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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."
You must realize, Microsoft has a long tradition of maintaining an internal tug-of-war, led by aimless management, and causing several UI redesigns. They're the perfect choice to synergize with Nokia's corporate environment to leverage their assets for market innovation!
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Nokia didn't have a choice to partner with anyone but Microsoft. If they stayed with Symbian they were dead. MeeGo was dead before being born. Blackberry would have never partnered with them. Apple would have never partnered with them. This leaves Microsoft and Google. If they choose Google they are now competing on the same platform against a much cheaper Korean and Chinese manufacturers and designers. I am sure they could have made a go of it, but the company would have shrunk and likely be in worse shape than they are now. Microsoft was desperate for a partner and champion, so it was a match made in heaven. Now this doesn't say they won't die, but given where they were it was the best move to make.
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 :(
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.
' Really; that's basically what you are saying. Astounding.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();