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?

[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.

[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.

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...

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.

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: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.

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: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: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".