5 more years down the road. Thousands got shipped out already and not to mention The Elopian Contagion mentioned about promised attempts to bring WP7 down from the top end to midrange devices. It’s a promise that I bet he’ll try to keep by hook or by crook.
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People here are an absolute emotional joke. You don’t understand anything about the mobile market and ecosystems.
N9 would have been a great product in 2008 now its absolutely dead but for Open Source geeks. You can thank Kallasvuo management for not pursuing Maemo earlier. Now its too late. Rim is DEAD. HP WebOS is dead on arrival. IOS and Android have gotten way too powerful and Microsoft is the only company to challenge that.
WP might fail and Nokia will have to make Android phones but that´s life. Meego is not viable for anyone but true believers..
Thanks for good laughs at your delusions Harri Viitamäki. Really amazing..
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@Market conditions must…not….feed…MS…fanboy…trollllllllllllls
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Heh, please don’t feed the trolls 🙂
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Pingback: MeeGo’s Impending Success Thorn in Elop’s Side
@Market conditions
So you think I am amazing… Thank you very much. It’s always nice to lift peoples spirit.
But I think that you are wrong and your reasoning is lacking in so many ways. But as I said in the post containing the “letter”. Everyone is invited to participate. So thank you for your participation, even though I feel your contribution on this matter is minimal at best.
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@FelipeC: But it’s so hard not to 😛
But back on-topic…
What are the possibilities of continuing MeeGo + Harmattan UI as a community-supported open OS? Manufacturers seem to be accepting the legal risks of using Android, so indemnification shouldn’t be an issue.
I’ve talked with the Intel side of MeeGo (product unrelated to anything Nokia) and I’m of the impression they see it strictly as a vehicle to sell Atom chips. Not sure what that means for phone manufactures. (i.e. would the requirement of Atom CPUs make it unattractive given the current investment in and availability of ARM-based platforms.)
Something similar happened with Oracle and OpenOffice. When Oracle took over OO from Sun they asked 30 OO developers to leave, so they forked OO and started LibreOffice, which has turned out to be better than OO – so much that OO wants to merge the two back into one. If Nokia found themselves competing with WP7 against “the next Android” (only better) they might have to listen.
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(troll related img didn’t show up in post 😦 – click on my name)
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@Pat
I think Intel’s best interest is to sell not only bare chips, but also the HW adaptation and OS that helps buyers implementing their own business on top – this will help growing the market for the chips, and will be good for end users as well. Currently we can see reference implementations under development, and the AppUp program is a good basis for an ecosystem.
Exactly for the reason they are dead serious about selling chips I am pretty sure they will push MeeGo with perseverance. It might also happen that MeeGo development will speed up without Nokia, especially since many MeeGo developers moved from Nokia to Intel (also to TI, NVIDIA, HP, RedHat, etc)… just check trends on linkedin. The question is how many device makers will choose MeeGo and whether the critical mass will be reached soon enough. MeeGo is in unique position now, but it has to prove quality and a large horizon for growth, and it has to be picked up by product companies.
Now the sole existence of the N9 might already help this: despite of Elop’s tricks – it does not even need to sell in tens of millions – if it works as promised in the demos, it already proves that MeeGo is viable, even if the N9 is a different OS flavor. It smells money, so I expect there will be device makers who will pick up MeeGo and continue the trend set by the N9, only with better HW.
Meanwhile Nokia will certainly produce nice handsets running Windows, which will force MeeGo to be better. I am sure Apple, HP, RIM and the others won’t sit on their laurels either.
It is all good for us, end users.
BTW your images rock :).
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MeeGo is the better system: it is more powerful and has the better user experience! In fact it has one of the most consistent and clearest UIs I’ve ever seen. And as a bonus: it’s open!
I don’t mind why Elop chooses for Windows Phone and makes Nokia dependent of Microsoft: maybe it’s money or i’s because Elop came from Microsoft. Or maybe something else. But no matter, what his reasons are, it was a very bad decision.
It would have been a good decision, if Symbian and MeeGo were too bad. Maybe that’s true for Symbian, but it definitely isn’t true for MeeGo. Elop said, that it would last too long to make MeeGo ready for the market. But the Nokia N9 with MeeGo comes this fall. And Nokia’s first Windows Phone comes this fall, too. So where is the problem.
And even if Nokia will make both in the future (MeeGo-Phones and Windows-Phones) this is a bad decision: if you split your development-money to both, MeeGo wouldn’t be as good, as it could be, if Nokia concentrates on MeeGo. And additionally: there are people out there, who hate Microsoft and they won’t buy a Nokia MeeGo-Phone, because Nokia also sells Windows Phones.
I hope, that Nokia will continue making good MeeGo-Phones. But it would be better, if Nokia would concentrate an MeeGo.
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By the way:
The future is in our hands! If many people buy MeeGo-phones and Windows-Phones sell much less, then Nokia will concentrate on MeeGo and maybe even stop Windows Phone.
And then, there will be much other companies, that will also build MeeGo-phones.
(If anybody thinks, that we consumers couldn’t to that and don’t have that much power: remember Shell and Brent Spar…)
Everybody can do something:
– buy a MeeGo-phone
– concince others of doing so
– writing in blogs, newsgroups or anywhere else about MeeGo
– contributing to the MeeGo-community by giving feedback (or even donate a bit money)
– develop apps for MeeGo (or as a consumer ask developers and companies for MeeGo-apps)
– and so on…
In fall, I will buy the Nokia N9 with MeeGo.
There is something for everybody to do… And because it’s open, every voice is heard! Not like many companies, where your feedback never reaches a developer.
The future is in our hands!
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@FelipeC: “whose bread you eat, the songs you sing”
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@Florian Sperlich:
I totally agree:
The future is in our hands!
We decide, which system is successful. Nobody should underestimate the power of us consumers.
I hope, that MeeGo-phones are a big success and Windows Phones are not.
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Anyone remembered the linux platform selected by Motorola pre-android era? Wonder any relevancy and good learning from there?
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@GCC
It was first called EZX, then MOTOMAGX (I hacked together an API for it 🙂 ) IIRC it was contributed to the Limo Foundation in the end. It was great. Motorola could have been where Apple is today if they had leveraged it and not fought the community. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple took some inspiration for the iPhone’s UI from the MOTOMING series.
There was a project working to document it and create a SDK called OpenEZX. The wiki appears to still be there: http://wiki.openezx.org/
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@Pat, I have a theory about why Elop “Osbourned” Symbian. You can read dozens of Harvard Review business cases where top management chose a radically different direction or process but the internal bureaucracy stopped it due to inertia or departmental priorities being different than coporate priorities.
I believe that Elop purposefully “burned the bridges” behind his army so they had to fight in the new territory or die. There is no going back. Military history shows that soldiers in this situation will fight much harder and are more likely successful than those who can run back to familiar ground.
Only time will tell whether he took Nokia across the chasm to a new success model or they die fighting. I just hope that the Nokia troops don’t lie down and die from home sickness (Symbian).
For those readers interested in the new direction, there is a great review on engadget for the beta release of Mango (AKA – WP7.5). If you have already decided that you hate anything that Microsoft does then do not read this. It will take away many of your “WP7 sucks!” arguments and you will be depressed.
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/27/windows-phone-7-5-mango-in-depth-preview-video/#disqus_thread
I’m looking forward to getting the update installed on my Samsung Focus.
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@Son of a Finn. I agree with you about Elop burning the bridges. I see the Osbourne Effect applied a little differently though.
Nokia could be executing the same strategy but not told the world “Symbian is Dead. WP7 is our only future. We’ll have a WP7 phone for sale in a year. Please keep buying our products we just told you were dead.” This was Osbourne’s problem. He told everyone about the great new computers that were coming and people stopped buying the current ones, but the new ones were many months from release. This makes me question the management.. it’s sort of a “marketing 101” mistake – I don’t know if it’s motive or competency I question though. (I think competency questions might be why investors are hammering the stock.)
The “New Coke” repercussions might have been harder to see. I doubt the officers and BoD understand the philosophical differences between Nokia and Microsoft and why they might be important to Nokia brand loyalists. I doubt very much if it will have much impact on the end result of Elop’s plan. If distributors and consumers stop buying Symbian phones Nokia isn’t going to run out of capital between now and when they launch their WP7 device, but it would have been better to try to take those most loyal to the Nokia brand with him, rather than alienating them.
FTR, though I wouldn’t personally choose it, I don’t think WP7 is a bad choice from an end-user perspective. There’s things I find annoying about it (WTF is a “Farketplack”?) but I can say that about any OS. My big objection, and where I see it sorely coming up short, is as a developer. For me it’s probably the least attractive platform for app development. I also have some reservations from a business perspective. (Will consumers buy Windows Phone 7 Phones? Microsoft’s marketing so far doesn’t give me much confidence they can successfully push it. Nokia may have a better chance.)
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@Son of a Finn
I can imagine elop being one of those ceos who read harvard review business cases in their sparetime instead of learning something about the mobile phone sector and nokia as a company (other than how to dismantle it). The worst thing you can have in the tech sector is a ceo who does not listen to his engineers. The departure of Richard Green speaks volumes.
I wouldn’t be so worried about elop if he didn’t openly tell lies, be it his “burning platform” memo (which was over the top and just childish) or the stuff he said about meego. Qt would have provided a proper transition path from the solid ecosystem of symbian to the new exciting meego. Unfortunately elop and the board have chosen to go down without a fight, searching comfort in a poisoning microsoft embrace.
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I think that Elop was the worst men to be the CEO of NOKIA.
For me the right to do was to merge the best of S40 and Symbian in a scalable QT centric software platform, and maintaining Meego for the High-End and a possible Tablet line. And the same time reducing the number of devices in the market in a 1+1 year cycle ( basically a new devices for the category every year but the device is phased out of market after 2 years) with a total off no more that 5-6 categories. And even with all the task force that Nokia had it was possible to create their one ecosystem of high quality applications.
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@Pat – We are pretty close to agreement. My point on the Osborne effect is I think Elop may have understood it and accepted the faster sales drop instead of a potential quiet revolution and WP7 sabotage that a “save Symbian” movement could create inside. By Osborning Symbian, he burns the bridge. If he didn’t go public, then there could be continuing resistance to his direction no matter what he said internally.
I am 100% with you on the New Coke analogy. I doubt the exec’s and BOD took into account the level of emotions that Nokia vs Microsoft fans have. This is a tiny % of the population and consumers but a vocal minority that can influence heavily as in New Coke.
I don’t understand your “Farketplack” comment. Where did you see this?
Yes, developers are making their own decisions about how big the WP7 market will be. MS tools and technologies make it easy for many to do app’s but ultimately you need the units in the field or your work is wasted. Honestly, I am surprised by how much support Microsoft has already gotten on WP7 from developers. Nokia’s partnership can only improve this.
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@Son of a Finn: re: Osborne Effect – ah – ok – I see what you mean. Interesting theory. I don’t know that Elop et. al .expected a big drop in sales. They told everyone they were going to sell another 150M Symbian units by Q1 2012, which would have been about 4 quarters at the same rate as Q4 2010. The head of smartphone (marketing? Mary was her first name IIRC) said the Feb. announcement wouldn’t effect sales significantly because, in her opinion, Nokia’s customers are unaware of the announcements Nokia makes. (Which is sad on so many levels.) I was told that not reporting forecasts means institutional investors have to divest. Do you know if that’s correct? (I would have expected more volume, but idk – maybe they have to space sells as to not tank the stock completely.)
WP7, now with “Farketplak” 😉 http://smartphoneblogging.com/index.php?callback=image&pid=740&width=240h=320&height=&mode=
“nusic+wob” http://images.intomobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/windows-phone-7-series-hands-on-demo-04.jpg
and “Zeople” http://c2499022.cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Windows-Phone-7-Developer-Tools-Beta.jpg
As a developer, it’s not so much the market size that turns me off WP7. If that were the only drawback I wouldn’t care (I’m learning QNX/TabletOS atm.) I know it’s subjective, but the platform itself just doesn’t excite me. At least for me, WP7 development is the perfect storm of undesirable qualities: managed code, proprietary language, proprietary interfaces, restricted APIs, restricted distribution, small number of users, major publishers subsidized, no multitasking or daemons. At GDC 2011 MS mentioned eliminating some of these restrictions for major publishers, which IMO would make it worse. A couple of those items would be fine, but not all of them together. The first smartphones I developed for were running PocketPC Phone Edition and Windows Smartphone 2002. Back then those were exciting platforms. They were open and unrestricted (comparatively). But I don’t blame MS for not getting me excited about WP7 development. It’s their platform. (I do blame them for spin – “multitasking” is not the same as “fast application switching” and most XBOX 360 games are written using C++, not the managed C# that community games use, so WP7 XNA is not the “same thing XBOX games use” for what most people think of when they think of XBOX games – Gears of War, etc.)
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@Son of a Finn:
You wrote about the “tiny % of the population and consumers but a vocal minority that can influence heavily as in New Coke”.
Well, I’m part of this tiny %. I’m a techie, a geek, I love anything that runs on batteries or can be plugged. I am the one all my family and friends ask for advice when they’re buying a new gadget, and that includes phones.
What can I tell them now? “Buy a Symbian phone. The CEO of Nokia stated that this platform will be phased out soon, but hey, buy it.” Doesn’t sounds very well to me.
“Wait for the N9. It’s gorgeous, nice, looks almost indestructable, it’s got linux-inside. But Nokia’s CEO has so little faith in it that no matter how many mobiles Nokia sells, they’re phasing it out too”. Sounds even worse, keeping in mind that the price tag will surely be on the top-end.
“Wait for a Nokia Windows Phone 7. Nokia is pushing it heavily, it’s the platform they will support for years, and Nokia’s CEO is so sure that it will be great that has bet (almost) all his company on its success”. Well, the fact (at least here in Spain) is that most consumers doesn’t like Windows at all. They tolerate it, but after the scars left behind by Windows Vista, the public perception of Microsoft is not exactly rosy.
So… I’m trying to push for the N9 and MeeGo, but it is hard. People has begun looking to Android, even with its shortcomings compared with Nokia and MeeGo.
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@Son of a Finn You must not understand how media works in this century. This “tiny minority” is in fact the most important, it’s these geeks, early adopters, fans, etc. They know the platform, they know other devices, and they are trusted by their network of friends. Many of them are respectable bloggers with thousands of followers, who in turn have friends on their own, and so on.
You should market to those people, because they listen, instead of the masses, who are really good at ignoring you (see Seth Godin).
That’s why people coined the term “viral marketing”. A person might not know what is WP7 or MeeGo, but he might know someone that knows someone that told him X phone is not that good. Just like people can’t help getting colds; they can’t help hearing stuff.
In any case, the improvements on Mango are good, but that only elevates it to a level similar to Android and iOS. It’s certainly not as good as MeeGo.
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Plenty of comments since I posted mine way above….
I have since posted a few other things related to Elop/Nokia/N9:
http://www.mobileinfoplanet.com/2011/06/23/is-nokia-in-for-a-dilemma-with-the-n9/
http://www.mobileinfoplanet.com/2011/06/27/what-the-rest-should-learn-from-the-nokia-n9/
http://www.mobileinfoplanet.com/2011/06/28/it-is-not-about-qt-its-the-os-stupid/
My question to you Felipe is particularly in regards to the last post, as you have been directly involved in these matters: how come everyone is cheering about Qt, even if it is put on feature phones, as opposed discussing the death (for now at least) of MeeGo at Nokia?
I posed a similar question in another blog but have not received a reply yet, and I’d be curious to hear your opinion in the meantime:
http://flors.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/the-four-wheels-spinning-meego-1-2-harmattan/#comment-2473
Un saludo!
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@Pat
“Nokia’s customers are unaware of the announcements Nokia makes. (Which is sad on so many levels.) I was told that not reporting forecasts means institutional investors have to divest. Do you know if that’s correct?”
No, they don’t have to but they hate uncertainty. If a company regularly makes forecasts then there is enormous pressure to continue to forecast or else the market traders assume something is terribly wrong and dump the stock. As you can see when Nokia declared they couldn’t give an accurate forecast going forward, the stock plummeted.
“WP7, now with “Farketplak”
Ahhh, I see what you did. You made up silly letters for the ones that were not displayed. 🙂 The format of having a large horizontal framework to put all related content and then using the narrow screen width as a window that scrolls across it is fundamental to WP7 UI design. Some love it and some hate it, as with any radical new design. Obviously, I love it but I see the challenges too. It assumes that the person reading “arketplac” knows that this is “marketplace” and is now automatically aware that you have more content by scrolling left or right. MS did a lot of research to see how this would be accepted and the results are that once a user understands it, they like it a lot.
One of the primary problems is that it works with English and other languages with similar roots and left-right reading but Asian languages to not work the same. Mango introduces Asian language support so we will see how that is handled. The other issue is that static pictures do not do justice to the UI. A knowledgeable sales person improves customer purchasing rate a lot with a good demo but the carriers in North America have few of these.
“At least for me, WP7 development is the perfect storm of undesirable qualities: managed code, proprietary language, proprietary interfaces, restricted APIs, restricted distribution, small number of users, major publishers subsidized, no multitasking or daemons.”
Excellent points. Windows Mobile was in fact the perfect platform for you but its freedom lead to its demise. The OEMs all innovated with their own UI and modifications leading to little commonality and extremely variable performance. This is the same direction Android is going but no ones knows when Google will tighten control. Apple took the opposite with very high levels of control and will never loosen it. Windows Phone is designed to try and take the best of both sides and be in the middle. Multiple OEMs all trying to innovate but Microsoft providing overall control to stop user confusion and ensure high performance.
Microsoft will continue to loosen its control over time as it is convinced that quality, performance and user experience are not harmed by giving more control to developers and OEMs.
Nokia negotiated more freedom and input to the direction of WP than anyone else so it will be interesting to see how they change things.
XNA is good for doing casual gaming and is used on the Xbox or PC for that purpose. It is not for Halo but then neither is a smartphone appropriate for a Gears of War, Halo or other marquee PC or Xbox game.
Best regards and happy coding.
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@Jonay
“Well, the fact (at least here in Spain) is that most consumers doesn’t like Windows at all. They tolerate it, but after the scars left behind by Windows Vista, the public perception of Microsoft is not exactly rosy.”
I understand. This is a fact that MS will have to battle against. I think they made a poor decision to name their mobile OS “Windows Phone”. I like Windows (even Vista which was a great OS if your H/W was good) but there are too many years of consumers blaming Windows for every problem their PC had so the perception of a phone being the same as a PC is just stupid.
However it is done now as is Nokias decision. If I worked for Nokia I’d do everything I could to promote the WP7 models as Nokia’s great product and downplay the Microsoft component. This will be easier over time as Nokia differentiates more.
Yes, Nokia should also continue with Meego as their enthusiast model but the life or death of Nokia will depend on widespread success with WP7 over the few years.
BTW, I keep seeing people say that no matter how successful Meego is, Nokia will kill it. I have only heard that Elop actually said that Meego will not replace WP7 as the prime OS for Nokia. This is very different. I hope that Meego continues as the premium (and lower volume) product line for Nokia.
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@FelipeC
“You must not understand how media works in this century. This “tiny minority” is in fact the most important….”
I don’t understand why you say this. I said exactly the same point in support of Pat.
I am 100% with you on the New Coke analogy. I doubt the exec’s and BOD took into account the level of emotions that Nokia vs Microsoft fans have. This is a tiny % of the population and consumers but a vocal minority that can influence heavily as in New Coke.
We are in violent agreement on this. I think Nokia is the one who did not understand the importance of the enthusiasts and influencers.
I can disagree about Mango being the same as Android and iOS as I know all of them well and can make a judgement that Mango is a more integrated and exciting platform. (personal opinion of course)
I can not make any judgement on it compared to Meego since I have not used Meego.
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@Son of a Finn “Best regards and happy coding.” Did I say something that offended you? If I did: sorry, it wasn’t intentional. I was really enjoying our conversation.
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@Son of a Finn Oh, sorry, my bad.
Well, hopefully you would have a chance to check out MeeGo on the N9. Probably before you try Mango.
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@Pat
“Did I say something that offended you? If I did: sorry, it wasn’t intentional. I was really enjoying our conversation.”
Absolutely not! I am also enjoying the conversation, it is good to talk with people who have different views and perceptions who add to my knowledge and understanding. Too many contributors on open comment blogs are stating emotional, often rude opinions without adding value.
My sign-off, of “Best Regards and Happy coding” was meant in a purely positive way. With the July 4th weekend approaching here, I may not read the blog for another 4 days.
Let me try a different way.
Have a happy Canada Day (July 1) and a happy Independance Day! (July 4)
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@FelipeC
“Oh, sorry, my bad”
No, you’re not bad, just confused. 🙂 Joke!
“Well, hopefully you would have a chance to check out MeeGo on the N9. Probably before you try Mango.”
I hope so but I’ll likely get a developer release for Mango first (I’m not a developer but I work with many companies associated with WP7 and Android). I don’t know what the schedule is for a USA release of the N9.
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for Harri Viitamäki, I agree with you as a Nokia consumer and sharholder.
shareholders should sue this board and ceo in Finand immediately.
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@another adaptation guy
Whoa nelly; lets just curb some of the misinformation you are spouting
There would be zero porting work involved in getting the platform software onto other ARM based hardware platforms. None.
The Nvidia Tegra2 also comes with absolutely insanely good X11 OpenGL ES2 support out of the box. Second to none.
The time spent would be in hardware/chip design/fabrication and all the other supporting hardware integration/miniaturization. Hardware platforms are chosen years in advance, which is why the n9 is shipping on such long in the tooth hardware. Hardware dudes are fundamentally conservative, which is kind of why they suck balls at writing software. (Guess who works for a hardware company where upper management is rife with radio dudes)
The n9 uses X11 much like the n900, it is desktop Linux which really is every bit as fit for mobile phones as Android (java for f**ks sake) or Darwin/NeXTStep if your phone wears combat boots.
@another adaptation guy (Just incase you thought I had stopped addressing you)
What you are trying to tell people is that Linux software development for ARM is fundamentally different from the mainstream x86 development 10s of thousands of developers are familiar with. This is a crock of shit.
@world
Disclaimer: Commentator works in the Linux integration field, and although he considers himself a clown wears a relatively small pair of clown shoes in comparison to the other jack asses kicking around and using the term port entirely out of context.
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@Son of a Finn @SLI
Good people. Common sense prevails in your posting.
@Finn
No (successful) corporation is philanthropic at the expense of its stake holders.
@world
I agree the messaging has been absolutely atrocious. I would chose WP7 over Symbian any day. I would chose Linux over everything else since I am a bit of a zealot and love me some Qt. Unfortunately the closest thing you get to Linux on modern compelling hardware is Android, which makes me feel like a bird shat on my tongue, but what can you do?
@xhhbtrdjd
I like your figurative speech, but 1.1 shows very little insight. The software on the n9 could be shipped (as is) on completely new hardware if all they changed was the architecture from ARM Cortex A8 to a dual core ARM Cortex A9. Upgrading the GPU would probably require a newer driver and require relinking your userspace.
@outsider @pat
Very well said
@ crowbar
Harmattan is Meego; not in kernel, nor in architecture, but due to the fact we lost 6 months of development time banging maemo and meego together for marketing purposes. It really is the prodigy of homosexual reproduction, which is not famous for feeding Darwins sausage machine. The libdui story warrants a book/expose or at least an airing on the daily WTF
@ Pat
” Nokia’s customers are unaware of the announcements”. That is a hair raising mentality, every bit as “Our customers are ignorant tools who will by our aborted platforms running on 7 year old CPUs” which is not an actual quote, but might as well be.
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I strongly agree with Felipe!
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@yet another adaptation guy *@Everyone
I agree with you but would suggest you don’t hold your breath while waiting for common sense or even a sensible decision from the management team. *I believe development of the hardware platform should have continued while the MeeGo/Meamo question was on going. There should have been separate road maps for hardware and software but they should have complemented each other.
This doesn’t mean I think the N9 is a poor choice next the current crop from other manufactures but it is definitely less competitive. I hope that Qt in MeeGo utilises the graphics hardware to the same extent or better as was report for the N8.
http://mynokiablog.com/2011/05/30/rumours-nokia-n9-nokia-is-using-a-patented-new-technology-not-seen-in-any-other-device-in-the-market/
Certainly something like this would have been harder to integrate into a new product. Isn’t that the point, if it was easy then everyone would already be doing it. A new exciting feature that changes how people use their technology is always going to generate a lot of hard work.
The development of technology should be a fun and exciting, if it isn’t then either you’re in the wrong profession or your employer is in the wrong market!
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1. MeeGo is much better (technical and user-interface) than Windows Phone.
2. With MeeGo, Nokia would remain independent. But with Windows Phone, Nokia would be dependent of Microsoft. And Microsoft only pursues his own interests. Microsoft degrades Nokia to a pure hardware-supplier. Nokia will lose its independency and autonomy.
Windows Phone was a very bad decision for Nokia.
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@Everyone
I apologise for my pessimism, what I’ve seen of MeeGo I really like. As for Nokia from my great experience with their customer support people, I can tell you that they’re very friendly delightful people.
Who knows Software may be going the way of Hardware and becoming a cheap replaceable commodity. Curiously, Microsoft and Google are the only two purely software companies entering the mobile phone market (that I know of). This suggests to me a reversal of fates may be occurring, while google offer a ‘free’ OS to hardware vendors, Microsoft doesn’t. The platforms which run these operating systems are the products that consumers are buying. Maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part.
I’m looking forward to the N9.
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I’m not usually interested in politics or politicians and I don’t really do brand loyalty but on the day I read of Elop’s announcement that he was killing Symbian, demoting MeeGo and imposing WP7 on Nokia I wrote a letter to the competition department at the EU and asked them to intervene.
It was so blindingly obvious that announcing the death of Symbian long before having anything to replace it with would devalue Nokia’s current product range and result in a share price crash making Nokia nice and cheap for a predatory take over.
I pointed out Elop was one of M$ largest shareholders and that this announcement only made sense to M$ not to Nokia.
Needless to say I got a completely spineless response about the EU ‘closely monitoring the situation’.
I understand around a quarter of Finland’s tax take originates from Nokia which means this shite is not only going to ruin a great company, he’s going to screw a whole country.
@Felipe
I’ve read LG are now taking an interest in MeeGo, if they were to put it on a handset would they be able to use the outstanding UI demonstrated on the N9 or do Nokia have some kind of control over that?
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@URNumber6 Indeed, that’s my fear too. I do think Nokia’s strategy is not going to work, but I hope Finland is prepared for that by the time.
But no, a lot of the UI elements are closed, so it certainly will be a very different beast. However, I have been looking into one of the elements, the mcompositor-swipe extension, and I don’t think it’s very hard to rewrite. Perhaps many UI elements can be rewritten. However, how polished it looks I think it depends on the UI departments of LG (or whatever company ends up making the product).
Many of us have pushed very hard for Nokia to make the UI open source (with a non-GPL license to avoid patent issues), but needless to say, without much success. Nokia has never been a really open company, only some people were.
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FelipeC,
“Many of us have pushed very hard for Nokia to make the UI open source (with a non-GPL license to avoid patent issues), but needless to say, without much success. Nokia has never been a really open company, only some people were.”
Why would you want to open source the UI?
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@ilkkah Why would you want to open source anything? So that other people can benefit from it, modify it to suit their needs, improve it, etc. It would be nice to see other devices with a similar UI, perhaps improved 🙂 It’s certainly better than MeeGo’s official mobile UX, or any other open source mobile UI I’ve seem.
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Felipe, there is a thing that has been bugging me for quite some time. Every WP7 must me at least 1Ghz, and now it seems that the N9 from Nokia is also 1Ghz’d. But… Is there a lower limit for a mobile to use MeeGo? I mean, couldn’t *all* mobile phones from Nokia (or from any other manufacturer) fit MeeGo? Linux’s system requirements are on the low end, so… Why not?
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“Linux’s system requirements are on the low end, so… Why not?”
I’d hate to sound a little bitter like most of other Elop hating commentators but here’s your answer:- Steve Elop and his bean counting cohorts…That’s why not.
Let’s for 1 second entertain the thought of MeeGo’s backward compatibility down to say the Nokia N8, X6 all the way to the E and C series’ models. It just won’t happen. Why? Because it will add and prolong said devices’ values. Precisely the kind of thing that can actually harm the future WP7 devices and possibly also planned MeeGo ones. Coincidentally I personally feel that having kept too many models across the series are exactly Nokia’s Achilles heel. You can still cater to price points with fewer products in more ways than one if that read right to your eyes.
The slightly negative slant amongst normal people with some passable computer knowledge apparent at anything Linux is; “Oh it’s good for older hardware.”. For the most part that line of thinking are 1 of the biggest culprit to desktop Linux’ current momentum (lack of). Critically this needs a drastic change.
At this point for MeeGo to make a strong point, it’s way better if it’s implemented on more current technologies, it being Linux or not or for having the flexibility to run on older ARMv7/11 driven phones. That just means far far better optimized user experience if we look at it in a diff perspective.
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There’s some interesting Nokia market predictions, analysis, and comments about the recent Q2 results on this marketing guy’s blog:
Modelling the Upscale Potential for Nokia-Microsoft Smartphones in 2012 and 2013 – Best Case Scenario
http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/07/first-look-into-microsoft-nokia-smartphones-in-2012-and-2013-expect-climb-back-to-barely-20m-in-unit.html
It’s nice to know we developers aren’t just nut cases angered by change.
Some highlights:
“Expect climb-back to barely 8% markets share by Q4 of… 2013 – best case scenario”
“We also know that the reseller market has put Nokia smartphones on a sales boycott”
“So we calculated that Stephen Elop’s actions have already caused 1.4 Billion dollars of abandoned profits in just five months. He should be fired for that already. It is criminal. But it does get far worse.”
…he goes on to calculate that Stephen Elop costs Nokia $10M USD *every day*.
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@FelipeC
But Nokia is in in the business of making money, so I was wondering how open sourcing would help Nokia with its plans.
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I have to agree, I’d rather buy a Meego phone, than a Windows phone.
Nokia has made a huge mistake with Elop and Windows and unfortunately it will end up costing them hugely. I have been a long time Nokia user, but now when Micro$oft is looming near, I hopped to Android camp.
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@ikkah:
You certainly are not aware that Android is, on its core, just a Linux too. And that Red Hat, a purely GNU/Linux company, has been on profits for years, multiplying it value year after year. So yes, you can make a lot of money on free and open software.
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@Jonay, I don’t think you can compare Red Hat to phone companies here.
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@ikkah:
Why not? You were talking about the drawbacks of opensourcing things, and I presented you two clear examples of huge success using open source software.
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Well, because Nokia sells products and Red Hat is selling services.
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Maybe Red Hat selling services isn’t 100% accurate – there may be some quality assurance type of things that come with RHEL. But I believe it’s pretty much services anyway.
Also, I don’t know how Android is relevant here. It’s also not a product that someone sells in itself. Google gives it away and makes most of the money from it indirectly (a bit like Red Hat?).
So, I don’t understand why Nokia should make their operating system open source. Having some kind of differentiation in the software platform means that there is one more way to get an edge against competitors. IMO. Would like to hear how I’m wrong 🙂
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@ilkkah
I agree, FOSS is a nice philosophy that is easy to support other people doing but long term profitability has been a challenge for most companies. I would support Nokia continuing to invest in Meego as a future high end platform but for the mainstream; Windows Phone was a better choice than Android.
Today many Android users complain that the phone OEMs and MNOs are far behind in Android versions and they do not update. To come even close to being current, the OEM must stop differentiating the OS and features that the OS effects. This will lead to Android being a commodity OS as OEMs all ship the same S/W. Since they all have access to the same chipsets and components, Android handsets will become price commodities like PC’s today. Companies that know how to succeed with 5% -10% margins will ultimately own this business. (Dell, Acer, Asus, Samsung etc) Motorola and HTC will have to become their own high performance Android (and lose some compatibility) or learn to change their business models.
Windows Phone could have been similar, MS mandates that all phones get updated to new OS versions and limits the differentiation to support this (in order to get happy end users). However, Nokia by making the big bet with Windows Phone was able to get the ability to drive changes that no one else had the right to do. At a minimum they will get first to market advantages.
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@Pat
You said “It’s nice to know we developers aren’t just nut cases angered by change.”
I am not going to say that you are a nut case but… 🙂
Building your case on a blog that makes up their own numbers to support their case isn’t exactly solid evidence. – “and note, from Q3 2011 all numbers are projections by my consultancy, TomiAhonen Consulting”
With most large business forecasting organizations thinking that Windows Phone will end up being approx 20% of the market (#2 or #3), I’d give them as a group more credibility that Tomi Ahonen.
Actually my confidence in anyone forecasting is pretty low. Nokia will make their own future, with good execution they should do well.
Mango is excellent. I am very interested to see how well the Japanese version works. I have been worried that the UI paradigm with works well in English would not work for Asia languages where top down and right to left reading is so different. Fujitsu/Toshiba have shown their device publicly now and it will be the first Mango to ripen so consumer acceptance in Japan will be known by September.
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@Son of a Finn [citation needed]
Who says WP will be 20% of the market?
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@FelipeC
Hmm reports are saying theries another meego product on the rise
that true?
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Given the situation as it is, I think the best thing to do is:
1) Let Elop have his Mango. Microsoft will make it work, one day. Then let the customers decide if they want to BUY it, which is an entirely different story. Our daughter (a typical mobile customer) would not touch a Windows phone with a stick after suffering with Windows on the PC.
2) Guarantee the future and survival of Meego@Nokia by positioning it as the “low end, free” operating system.
3) Leave it up to Accidenture to destroy Symbian. They will handle this with expertise. I really think it should be possible to replace Symbian with Meego. Symbian’s days are over.
If you are only allowed to create 1 Meego phone per year then see that as an ADVANTAGE: Make it the iPhone of Nokia! The model everybody wants to buy and that stands out from the rest.
I am all excited about the N9 and would love to see it succeed. I would probably even give up my awesome HTC Desire HD for it.
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@FelipeC
Have you guys been approached by the Alien Davilk guys, and what is your mind about that. If u guys can have something about that it can greatly pushed the Meego platform
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The N9 IMO has the best, most intuitive UI in the smartphone market. Paired with the beautiful hardware and screen its just the perfect match.
The camera seems to be really awesome also, everyone seems to be praising it (In anantech I caught a nice reference in the ‘T-Mobile MyTouch 4G Slide’ review: “…I’d still put the Nokia N8 at the top (and the N9 even higher when it releases), but this definitely in the conversation for second best, along with the Galaxy S II (which we’re still testing)…”.
I want this phone so much!
I Just hope Nokia will keep updating and developing maemo6/meego together with “their” WP7 which I don’t really care about.
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why have not seen any Nokia N9 shipped after announce on Jun. 21st ?
Is it because of Elop’s blocking or the old nokia way of delay after delay ?
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@Peter Huh? Some countries already have launch dates. How many devices will be shipped? That’s what worries me.
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@FelipeC Without India/UK/Germany/USA on the list, how well can it reach largest consumers ?
is it restricted by the exclusive agreement with microsoft or by shoortage of components ?
I am in USA which Weber has declared no n9, no meego, no symbian, no s40 phones for me.
How can I import an English version of Nokia Meego N9 ? Austrlian version ? Chinese version ?
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@Peter I do not know 😦
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@FelipeC
” [citation needed], Who says WP will be 20% of the market?”
Fair request though based on the publicity these got I thought it was common knowledge.
I’ll start with – IDC, Gartner and Pyramid Research
http://money.cnn.com/2011/03/29/technology/windows_phone_7_forecast/index.htm
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1622614
http://www.pyramidresearch.com/points/item/110509.htm?sc=PP051011_SMRT
Bing is your friend. 🙂
Sorry for the delay in replying. Asia business trip and then vacation…
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My bet is Gartner is wrong on this one 🙂
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Gartner is so consistently wrong I’m surprised companies still pay them to make public predictions about how successful their products will be. (For a good laugh, look at what they predicted for ringtones back in 2008-2009)
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My confidence in analyst forecasts is no higher than yours, Felipe and Pat. However, with 3 of them indicating success for WP then it indicates to me that they hear from Mobile Operators that they are open to it. Nokia will attack the market with the Tango version that is targeted to lower cost WP7 smartphones. As Android is moving more to dual core, high performance chips then I think there will be a large volume opportunity at the low end. WP7 is proven to run very smooth on 2 year old single core chips and should do well at the low cost market. The UI is simple and easy for new Smartphone users and Nokia is all about scale and volume so I remain optimistic.
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@Son of a Finn First of all. WP7 only works on certain Qualcom chips, and they are quite expensive, truly low end phones are not only 2 year old single core chips, but they also have certain limitation, including CPU frequency, but most significantly memory size. I doubt WP7 can really work with those constrains, plus, Nokia already mentioned a strategy for the “next billion” that doesn’t include WP.
Perhaps you are thinking of feature phones, but Symbian is positioned there already, and Android is moving in that direction as well. China seems particularly interested to make Android succeed in that market. I doubt WP7 can really compete in that level.
I don’t see what these analysts are seeing. Have they ever looked at Linux kernel code? Do they even grasp the advantages of having 100 companies working on the some code-base? Have they considered the fact that work done for truly embedded real-time devices benefits supercomputers, and work there back again to smart-phones? No, I don’t think they understand Linux at all, and why it was possible for Android to succeed in ways WP7 never will.
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You are correct that the current WP7 phones must use the 8XXX Snapdragon chips from Qualcomm but this is not a future limitation. (I can’t say more than that for confidentiality reasons) My point is that with a 1 GHz single core processor today, WP7 is extremely smooth and fluid, unlike Android devices with much more powerful and expensive chips. Android is nice but you can see a jerkiness and hesitation in the operation.
Also on the WP7 cost issue and your point about it shipping on expensive Qualcomm chips; 81% of Android phones ship on Qualcomm chips based on the last stat’s I saw.
The Tango minor update coming after Mango will be targeted at getting great performance from lower cost processors. The sweet spot for Nokia will be in moving Symbian and feature phone customers to a nice performance, easy to use smartphone based on Tango. The low cost Android phones do NOT give a good experience. China will be a major market for WP7. The carriers and the government are supportive of WP7. Remember that China Mobile contracted Borq to make their own version of Android because they didn’t want Google control and needed support for their own “standards”. Google and the Chinese gov. are not good friends, remember what happened with Google search business in China.
Analysts don’t care about the code or how it is created. Neither do consumers. Analysts base their forecast on developer adoption and barriers, business models, carrier desires and support, past history, company effectiveness and resources as well as the technologies involved. Consumers buy what is advertised and marketed well.
By your argument and logic, all versions of Windows and iOS (long ago forked from being an Open Source OS) would have no market share. PC’s and iPhones seem to invalidate that.
BTW, I like Android and promote it as part of my job. 🙂
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@Son of a Finn It doesn’t matter what Android is shipping on currently, since it’s using Linux, there’s always the option to use something else very easily, as in fact many people have done already. With WP7 the issue is completely different, there’s no other option. Who knows, maybe they hacked the whole thing for Qualcom, and now it’s difficult to make it work in other chips. Until it ships on another chip (and it works well), this might very well be the case, and wouldn’t surprise me.
China will be a major market for WP7? Yeah, right. Unless anything changes, China is going for Android.
Exactly, analysts don’t care about code, but reality does. Once Nokia managers wonder why is it so difficult to get a project to run WP7 on other chips (pure speculation here), that’s when reality hits.
Windows has market-share because of monopolistic measures, iOS works on only one phone, they don’t need a particularity flexible kernel. But we are not talking about a single phone, we are talking about a platform.
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FelipeC: “Have they ever looked at Linux kernel code?”
Quite surely not. I looked into Linux kernel code last summer and I was quite shocked how much of the hairy deep inside code is encumbered by the multicore architecture. All the data structures must be protected of the simultaneous access of several cores. Furthermore, it must be very, very efficient making code unreadable.
Additionally, forwarding interrupts to several cores is tricky and I have heard that some PC motherboards still do it wrong. And, to save power, you must be able to dynamically shut down extra cores when they are not needed – and transfer interrupts evenly to the remaining cores. Linux can do that.
Ability to do this in Linux is a result of 10 year trial and error development. I find it hard to believe that anyone could extend single-core OS to efficient robust multi-core OS in less than five years. I think that it at least doubles the amount of code in the kernel.
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Well since we’ve just seen the new Symbian Belle and it looks good to me that just confirms my initial reaction towards Elop canning it as a bad move and it’s an ok OS that just needs a UI change. That made me mad since I’ve been a loyal Nokia purchaser after that annoucement I gave my N8 to my friend, my N900 (3g burned out on it) to another friend and bought a dual core android. For that reason and him signing up with Microhard I’m pretty much in the “Elop is a Trojan” camp and I kind of hate him.
However, I think I read an article somewhere on the internet that Nokia shopped meego around to the other manufacturers and none of them would get on board for fear that Nokia has too much control over it. Can anybody confirm that? I mean we didn’t see these meego devices until after Elop’s MS announcement (except for the wetab).
So maybe Nokia dropping meego as it’s focus is actually better for meego in that more manufacturers will now come on board and it will get developed for faster.
I mean in a way your kind of making his argument for him if it’s true that the other manufacturers would not make hardware for it until Nokia’s perceived control over meego was gone.
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@Ahmad Madq Ismahl, there is no such thing as free lunch. If nobody does deep work on MeeGo, no way hordes of other manufacturers would be able to make it reasonably usable. There is need to have a leadership and be a driver.
Nokia seem to have lost such leadership will with regards to MeeGo. I’m not sure how far will Intel work with that, I’d be very sceptical given their current dancing around Android/x86 and blow up from Nokia that is very hard to forget. Maybe we should just forget about non-Android-based Linux mobile devices for a while — who knows what HP’s licensing talks will end up with WebOS for other manufacturers but currently, quite unfortunate, there is only Android left.
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@FelipeC
Do you know about any software updates that may be planned for the Meego Harmattan. These have been alluded to on this page.
I ask because earlier this year, I submitted a feature request for the phone UX with the Meego bugzilla and that was accepted. Since when I’ve heard nothing but now I’m not sure if it would have even been brought to the attention of you folks at Nokia. If it hasn’t (couldn’t or wouldn’t) is there an alternative mechanism for me to express my request for Meego and the N9.
Thank you.
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Someone asked if MeeGo would run well on less powerful hardware than current typical ~1GHz specs. A few years ago I worked on a prototype project that ported Linux to an ARM9 phone platform. We successfully demoed 1.x Android on that and performance was quite fine, despite having to do with 256MB RAM, ~400MHz CPU and a graphics core that basically couldn’t accelerate anything at all. But Android is managed code, so a port of MeeGo/Qt would have performed even better. It makes a lot of sense to run MeeGo on hardware priced/spec’d for developing countries. Someone should invest in that.
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> Ahmad Madiq Ismahl says:
> August 29, 2011 at 11:17
> However, I think I read an article somewhere on the internet that Nokia shopped meego around to the other manufacturers and none of them would get on board for fear that Nokia has too much control over it. Can anybody confirm that?
The most important reason is probably not control (although it certainly is an important influence). It is more that Android was the winner of super-ultra-high-risk award for getting an iPhone competitor out fast enough. Going through that phase of terrifying uncertainty is not something the non-Apple industry wants to experience too soon again. Also, the Android investments are just now starting to generate the really good profits. Why take another “ecosystem” risk when your business is exactly where you gambled it to be in the first place?
It could simply be too early for the operators and manufacturers to introduce another serious platform contender. I’m guessing WP has been the third logical choice for operators for a long time already. That Microsoft failed to fill a third base is definitely not a good forecast on other contenders for that position. Too much risk.
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Bottom line is the OS was more than a year late and the ship was sinking. Someone had to make decisions – right or wrong. Don’t blame Elop for having to make that choice. And yes, Nokia will survive because they make great hardware, and never understood software made the difference. Maybe now they do.
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@buffalobill
You are completely wrong on every single point. The OS was just fine as you can see from N9, and it was in a huge momentum. The N9 is a far cry better than the Lumia 800. Imagine how much better would it have been if the strategy shift didn’t osborne the product and the team. Nokia did realize that SW makes a difference long time ago. There were operational inefficiency issues, but Elop could have cured that if he ever wanted it. In fact, he didn’t want it, it was the best cover for him to execute his hidden agenda. That was a decision for a hostile takeover, it’s clear today. Microsoft needed Nokia like water. So please stop the BS that the OS was not good. The reason for the decision was completely different, and your argument was just used as a cover. Today it’s clear the cover was false, but the move was made. I don’t blame Elop for executing what he was hired for, but I blame Elop for hiding the real reasons of the change, blame the innocent, lying to the teams and to the world, creating FUD, and almost blowing up even the new strategy together with the company. He is smart (when it comes to politics), but not smart enough (when it comes to technical execution).
The key in the strategy change was only to get a new market and OEM for Microsoft. M$ got it so cheap they couldn’t believe it themselves. The second key (which was not in Nokia’s interest, but only Microsoft’s) was not even killing Symbian, but to kill MeeGo, the Qt ecosystem and open source mobile SW, which were going to take the place for the 3rd ecosystem. This decision was so irrational from Nokia point of view that it must have been pushed from outside. It was so pathetic and emotional that it’s 100% sure that Ballmer himself pushed this through (directly or indirectly).
So the deal was saving Microsoft mobile, fire Finnish workforce (i.e. optimize for short term) and silence the Finnish/European politicians with a few cheap gestures. But they executed this so poorly that Nokia shares plunged to bottom because stupid Elop was so eager killing old Nokia platforms that it osborne’d Nokia sales.
There is not enough punishment for these guys (I mean Ballmer, Elop and the Nokia board). Especially the Nokia board: they have betrayed the people who have made Nokia a great company, and they have betrayed Finland for foreign financial interests. They are not criminals after the law, since I am sure they took extreme care on this; but morally they are no different than a mafia (yes, Mr. Ollila, your final deeds wash away the good past).
That’s the bottom line, buffalobill. Now about Microsoft, do you watch the news related to Microsoft and license bullying? Now Nokia is pulled into the same destructive business model. Let’s see where this will lead, but this mess around SW licenses must be fixed now. One thing for sure, I will not buy anything related to Microsoft, and in my little circles I will do as much against them as possible.
I hope that in the end Microsoft becomes an open-source company, and that will be a nice day :D.
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I have recently re-read the ‘Burning Platforms’ memo and found myself left with a question, which is the burning platform?
There are three to choose from:
1) Meego, which didn’t exist in a commercial sense (at the time of the memo).
2) Symbian, this has had three new product lines launched recently.
3) Windows Phone 7, which to the best of my knowledge was loosing market share at the time of the memo.
Well that’s answered that one.
In my opinion if the ‘Burning Platforms’ memo had pointed to Meego as Nokia’s saviour then the media and consumers alike would be as enthralled by it as they are now the Lumia phones.
Nokia has not jumped from a burning platform but to a burning platform and are in the process of trying to rescue it. To address what I believe is wrong with Windows Phone 7 and aside from my personal taste, I can not see how Nokia can deliver an innovative exciting new phone while Microsoft creates and manages the specification.
I fear that we may not see another real Nokia flagship phone for a long time, if ever again.
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+Huanle
Yup. From a burning platform to a sinking platform.
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When I got my first Nokia phone, I found myself to be even more impressed by Nokia themselves. They actually seemed to listen to their customers.
Their Ideas Project again gives this impression but its been years since I got my first Nokia phone and now I’m a jaded cynic. Do you think they’re listening?
I would suggest that being able to listen to your core consumers is as important as any R & D department and by that I don’t mean a ‘Sales’ team, I mean consumer research, focus groups, engaging with those passionate about your products. All of that must cost greatly, if executed effectively then the benefits are bound to be greater.
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For me myself, i have owned Nokia N9 awhile ago, i would say its a well polished product no matter in software or hardware. And Meego is something that more related to Nokia trademark – Simple and Easy to use UI. I will definitely support Meego more than Windows mobile because Nokia was a giant in mobile phone market, they should have their own OS to lead back the market in smartphone instead of partnership with Microsoft. Just my 2 cents. SUPPORT MEEGO!!
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aybe a way to make Nokia thinking – do not buy Lumia phones. If the sales were zero, maybe Nokia would return to MeeGo.
But:
1) It is very hard to make all people avoid buying these phones. Some people like Windows Phone and Nokia and like these phones and will buy them. And some people will buy ANY Nokia. Later they
2) Maybe the Nokia will not be able to make a right decision and to revert to the MeeGo…
Elop has told that the MeeGo will be closed even if the N9 would be a super-hit. 😦
P.S. Excuse me for being a bit obsence. I know why Lumia is caused Lumia – “prostitute” in Spanish. Because Elop has turned Nokia into a prostitute. Microsoft’s prostitute.
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I just got my N9 a couple of weeks ago. After using it constantly on a daily basis and falling in love with the Meego UI, true-open platform (with Debian’s apt magic) and lovely hardware, I can put my hand on my hard and honestly say that Elop has to be either:
1) a Microsoft schill
2) a complete idiot
3) both
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@koshkin@rbcmail.ru
At present there’s NO urgent need to boycott Nokia’s current WP7 products. I’ll tell you why:-
1. A typical Windows user still asks “Umm wait? Will WP7 behave like my Win PC/laptop?And why is Metro UI feels alot better than Aero?”. It’s not because Win 7 are a complete POS job it’s just that it’s a perception problem AND people just expect a seamless mobile experience. So to them when they see “Windows” and “7” in 2 supposedly DIFFERENT OSes, the perception is the same even if they’re confused about UIs.
2. And then there’s pricing concerns. Whatever Nokia puts out right now it goes head to head to any mid – high end Androids. Doesn’t matter which UI works best, contrary to popular belief that only nerds care about HW specs, ANYONE can read, ask and compare. Right now best thing that MS and Nokia could do is cut deals with carriers and see what sticks on the wall. By the numbers it’s still not working.
3. Windows 8… That to me is the crucial make or break MS OS revision that they just can’t afford to mess up AND fully tie in the WinPhone UX. That’s their only chance and that’s when people will decide to take WinPhone seriously…or not.
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To Mr Contreras and the rest of the MeeGo/N9 team:
What you have created is a work of art and the fact that narrow minded fools like Elop and his army of Microsoft droids would destroy it only serves to illustrate their utter lack of taste and culture. I have owned and used BlackBerry, Android and Apple smartphones and none of them come within a mile of the sleek efficient beauty of the N9 which I carry today. The speed and versatility of your OS is unsurpassed and the aesthetics blows everything else out of the water. You have shown that it is possible to be truly innovative in the fiercely competitive smartphone market without compromising on look and feel. In between Apple’s burning desire to own all things of good design(tm), Goggle’s big-brother-esque electronic dog collar philosophy(c) and Microsofts pitiful attempts at squeezing the Windows(r) “experience” into something pocket sized you manage to show us a different, and better, way forward.
We are all poorer as a result of Elop’s foolish decision to jump into bed with Microsoft, not to mention the shameful way he and his cronies have plotted against the success of the N9 by artificially strangling the marketplace. After all, isn’t the great promise of capitalism supposed to be consumer choice? Well I made my choice and it’s one I’m not regretting in the least – even though it meant I had to import my N9 from Sweden. Thank You for creating this gem of a phone!
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Just got hands on N9–simply an Artwork.
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As a long time nokia customer and a student in software eng, I really regret this for nokia.
I bet you everyone would be talking about nokia if by now they had good sales in symbian, maemo/meego & windows phone. It would have been even wiser to go with meego alone. Instead, they chose the worst (WP handcuffs us) platform.
AND because of that, nokia lost its originality although the lumia’s are of good quality.
IS WINDOWS PHONE BETTER THAN MEEGO?
Yes? How?
No? Is it too late to in back?
Elop is good in management but being an ex-microsoft i’m convinced Balmer pushed him.
The “eco-systems” war he was talking about is utter nonsense!
In the end i the consumer can’t do anything about it!
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Nokia’s WP business plan doesn’t seem to be working. With the dismissal of 10,000 employees yesterday, it seems there is no plan B.
For me, Nokia as technology provider went down hill with the arrival of the N97. It is no secret that the N97 had a number of problems and none of these seemed to be addressed as time went on, indeed as I owned the phone it went from bad to worse. Now you might be thinking that I’m taking an opportunity here to ‘vent’ or ‘rant’, let me assure you that I am not.
All these problems led me to have a more intimate relationship with the Nokia customer support than I would normally expect to develop with a large technology company. This experience of the Nokia customer support was far from satisfactory, as I mentioned earlier problems that existed on day one with the N97 were still there on day N and they had multiplied. At the time I thought my experience was anomalous, when you make millions of phones one or two are bound to slip through quality assurance tests with an intermittent fault or faults which don’t immediately manifest. Now, if my experience wasn’t anomalous and indeed was closer to being typical then it won’t matter how much they peddle WP or any other platform.
I can not speak for anyone else except to suggest that if this the case then Nokia is fighting entirely the wrong battle (when reading about Nokia and their troubles you often see “great hardware but…”). Right now if I had a problem with my N9, I wouldn’t consider Nokia’s customer support team at all. With the emergence of Mr. Elop and the shift to WP, it almost seemed to me that Nokia was saying don’t buy our technology. This description is drawn from my experience and not a nebulous disappointed comment on a company that’s performing poorly.
From a strategic point of view, how many people (who’ll probably read this) have owned a Nokia 770, N800, N810 device before the Ipad was even suggested? At the time the Ipad was brought to market Nokia already had a older device in place but they did not develop the market share that they had indeed they abandoned it. These are the people bringing you Lumia phones. Rightly or wrongly, I’m going to tell you that I would do a better job of making Nokia profitable.
So, there’s no plan B and there have been rumours since Mr. Elop’s arrival that Nokia is being positioned for a Microsoft buy out. Truth or rumour either way it’s looking more and more likely to come true.
I suggest perhaps in the future there should be a “Rantner/Elop” award for poor management decisions akin to the Darwin Awards (Except the Darwin Awards have more positive out look).
Out of all that, if I were in charge of Nokia. I’d be looking address the ‘but’ in the “great hardware butt…” statement and to be honest I don’t think WP does that.
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sed ‘s/butt/but/’ ^
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Almost a year after the N9 was released, I went and get one Nokia N9 for my wife, since the Nokia N8 happilly took a swim, she wanted a good camera smartphone, and the 3 choices were, a new Nokia N8, the PureView 808, and the N9, I was a Nokia true fan user until we got the n97 and the n97 mini, I owned before that a E71 (great device) and, honestly, the N8 was a great camera, but a very bad phone, slow, buggy, inconsistent, etc. So why did we picked the N9, simple, because of MeeGo, honestly, who would buy a phone that its OS is already dead, well, only those who own a N9 can reply to that 🙂 it is simply the mose intuitive, amazingly fast, responsive, consisten phone I’ve used in a loooong time, I use a Galaxy S2, and it is great, but just having the N9 close made me think “what was nokia thinking by dropping the continuos development for MeeGo”.
I’m honestly not surprised of Elop’s behaviour, he’s just a Microsoft trojan horse, killing Nokia, and, in my humble opinion, ever since I’ve seen the Metro thing all over windows, and windows future, I’m just waiting to jump to another OS, Apple is not a choice (it’s a matter of principle), Android is ok, but not the BEST, I would really like to have a MeeGo laptop, MeeGo tablet, etc….
Now that most of MeeGo developers are gone from Nokia, and a third party option is planning on continuing this (old grat MeeGo pals), there seems to be light at the end of the tunnel.
P.S. I only used the N9 for 3 days when writting this review, and used Android for over a year before this, so I’m not talking as a fan, but as a user that respects and praises a good polished OS like MeeGo.
Thank you for giving this great piece of technology to the world!
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I tend not to leave a response, however after reading a few of the responses on this page
My disagreement with Elop on MeeGo | Felipe Contreras. I do
have 2 questions for you if it’s okay. Could it be only me or do some of these responses come across like they are written by brain dead visitors? 😛 And, if you are writing at additional places, I would like to follow you. Could you post a list of every one of all your social community sites like your Facebook page, twitter feed, or linkedin profile?
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Simply wish to say your article is as astonishing.
The clarity in your post is simply nice and i
could assume you’re an expert on this subject. Fine with your permission allow me to grab your feed to keep updated with forthcoming post. Thanks a million and please continue the enjoyable work.
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I really enjoyed the images put by Pat in comments than the original article. Nice one.
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2+ years later, still using an N9. Thanks for your work.
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I’m still using an N9 as well.
Android only got decent rendering support for complex scripts with Jelly Bean, to add a keyboard layout they don’t support I still have to install a 3rd party app, and to install a font for a script they don’t have one for I need to root the phone – much more difficult (and risky) than with MeeGo.
WP8 is even worse.
Nokia should have marketed such advantages. If they didn’t have confidence in MeeGo – they could have sold virtually the same devices with a choice of either MeeGo or Android installed and let the market decide. In the long run, I suspect many people would have preferred MeeGo.
Anyway thanks to you and your colleagues for your work on MeeGo and good luck in whatever you’re doing now.
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Thak you for another fantastic post. Where else could anyone get that type of into in such a perfect methokd of writing?
I have a presentation next week, and I am on the look for
such info.
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Way cool! Some very valid points! I appreciate you writing
this write-up and the rest of the website is also really good.
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