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The Story of Nokia MeeGo
An anonymous reader writes "TaskuMuro, a Finnish tech news site, has anonymously interviewed various Nokia employees and pieced together an interesting timeline of the events which led to the abandonment of the Nokia MeeGo platform and to Nokia's current affiliation with Microsoft and Windows Phone. It appears the MeeGo project was rather disorganized from the get-go and fell victim to the company's internal tug-of-war, aimless management causing several UI redesigns and a none-too-wise reliance on Intel components which lacked some key features – namely, LTE support."
I've considered Elop to be a massive fuck up but this sounds pretty bad. Maybe his move to Microsoft wasn't completely moronic (even if it ultimately kills the company because no one buys windows phones).
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
I always had to think whether it actually doesn't sound like a "Mi-go" (from Whisperer in the darkness), and had absolutely no other explanation for the 'MeeGo' word.
You have to figure they're recruiting the best of the best, yet some of them manage epic F-ups. I can't imagine there weren't howls of disapproval from at least a few people in that organization.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Slashdotted in 1... 2... 3! Wait, what...!?
In any case 1487801 pretty much sums up Symbian in the "good old days". Can you say "clusterf..."?
"...it was difficult to keep hold of the quality of the subcontractors' work..."
"...bad code written in India..."
"...communication problems..."
I'm shocked. How upper management types keep justifying this model with "lower costs" is completely beyond me.
giggity
They should have switched to their iPhone killing bubble UI instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSRuY_9ZMsY&feature=player_embedded
This space for rent.
Nokia builds great hardware, great cameras, has assets for mapping and navigation and they had 3000 people working on Software. With Android and some hard furious work they could have done some amazing things, no doubt.
Two companies full of backstabbing management clusterfucks.
My N900 is almost 3 years old, and it is starting to show it's age. I really hope the combination mer/sailfish will turn out ok, as i haven't found anything able to replace my current N900 yet.
I'm going to miss Nokia if they go down for good :(
I'd always assumed Meego had been canned because Elop is a Microsoft Trojan Horse who just wanted to get back into bed with Microsoft and kill anything new, open-source and great. But reading this story of events, I'm quite dismayed to read just how unguided and wasteful the development process apparently was. Even though the final end product (the N9) was terrific, it looks like they only got it properly together when they were told that the project would be canned after the release of the N9. It really does look like a lack of overriding vision and lack of staff working towards a common goal which resulted in the Meego project swimming in circles while the tide took them out.
Going with Microsoft was obviously a bad choice, though. What he needed to do was scrap Symbian, say that Meego would be scrapped after the N9. Pretend to sign a deal with Microsoft. Wait for the greatness that was the N9. Sell the N9. Profit. Develop the N9 to get it to work on LTE., upgrade the processor, memory etc & Profit more...
You have to figure they're recruiting the best of the best, yet some of them manage epic F-ups.
Like the article said though, the teams were great what they were coming up with was great - but they lacked focus, and Nokia was working on multiple platforms at once.
You cannot do that when Google and Apple both ALSO have great teams, also working but all with a focus on one system. Nokia was fated to fall behind these other platforms without the focus on building out a single ecosystem at the same pace Apple and Google were.
It's really a shame, Nokia had an awesome starting position and smart people. But in the end I have to agree with Elop that they were too far behind and the Microsoft partnership was the only way to let them catch up and yet stay distinct in the market (which would have been an issue with Android for Nokia).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The phone itself is running x11 which is really great for porting apps to it. You get to use c++ and the great qt framework and extensions for pretty much everything, with the option of doing the UI in QML (a javascript based framework). You get to use deb packaging which you either know already or doesn't hurt to learn. If you use the qt creator sdk it does all the dirty work for you, but you can develop without it and just use the scratchbox environment instead if you prefer. Services run with upstart. The xterminal and related developer tools are already compiled and hosted in nokia's repositories, one click to install everything. The fcam camera api allows raw shooting and manual aperture and focus. Gnome tracker indexes your messages and music. The nolo bootloader can be set up to dual boot to another OS. I look forward to the new Sailfish OS promised by Jolla, I have faith the guys writing it are the ones behind some of the well designed N9 OS, and won't make it any worse. I tried windows phone 7 and you're not even allowed to run background services, let alone run your own code without paying a $99 fee.
In other words, this article is crap. It's not even an article -- it's a write-up. You see a multi-page write-up and expect some actual information and facts; instead, you get nothing but what could only honestly be called whining:
From TFA
Products were mostly made by subcontracting without a top organization or support from certain sector’s professionals. No one intervened with the process and it resulted in quality problems in finished products. Considering the small resources and the subcontracting, lowest price was always the first priority in choosing components, space requirement was second and poor hardware performance was patched up with software optimizations as well as possible. Cutting expenses from the software developers didn’t particularly motivate anyone, considering the fact that savings were made in material expenses by using poor components, which then meant stress for the next couple of weeks in performance optimization.
Most of the people we interviewed from Nokia said that Nokia used too much subcontracting. Building specific knowledge from scratch inside the company is expensive and time consuming, and the OSSO team’s resources were limited.
There were a lot of problems, it was difficult to keep hold of the quality of the subcontractors’ work and the contracts weren’t supervised properly. The subcontractors could cheat in the contracts by changing the best experts, who were there in the beginning, to less qualified people. Examples given included bad code written in India and the communication problems with the Chinese and the Japanese because of their poor English skills. All this resulted in more additional work and delays for the project managers in Finland, when they had to take measures to repair the errors and poor quality.
Okay, so the development contractors were chosen based on low price. That is one fact.
Okay, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian coders were used. That is another fact.
But beyond that...no other facts. The article alludes to "bad code written in India and the communication problems with the Chinese and the Japanese because of their poor English skills." But what bad code?
It alludes to "project managers in Finland, [taking] measures to repair the errors and poor quality."
Examples of errors? No where to be found.
You do understand that the interviewed current and ex-employees of Nokia had to speak generally and under the condition of anonymity because they are subject to very strict NDAs? Talking about anything specific could make it possible to identify the individual.
So you're saying you agree that it is a surface-level write-up. Okay. Thanks!
Even before Nokia scrapped its whole smartphone strategy, the MeeGo project was in difficulties. The biggest problem was that Nokia clung to Symbian, refusing to see the obvious fact that the customers were attracted to the competitors' platforms because they had a much stronger offering of 3rd party apps. MeeGo/Maemo was a good development platform, but internal competition between teams meant that the managers of the much older Symbian division would do anything in their power to stall the development of the "competing" platform. Although this might have shielded a few jobs in the Symbian division for a short period, Nokia's customers, and eventually the company as a whole, had to pay a very dire price for this indecisiveness.
Relevant quotes:
First signs of Nokia’s internal competition between two platforms were seen with the N810 device. It was released in late 2007 and entered the market without phone functionality. It would have been Nokia’s first Maemo phone, but the decision to leave out the phone functionality was said to have been completely political.
According to a Maemo team member we interviewed, Symbian team directors were afraid of the possible competition between the N810 and the Symbian based communicator.
Inside Nokia, members of the Maemo team thought that the managers of the Symbian team were afraid for their jobs, and used their positions within the company to slow down the development of Maemo by any means they could.
N9 will remain most critically acclaimed and one of the fastest-selling and anticipated models in the company's history. Sadly, it could have been so much more, the beginning of a new platform like Android and iOS, but it was ultimately an executive-level decision to prioritize Symbian over Maemo. With falling market figures, this eventually lead to a situation where the whole strategy had to be scrapped in favor of Microsoft serfdom.
Spring and summer of 2011 I worked part time testing software at a company that wrote software on contact to Nokia and the big Android OEMs.I always hated when I got a Meego to test. Apps wouldn't launch, would crash randomly just a disaster.
Nokia makes some of the most beautiful hardware. I would have seriously considered switching from iPhone to get a nice Nokia Android phone. I simply can not stand Windows phones or anything associated with Microsoft. They have (had) a great reputation and completely messed it up. There still is a chance that they wake up and bet on Android. Samsung is making money hands over fist on Android. Nokia can do the same. Windows 8 is a dead end for them.
meego was truly a dead end. There are far too many of these mobile platforms. The last thing the world needs is Yet Another Incompatable Mobile OS. Each company trying to do their own OS simply harms consumers, leading to scattered development. Developers basically cannot target more than 2 or so platforms.
It was smart for Nokia to dump Meego but questionable to go with Windows Phone. Like RIM, they should go with Google Android. It is actually confounding to watch companies spend years while their market share slips away, trying to reinvent the wheel, when they could take Android right off the shelf and have something in stores right away.
Seriously, I agree with all but the Android part. Back in 2010 Nokia was the biggest phone maker in the world, both in smart and dumbphones. They had the distribution network, the manufacturing capabilities and the brand name to keep that position. With Android they could have stayed in this position, possibly losing a bit of it or gained a bit more depending on their implementation and quality, but they would still have had a fighting chance to be the top dog.
Why the hell has Samsung gone from a bit player to a giant with Android while we should think that Nokia couldn't even keep their dominating position with the same system? It just doesn't compute. Of course Nokia should have seen the lights 5-6 years ago and either dedicated themselves to Meego/maemo or they should have jumped ship and gone with Android. But they would still have a be in a position if they had gone with Android instead of Windows close to 2 years ago. Of course they could still have fucked up, but saying they couldn't have competed with Android just makes no sense at all.
... and frankly, a 1980s style framebuffer, even if redone today for the nth time, is the "outdated stack".
I have had innumerable Nokia phones going back to the Radio Shack branded Nokia hand held in the 80's. I especially like Maemo. I have an N770, N800, N900, and an N9.
I have also had a lot of Symbian phones. the best being my N95, and the worst of all the N97. I have an N8 which is a nice phone with a great camera, and an N808 Pureview which is a great camera infected with Symbian Belle which is flaky as hell.
I won my N900 as a door prize at the chicago Nokia store launch. Wow!
I just bought a Nokia Asha 311 to play with, and at least Symbian S40 is stable. Actually Symbian S40 at 1Ghz is fucking awesome.
I think many here have it wrong. The N9 was beautiful and would have sold well if it had corporate support. I also think Microsoft's main goal is to contractually tie up Nokia, then drive the stock price to the basement and pick up bargin maps and patents. I think that was the plan all along.
Nokia was the last phone company to make the handsets for the customers. All the other make them for consumers with spyware and ad injected bloatware.
End of an ERA.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
Nothing to see there in that article. It's all just part of the massive $$$ PR bulldozing of Nokia history, plain and simple.
Yes. The upside *for the consumers* is that the freaking phone works with anything and everything.
And if that "generic OS" can be *easily* customized to the user's every whim, is super cheap (or have no licensing fees at all like Android), AND is easy to develop for, then that will be the best seller. Guaranteed.
Until then, install CSSU Thumb2. It will give you a very significant free RAM boost. If swapping is still your issue, you could try installing a fast microSD: http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=1277722&postcount=40.
Also, Opera 12 just got ported, although it's a bit buggy.
This should tide you over a couple of months to see if Jolla will fit your bill.
meego was truly a dead end. There are far too many of these mobile platforms. The last thing the world needs is Yet Another Incompatable Mobile OS. Each company trying to do their own OS simply harms consumers, leading to scattered development.
Think how many mobile phones styles there were before Apple. People want their individuality. Indeed this is the basis of the success of iPhone. Get an iPod because it makes you look cool. Get an iPhone X because it's clearly better yet largely identical than what half the world has.
It is almost irrelevant what developers think, especially as MeeGo is Linux. This is why N9 outsold Windows phone 7 in spite of being declared a dead end, not sold in all major markets etc.
N900 is still up and usefull on 2012 thanks to community.
Hope Jolla doesn't do the same as Nokia did, because there is still a few closed crap that takes years to open.