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Nokia and Open Source — a Trial By Fire
An anonymous reader writes "The H has a damning piece on Nokia's open source smart phone projects, Maemo and MeeGo, and why they failed. 'They did dumb stuff like re-writing the whole networking stack, duplicating as they went. So instead of re-using NetworkManager and improving it, and getting to market fast – they re-wrote, got something that still doesn't work well, failed to push Linux forward, and failed. Repeat that for every technology pick and you get the idea,' said Andrew Wafaa. 'The N900 was a great product. Immediately [after] it was launched it was announced that it was a dead product, ISV-wise. They announced a Qt re-write/project re-set. Then they merged Maemo into MeeGo, giving another project re-set. Then, when they were coming up to release in September 2010, there was another project reset to switch to a different Qt technology (even the Qt groups in-fight in Nokia). In consequence they have no shipping product.' At the same time, 'both Nokia and Intel were working on separate handset UIs using Qt, the former proprietary, the latter open-source. A better worked example of squandering your leadership role and wrestling yourself to the ground is hard to see. Nokia deserve their trial by fire – and I hope the people who truly screwed up the amazing Linux opportunity that was the N900 get shut down in the process.'"
That was Steve Jobs great brilliance. Nokia wasn't going to to play the crappy network game, and basically gave up on the north american carriers as worthless, incompetent, and not worth dealing with.
So Steve Jobs comes along, releases a device that, at launch, was inferior to Nokia's offerings, and was saddled by an outdated network. But suddenly people could see the potential in their phones, if only they had a decent network, and a decent OS. Nokia had (for the time) a decent OS, but no connection to the network, and by the time the network was getting fixed Apple had used off the money they generated to actually build a decent OS. Now you have RIM, Google and Apple all devouring marketspace that in the rest of the world was basically owned by Nokia, because they didn't catch up on innovation.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of Steve Jobs or a lot of the nonsense he pulls, but credit where credit is due, he forced the antiquated network providers in the US and Canada to start pulling their heads out of their asses. That should have been done by Jim Balsillie or Mike Lazaridis of RIM, but they didn't get it.
And now we have phones that are basically computers that can make phone calls. Nokia understood the phones that can do other stuff model, but it doesn't get computers that can make phone calls, and RIM is in the same boat. MS, Apple and Google all get it, it's a matter of how well they can execute and any number of other factors for them.