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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!
MeeGo, the scourge of Carpathia, the sorrow of Moldavia, commands you!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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!
"...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
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.
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.
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.
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.