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.'"

Comments

Who is laughing now?

[wombatmobile]

Nokia's former CEO, a lawyer, failed to notice the product groups were in such disarray. How cool must his job have been? He got to fly around the world in his suit spending money, while his product guys are achieving nothing for years, and he didn't even notice!

Re:Who is laughing now?

[thijsh]

He got to fly around the world in his suit spending money!

He was Super-Lawyer???

Re:Who is laughing now?

[aliquis]

Nokia had early touchscreen, 3D interface, application store, ... ideas.

And the uhm, "Internet appliances" such as N770, N800, N810.

It was just that they never actually implemented them. And never made the later ones actual PHONES.

Re:Who is laughing now?

[segedunum]

I strongly suspect this was the Symbian side of the company trying to shut the obvious Linux path down. I was always suspicious of how the N*** series never developed into a proper smartphone. Qt was probably a logical choice and development direction to go in especially for third parties, but surely it should have been obvious to them far earlier. What then happened with Symbian? We got a half-arsed port of Qt that never amounted to anything. No one was strong enough to stand up to Symbian and the rest descended into a political mess.

Re:Who is laughing now?

[TheRaven64]

I strongly suspect this was the Symbian side of the company trying to shut the obvious Linux path down

I always assumed it was the other way around. Symbian, in particularly EXA2, was a solid kernel, with a good capabilities model, mostly-usespace device drivers, a great design for power management, and a large base of existing software. It even had a working POSIX implementation, but someone at Nokia saw Linux as more buzzwordy than Symbian, so decided to throw out a working stack and replace it with something horribly experimental (I own a Nokia 770 - power management is atrocious and the Linux OOM killer is pathetic).

Rather than take their existing, mature platform and evolve it slightly, they took a stack that was designed for the desktop and tried to wedge it into a mobile phone. The result was a mess, but all of the focus for smartphones was on Linux, not Symbian. I'd love to have a modern Symbian phone, with a working POSIX layer shipped as standard, but Nokia didn't want to ship anything like that.

Re:Who is laughing now?

[gordguide]

" ... Worse, Apple had been rumored to be designing a mobile phone as early as late 2002. For the industry (Nokia et al) to not have made any plans to circumvent this (shut them out with some exclusive contracts, start development of a touch screen phone themselves, etc.) was another example of "falling asleep at the switch."

Although you are probably right, I find the reasons why they felt they could safely ignore an Apple smartphone somewhat interesting.

There is a leaked memo from an executive meeting at RIM where they sat down and had an iPhone in hand to evaluate for the first time, just after launch. I'd give a link, but it wasn't widely reported and I'm not sure where it's at (so feel free to call it bull, but I did read about it somewhere I no longer recall a few months ago; I use a Blackberry).

Their hardware engineers had been telling them that the User Interface and enhanced features (beyond simply making a call) would be limited and easy to add to existing RIM products because there was no way you could put the necessary processing power into the phone and maintain battery life while still having a usable compact form factor. They had estimated battery life to be on the order of 2 to 3 hours if you actually used a feature that didn't involve a simple cell call.

So, prior to it's actual launch they saw it as lightweight competition and of no real threat. Combine that with RIM's belief (and Palm's) that a smartphone had to have a keyboard, although that doesn't really apply to Nokia, perhaps, and there's a recipe for complacency.

On the teardown report discussed in the meeting, the RIM engineers admitted they were taken by surprise at the level of miniaturization and compact layout of the PCB and components, which allowed Apple to stuff a huge battery inside; one much larger than RIM believed could fit prior to the launch. So there was a scramble on two fronts (hardware and software), not just one as they had somewhat expected. One is said to describe the first unit they were able to get a look at as "it's all battery". One can imagine a similar meeting at Nokia.

Some have suggested the delay in releasing a non-GSM version of the iPhone was essentially due to the difficulty of reducing the component footprint to allow for sufficient battery size.

Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smart

[PickyH3D]

Now the in-fighting cannot frequently cripple development of other projects.

Makes me feel a lot less bad for the Nokia employees that walked out. Although likely moving at the whims of management, this report makes them sound more like hobbyists that simply want to build their own and tinker, rather than shipping a good product.

It certainly makes a good case for replacing a lot of the management as well. If employees end up leaving as a result, then they probably weren't great employees anyway, or they did not understand the problems that they were causing to their own development cycle by diligently following those managers out the door.

And they ignored the North American Market.

[LWATCDR]

That is Nokia's big problem IMHO. The US has the biggest GNP of any single nation. It is a large unified market and it is just dumb to ignore it. Nokia didn't adapt the the US model by working with carriers to offer subsidized smart phones and didn't offer CDMA smart phones. Way back when Sprint had no really interesting smart phones I would have jumped on a Nokia smart phone. Now we have Android, IOS, WebOS, RIM, and WP7. I just got an EVO 4g but I would have bought the N900 if I could have for the same price and on Sprint.
Nokia believed that it could live marketing to the rest of the world and it did for a good while. Thing is all the new smart phone OSs are coming from North America.

Re:And they ignored the North American Market.

[Sir_Sri]

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.

Re:And they ignored the North American Market.

[GameboyRMH]

but it doesn't get computers that can make phone calls

They got it better than anyone else, but only after it was basically too late.

Re:And they ignored the North American Market.

[Mr Z]

It's almost like Nokia is the Commodore of the phone market. The Amiga took off in Europe but not so much in North America, where they kept pushing the Commodore 64-derived stuff. The Amiga had its fanboys here, but it never established a huge presence. Meanwhile, the Mac, which was technically inferior in nearly every way to the Amiga for quite a long time, took off. By the early 90s, I saw plenty of Macs, but only ever saw one Amiga in person. Its owner even showed off how it could emulate a Mac and run faster than a native Mac at the same clock rate would run. Technical superiority didn't matter, though.

Yes, it's not a perfect parallel, and Nokia's specific problems are certainly different than Commodore's. But lack of focus behind the cutting edge platform dogged them both.

I remember the joke at the time that if Commodore tried to sell sushi, they'd market it as "cold, dead fish." Kinda reminds me of how Nokia pushed Maemo.

Re:And they ignored the North American Market.

[Sir_Sri]

When the first Iphone launched Nokia phones had 3G, voice dialing, half decent web browsing, and workable Versions of MS office on them, and they retained decent call quality, video recording. The first iphone managed e-mail (done better by RIM at that point, not sure about nokia there), a much better, web browser and uh... an ipod with a big screen (other phones had MP3 players already). Lets face the sad reality here, north american wireless providers and phones in general lagged our european and asian counterparts significantly, because no one cared enough to fix it.

Apple made people care. And once people cared, and once computer makers got into the phone business rather than phone companies, they gutted the market.

Nokia's idea of a high end phone is the vertu, a $20 000 device that you can dial a special number to get a special call centre where they will direct you to 5 star restaurants so you don't have to hang out with people who can't afford $20K phones which connect to special call centres. I'm sure there will always be a market for that, but that problem can be solved in software for a lot less than 20k, *AND* the same software will solve a whole lot of other problems while you're at it (like finding the nearest dry cleaner or H&R block).

Re:And they ignored the North American Market.

[sarhjinian]

So Steve Jobs comes along, releases a device that, at launch, was inferior to Nokia's offerings, and was saddled by an outdated network

Well, there was the little issue of, you know, the user interface. The iPhone did show you what you could do with your phone, and it did it by not being completely irritating to use the way Symbian, Windows Mobile or BBOS were. Sure, it didn't have a 8 megapixel camera, or a hardware keyboard, or better-than-EDGE networking. But it turns out that people didn't really want those things: they wanted a phone that didn't suck to use.

I remember when the iPhone came out. I was working with Windows Mobile devices, mostly, at the time but did have some experience with Symbian and used a BB day-in-day-out and Apple's device didn't just move the goalposts on user experience, it changed the game. RIM you can excuse because they never pretended to make anything other than a perfect email device, but Microsoft and Nokia were either shamelessly arrogant or grossly incompetent in sticking with their completely-broken systems for so long.

I remember getting a new N86 8MP new when I dunked my E71. Compared to my partner's first-gen iPhone it was better in every way, except when it came to actually using it, and that was years after the iPhone debuted. Someone at Nokia should have figured that out the day Apple's device came out because there was no excuse for the N86 or N97 sucking as badly as they did. And no, the half-baked, orphaned-at-launch N900 was not the answer.

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[oakgrove]

Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smart

Yeah, smart in contrast to the disaster that the submission is highlighting. Somehow, I have to think there might have been a third option in there somewhere...

Writing was on the wall for N900 before it began

[blindbat]

It didn't take seeing all this happening with the N900. I had a N800 and developed for it and saw that stuff then. That's when I bailed to iOS. At least with that you had some OS maturity and a platform that knew where it was going. I liked the N800--an open linux *computer* for my pocket. But the disarray of Nokia...

Re:lol nokia

[Verdatum]

I was successfully blinded by the promise of Maemo. I owned a Nokia in the late 90s and hated it to the point that I said "never again" to Nokia. But then the N900 buzz started and I was first in line to get one. It's a great phone, and the platform does have potential. But man, it has been a really depressing ride so far.

You don't have to jailbreak an N900.

[sethstorm]

From a relatively free Maemo platform to a walled garden is not an improvement. That, and unlike the iDevices, you can do all the things that Apple decrees that you cannot do and have all the things that Apple decrees that you shall not have.

Some of the things you're missing:

Non-carrier dependent tethering
Out-of-the-box root access
A mature, true-to-form Linux stack
OS upgrades that dont obliterate your personal data
Integrated QWERTY keyboard
Removable / expandable internal batteries
A standard USB connector
Non-proprietary screws

While you're waiting for the next upgrade to be jailbroken, many others are doing things with the phone that would be breakthroughs for the iDevice. With the current release of software.

Re:You don't have to jailbreak an N900.

[TeXMaster]

From a relatively free Maemo platform to a walled garden is not an improvement.

So says you. The 30 million iPhone 4 owners seem to disagree.

aka "Eat shit, 50 billions of flies can't be wrong"

Re:You don't have to jailbreak an N900.

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

From a relatively free Maemo platform to a walled garden is not an improvement.

I'm not going to speak for the parent here, however, going from Maemo to iOS is a huge improvement if you're trying to pay the bills with your work on that particular platform.

Iterative development FTW

[Max Romantschuk]

It's weird how many engineers fall into the trap of trying too much when settling for good enough would be the right solution. You can always improve stuff in the next version, even if part of the code is ugly. I think the Hurd project has shown how well it works when you insist on getting it "just right".

There are exceptions (Blizzard for example), but often Good Enough is just what you need. Especially with OSS, where the user base doubles as QA and a feedback channel for new ideas.

Now they are in bed with M$

[strangeattraction]

HEADLINE: The two kids that couldn't get dates to the prom decide to dance together. RESET one more time.

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[oakgrove]

That mountain of cash MS has might help them out for a bit.

Yeah, I'm sure that didn't hurt too many people in upper management's feelings. Only time will tell if it will be worth it in the long run for the shareholders. Windows Phone 7 is extremely speculative at this point. So far, it little more than an also-ran and that doesn't appear to be on any trajectory for change any time soon. Characterizing it as the "third choice" in the grand scheme of mobile OS's as it is in a lot of the media is just pure dishonesty. I'm sure RIM might have something to say about that.

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[aliquis]

Four options, all would probably had been better than Windows Phone 7:

1) Keep on developing MeeGo if they think it's better than Android. Throw in Alien Dalvik, get access to the "eco-system" of Android.
2) Probably better in the current market: Switch to Android base, slap QT on it, port whatever MeeGo applications they had already made over to Android. Sell. Would work both with Android applications for everyone who want to and not abandon QT or QT developers.

3) Buy or co-develop a new OS with RIMM. I've read they asked them but RIMM wasn't interested, or something such. QNX-based OS with QT and Alien Dalvik?

4) Buy Palm and use WebOS as base.

Re:lol nokia

[Mr_Silver]

They are great at designing, building and marketing dumbphones. Smartphones, however, they they are certainly heading towards rank incompetence at a rapid pace, especially given how badly they've handled the ownership of Symbian, Meamo and MeeGo.

They aren't doing dumbphones very well any more either. For example, the Nokia 6600 fold has a bug where if you press the "6mno" key three times in a row during texting then every so often the phone will lock up solid. The only way to get back a working phone is to pop out the battery.

Since the issue was found (and reported on Nokia's forums) they've released no less than 6 updates - none of which have resolved the problem.

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[segedunum]

Moving to a third-party OS you have no control over is never smart. If history should teach us anything it's that those who give up control of their platform end up dead by the side of the road somewhere. The only right option is to man up and whip the company into shape.

Gave up...

[NitroWolf]

I gave up on Nokia back in the mid 1990's. Their phones always seemed like they would be awesome on paper, and then when you actually tried to use them you realized what a giant piece of shit they are. It wasn't because the phone was a piece of shit, though, like you usually find with products that look good on paper - the phones hardware is solid. It's the UI. Nokia has never been able to develop a usable UI. This was true in the 90's and several years ago when the N95 was the rage, I figured they'd had time to fix their mistakes. I bought an N95. Again, the hardware was awesome, but guess what? The UI was total garbage.

Nokia simply can't develop a UI that people want to use. In the 90's, long before smart phones, the UI was simply too slow. I literally had the problem of dialing too fast on Nokia phones. The UI couldn't even keep up with dialing a phone number. In the late 2000's, again the UI couldn't keep up with input, but add in the quasi-featurephone/smartphone hybrid that is Symbian and you have a graphically intensive, slow UI that is cumbersome to use. Another recipe for disaster.

I wish Nokia would pull their head out of their asses and take a step back to assess the fact that they have nothing to offer in terms of quality when it comes to the software end of things. Everything they have been doing up to know is complete fail; they need to realize this and look at successful software applications. Android, iOS and yes, possibly even WP7. Their new alliance with Microsoft is a step in the right direction, but it probably wasn't the best choice. Nokia could have dug themselves out of the giant hole they are in by going with Android (since I doubt even they could license iOS), simply, easily and quickly. Then again, they may feel the need to modify Android so much and re-write whatever they can that they'd make a mess of that, too. So perhaps the stern hand of Microsoft might let them put out a phone that's actually usable. Time will tell.

N900 Owner.

[orlanz]

So I got a N900 a year ago. My first Nokia phone (I was a Sony man before). It was and is almost exactly what I am looking for. I was even impressed by the way Nokia did the whole repository thing. I am basically a PM. And as I looked into the processes that Nokia employeed, I slowly became disappointed.

They had initiatives for :
- code refactoring for better UI/responsiveness
- Meemo to Meego migration
- Ovi Suite
- Better front camera software stack
- Qt in the works
- voice recognization
- Android compatibility
- etc.

What I see are a lot of "initiatives" but no project plans or defined deliverables. It just seemed to me that there was no direction or focus. The second something became almost, it's direction changed. I don't mean to be rude, but this is what in-experienced programmers do. I am not talking about good/bad programmers, but about immature/mature programmers. Mature programmers are the guys who also write the good help docs & APIs along with the code. In-experienced programmers reinvent wheels, lose focus on the big picture, and get too much into their super optimized code. And I am not placing the blame on them, but rather the PMs. It is their duty to notice this, put them back on the correct path, and keep the big picture in mind. It is the PM's duty to define and focus on the deliverables. They need to make sure they aren't wasting time on useless optimizations that give you 50% gain a module, but a meer 1% in the overall process.

Going with Microsoft may give Nokia the ability to quickly draw a common big picture, but it does really nothing to address the issues underneath. Even within that big picture, the issues will just resurface and you will end up like you did with the N900. I really like the N900, but it can be so much better. Before this whole Microsoft thing, I was going to buy another N900 and was recommending it to 2 others in my office as PDAs. But after almost convincing my wife to buy my phone, I dropped it at the last minute. Along with my recommendations in the office environment. A good product is more than just hardware or even software, and I don't think Nokia gets it.

My takeaway

[iluvcapra]

Every other story in TFA basically goes like this: "Our platform started on X, and then we changed it to Y, using Z UI library but the developers from Y used some of their own." As far as MeeGo and Moblin go, there didn't seem to be any attention to creating the minimum specification and just choosing what they were going to support and refine.

Nokia seemed to have completely outsourced their technology strategy to their open-source community process, and things stagnated over the sort of squabbles people in OSS know and love. Unlike Apple or Google, which took off-the-shelf OSS software that the community had written, made it their own and now act as BDFLs for their own brands and make their money off supporting and extending the OSS core; Nokia did the exact opposite, putting a ton of effort into reduplicating OS work, and then leaving support and extension to the community. It seems like their community process was completely dysfunctional and nobody working on MeeGo ever knew where the platform was going next. Nokia and Intel were very tight-lipped, so the people in the community would do their own thing and the platform would drift and work would be done on all kinds of stuff that didn't benefit Nokia. And then Nokia would come in one day and drop Gtk. You don't see the sort of high-level coordination that Google nominally does through the OHA, and you don't see the sort of commitment Apple makes to promoting their platform to end-users and keeping the platform as consistent as possible.

Open Source is good for a lot of things. People can write your software for you! But Nokia seemed to have the idea that if they just kickstarted an OSS phone OS, they could just sell handsets and the software platform would take care of itself with magic bazaar pixie dust, while assuming that at any time they could completely drop or add whatever technology they chose and the community would go along for the ride.

Re:Regarding the N950 successor

[sethstorm]

Then Nokia can save a ton of development costs and just port Meego to the E7, then slap the N950 label on it.

Make it the same color as the N9-00 or N900, and you have a damn good phone.

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[PickyH3D]

HTC, Motorola and Samsung are doing terribly these days.

Failed? For Nokia maybe..

[xnpu]

Fujitsu has released a MeeGo netbook and I'm sure more will follow. MeeGo isn't just Nokia.

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[segedunum]

I wasn't aware they had their own platforms that they rely on for their current market share like Nokia do.

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[gbjbaanb]

have they moved to Android then? 'cos you cannot mean Microsoft - the company famous for infighting between teams. The Kin was shut down because it was in competition with Windows Phone team, and really - if you want a good laugh, read this blog piece about putting the shutdown menu into Vista.

Now, when you consider that one of the options available to Nokia in taking Windows Phone 7 was that their teams get to work on the WP7 code and customise or improve it you begin to understand just what a total, epic, unmitigated, colossal fail WP7 is soon to be (not that its been a roaring success so far!)

Re:lol nokia

[Inner_Child]

Ah yes, the classic "SMS of the Beast".

Re:Sounds like moving to a third party OS was smar

[AmbushBug]

I was wondering that too. I think Nokia and HP should have made a deal to put WebOS on Nokia's phones. This would be good for both companies. It would have instantly created a huge market for WebOS apps and created a real viable alternative to iOS and Android. I highly doubt HP on their own will be able to make much of a dent in the current market.

[OT: What's with the double/triple spacing of the comment text?]

The n800

[Eil]

I bought an N800 a few years back because it was most portable and semi-capable Linux-based computer at the time. It did many things very well, but it did the important things (web browser, video, email) poorly.

My biggest gripe was that, after the device was sold and the necessary source code released, there was really nothing in the way of community help from Nokia. The firmware and applications were developed in secret and released infrequently. There was an official website, but community-hosted forums were where the real action was happening. And aside from a kludgy SDK, there was little help for third-party developers.