Intel Committed To MeeGo Despite Nokia Defection

CWmike writes "Intel put on a brave face Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, insisting that there is continued strong support from it and many companies for MeeGo, the open source software platform that Nokia last week said it would abandon in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7. 'Intel is disappointed at Nokia but life goes on,' said Intel's Renee James. 'Our decision and resolve on MeeGo is only stronger.' She pointed to a long list of companies participating in MeeGo development, including competitors AMD, TI and ST Ericsson; operators including Orange, Telefonica and Sprint; and software companies including Novell and Wind River. Intel expects to see MeeGo tablets shipping this year based on its Atom chip. Handsets will follow, James said. Despite its enthusiasm, however, Intel is sure to be negatively impacted by Nokia's decision."

Comments

As an N900 Owner...

[BJ_Covert_Action]

Let me be the first to say:

Thank you Intel!!!!!

Re:As an N900 Owner...

[mickwd]

Going whole hog for W7 is a disaster for Nokia.

Now if they'd gone for it as a stop-gap until Meego is ready, with promises to Microsoft that if they really make a good job of it then Nokia will continue to promote and sell it, then they've got a fair amount of leverage with the Beast of Redmond. Plus a lifeline if either one of W7 or Meego don't cut it.

It wouldn't have cost Nokia so much to do that, providing that what they said about actually shipping a Meego phone isn't an outright lie - they'll have to bring Meega to some level of readiness to do that anyway.

But instead they seem to have bet the farm on Microsoft, and Microsoft surely knows it. Nokia are going to get shafted.

As well as that, they already seem to have alienated most of their own workforce, and a large chunk of their user community.

(Yes, the N900 is very good - if they'd ported the latest Ovi maps, paid Adobe for the latest hardware-accelerated flash (which was already demonstrated running on it by Adobe), and polished a few of the standard apps, it would be superb. Still, lets see what happens with Meego).

Re:As an N900 Owner...

[miknix]

To be honest I've been impatiently waiting for a ARM-based netbook running Linux, during the last two or three years. Judging from previous /. commenters, I'm by far not the only one. With the latest happenings regarding the negative Nokia-Microsoft agreement and the continued beneficial commitment of Intel in supporting an open platform, I now realize that I'm mobilized to support Intel. I'm looking forward to acquire a Intel-based embedded Linux solution in the future and hopefully motivate myself in related opensource development.

Thanks Gunjan for your words.

Re:As an N900 Owner...

[Nursie]

Does Mappero give you the whole world, offline?

That's the major win for Ovi maps, for me.

I got used to its other quirks, and it guided me around the australian outback for months...

Apps

[shutdown -p now]

I have no doubt that Intel can complete MeeGo alone if need be, and even find a company or two to release handsets (MS did, after all). The question is: how do they convince application developers to target it? There are already two well-established players, iOS and Android, which have the critical mass. WP7 was late to the party, and consequently struggles hard for developer attention, but it at least has the advantage of being easiest to develop for. And still, only 8k apps so far there, with many big players notably missing. When MeeGo comes in, say, in a year (and I'm being optimistic here), why would mobile developers care to divert resources from existing well-entrenched platforms?

Re:Apps

[KiloByte]

MeeGo, unlike iOS or Android, is a desktop environment rather than a whole operating system. It's no different from Gnome or XFCE. Ie, you can run any regular Linux program on it, at most suffering from it not being well-integrated, just as if you ran a KDE program on Gnome.

And the last time I checked, your average Linux distribution has orders of magnitude more software than either iOS or Android.

Re:Apps

[arivanov]

The app developers are already convinced.

MeGo is not just phones. It is in-car entertainment and navigation, set top boxes, smart white goods, home automation and so on. There will be plenty of apps written for those markets. Even if there will be no phones it will live on.

Re:Apps

[diegocg]

QT could be used to develop common codebases for Symbian, MeeGo, iPhone and Android (via NDK). Developers would be really interested in something like that, but for some reason Nokia doesn't care.

Re:Apps

[shutdown -p now]

Since MeeGo is essentially a Linux desktop, most Linux "apps" that work on a normal desktop and can be compiled for Arm should run. A few UI tweaks should be in order to make them a little more touchscreen friendly, but MeeGo could have a large selection of "apps" quite quickly this way.

This is the same argument as why Windows 7 (desktop one) on tablets is a good idea. It doesn't work in practice. UI "tweaks" are not sufficient - you need a major UI redesign to get the app truly touch-friendly. Furthermore, there is the issue of battery life - the reason why e.g. iOS does so well in that department is due to its severely restricted multitasking. In contrast, if you want to look at a typical battery life of a mobile OS where spawning extra processes and threads and letting them run all the time in background is free for all, look no further than Windows Mobile.

Re:what has died is openness

[blair1q]

I say the opposite. Intel doesn't sell operating systems for a living, it sells chips. It only does software to get people to need more chips. It would be entirely in Intel's interest to make this OS as open and free as possible, to get it into as many hands as possible, to create demand for chips that will run it well.

not just a bad decision... it's an implosion.

[xeno]

The news is sad. I was stunned at what an amazingly powerful-yet-friendly platform Maemo is, and had high hopes for new Nokia N900-like devices running MeeGo in 2011-12. Instead, it looks like Nokia will be shoveling out devices running some zune-based drm-laden insecure crapware from Redmond. They're not getting my money to be sure, but the big picture is sad.

Let's see the sequence:
- Nokia picks up some executive deadweight cast off from Microsoft.
- He steers Nokia to buying shiny-but-slow crap from his former employer.
- He also dumps Nokia's Linux-based collaboration projects. (Maybe Elop's just a mole, and this was his main task?)
- Nokia commits to releasing the massively-processor-heavy WinMo7 OS on cheaper hardware for developing markets. (**HTC snickers and says "Good luck with that, sucker!!! **)
- Nokia investors recoil. The stock price drops... and keeps dropping.
- Customers shrug.
- Nokia employees assume this is a tacit admission that the company is going bankrupt.
- The employees' Union asks about severance packages.
- Nokia runs more ads for Symbian*3 on the N9... as if the higher-end N900 and its OS never existed.
- Nokia can't easily retreat, having crossed/burned/blown up it's Linux/Maemo/MeeGo/Android-related bridges.

Summary: Burned bridges, impossible commitments, angry employees, a doofus CEO, declining revenues, bewildered customers, a weak economy, and it just got in bed with a company that eats its partners after mating.

This isn't just a bad decision, it's an implosion.

-x