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Jolla Goes For Debt Restructuring (phoronix.com)
jones_supa writes: Months after the smartphone company Jolla announced its split and intent to focus on Sailfish OS licensing, its financial situation has not improved. Jolla's latest financing round has been delayed and so they have had to file for debt restructuring in Finland. As part of that, the company is temporarily laying off a big part of its personnel (Google translation of Finnish original). Jolla co-founder Antti Saarnio said, "Our operating system Sailfish OS is in great shape currently and it is commercially ready. Unfortunately the development until this point has required quite a lot of time and money (PDF). To get out of this death valley we need to move from a development phase into a growth phase. At the same time we need to adapt our cost levels to the new situation. One of the main actions is to tailor the operating system to fit the needs of different clients. We have several major and smaller potential clients who are interested in using Sailfish OS in their projects."
i would have never saw this coming...
We are not outnumbered. We are in a target rich environment with a low blue-on-blue probability.
We are not surrounded. We're operating on interior lines.
[1] of the armoured variety
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Thank you very much, capable engineers who have developed our product. Sadly, unless you have skills in sales and marketing, we simply cannot afford you at this time.
Sincerely,
The management team who should have seen this coming but is acting surprised.
Blackberry is still trying to license theirs.
We're losing money like mad and haven't yet figured out a workable business model, so in order to maintain executive bonuses we need to get rid of some people.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And then there's Mozilla's Firefox OS. I'll never forget how poorly Firefox OS fared in the most scathing software review I've ever read.
If Jolla is having such a hard time making a go of it, and they have a better product than Firefox OS, how the heck does Mozilla think that they have a hope in hell of accomplishing anything but complete failure with Firefox OS?!
Mozilla should put an immediate end to Firefox OS, throw it away, and redirect the resources to Firefox. Instead of taking inspiration from Chrome, take inspiration from Firefox 3.6 instead. That was the last release of Firefox that users actually liked. Mozilla should work toward restoring Firefox to that UI and user experience. When the UI and UX have been fixed, then they can focus completely on resolving the lingering performance problems that Firefox is notorious for. At least doing that will give them some chance of salvaging Firefox, while no longer wasting time, effort and money on Firefox OS.
that Nokia buys them out?
It's a real shame to see this happen to them, I had been hoping that the Jolla phone might make it to North America before my Lumia kicked it, and with no 3G support on North American bands and iffy LTE functionality I couldn't just buy the phone directly from them. Now it seems quite unlikely I'll ever see a Jolla phone this side of the pond, especially since I did end up having to replace the Lumia fairly recently. I'm now using an Android device and hate almost every minute of it, as it is infested with Google "apps" (really they're just shortcuts to launch chrome with a particular URL).
I had a Nokia N900, a great linux-based phone, especially if you were an advanced user. Then I sacrificed the qwerty keyboard that I liked on the N900 and got a Nokia N9. To this day, I maintain that it was by far the best mobile phone UI I have ever used. Best feature was probably the app switching, so quick and easy to go from one app and the other and at the same time deciding whether the app you are leaving keeps running in the background or terminates. And the hardware and design was great as well. When I first got it, my wife tried it out with its beautiful Super Amoled curved display and told me "hey, next to your iPhone (a brand new 4S if I recall) this one looks like it is from 2030!". In fact when I switched to a Samsung Galaxy S3 (due to some apps I needed and were not available for Maemo/Meego), it was the first time ever I thought my new phone was (much) worse than the previous one. Right now I have an iPhone 6 plus and a Xiaomi Mi4 and I still miss that N9!
So, this was just a side note before saying thanks to the engineers who brought us what was the best mobile OS so far and it should have dominated the market, if only the marketing was as good as the actual product. When I first heard about Jolla I hoped I would be able to get another phone as good as the ol' N9 at some point, so I am sorry to hear about their struggles.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
"Now I got all the time in the world." -- The Association
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Simple: I wanna give it. You don't even have to shake it down from me.
Just sell me a phone with Sailfish OS. Here. In Brazil.
Nah, scratch that: just put Sailfish, as a free upgradeable distribution on all my phones (and tablets... and computers).
Scratch that, too: just put it on a single phone I have.
Scratch even that: just put it on a brand new model that I purchase.
Scratch that still: sell me the OS (on a SD card) and tutorial and I will put it on a phone you say it's compatible.
One further simple step: sell a card, much like Google, Facebook etc. so that I can acquire credits with which to buy your products.
It's that simple. Or maybe not: there's probably a lot of bureaucracy involved when it comes to telephony authorizations etc.
So why not make a tablet-only OS and bypass all that while we wait for all the authorizations to be obtained?
Make a distro. Say which devices are compatible.
I want desperately a tablet with Linux (and a dock to put it in when I come home -- but this part I can do myself with the computers I already got), but the catch is that many things are required, such as easy upgrading (like in Debian and derivatives).
My money wants to leave me and get into your hand.
And Android is the clear winner, with iOS a good second. I don't see more than 2 major OSes on this market. Other OSes will only remain alive when they are developed for free, or when big companies are willing to compensate the losses (Samsung with Tizen and Microsoft with Windows Phone).
Perhaps if they actively courted the US market, they wouldn't be in this mess.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And Maemo was *much* better than the shitty android I'm using now!
I had the same spreadsheet I've used on my desktop, similar editors, fantastic app switching, a browser that actually loaded website in the background windows (to this day I have to wayit when I switch tabs in android: yack!
In a word: it was fantastic!
I still miss it. The only thing better now is my wacom stylus: *much* better than the one in the N900 ;)
the Brazilians were tired of those jewish parasites sucking the life out of their country?
it's a pity, I recently got a jollaphone and I'm very surprised and entusiastic about this Operating System. I can say without regrets that's the best phone (and phone OS) I've had in my life.
As usual in IT, having a good product means nothing if you don't have the power to fight monopolies.
Sorry, in the previous comment I have wrote "Nexus 5P" while I must have wrote "Nexus 5X". I was confused by the Nexus 6P, but the one I own is the Nexus 5X. That said, I don't think this will affect the observations.