Android is not Motorola. If Motorola is losing money it doesn't follow that Android is.
Motorola's losses show other players in the market either that being an Android OEM is unprofitable even if it's Google itself, or that Google is willing to sustain losses to better compete with other Android OEMs. Neither interpretation bodes well for other manufacturers using Android.
Android is popular because any manufacturer can make a fully functional phone for very little development cost. Free is a strength, not a weakness. Microsoft has a closed proprietary phone and it isn't doing well at all.
As an upside to keeping their cards close to their vest, they have easily rolled out a "fuck your OEM/carrier, here's a dev preview directly from us if you're not afraid of voiding your warranty", and it's not reported to be causing many problems to people trying it.
Google cannot push an update for the above-hardware parts of Android and expect everything to work, because the device vendors have been tweaking those as well. So the tinkerers have to use third-party mods like Cyanogen, or stick with a Nexus.
It is a win-win proposition for everyone and that is why it does so well.
In practice, it shifts control to the manufacturers, and the benefits for the vast majority of the end-users are not so clear cut.
Bus stops are ubiquitous around metropolitan Helsinki. They not only use the stops used by "main line" buses, but also stops on smaller residential roads that are served by minibus lines catering to seniors and other people with reduced mobility (a Kutsuplus vehicle is basically the same minibus equipped with high-tech gizmos). They have even invented new stops for themselves in places they notice people often go to.
With any luck, our government will also tax our gas to the point where paying $10 to wait for a bus in the rain and then ride in it with random strangers for an hour all over the town will make more sense than driving directly there in comfort of your own car in 15 minutes.
You don't need the government for that. Rising oil prices may do this sooner than we all switch to electric cars, natgas, or something else. Pretty much every datum in your rainy day scenario is sheer hyperbole as far as Helsinki capital area is concerned. Car commute is pretty fast, but if you need to park downtown, you'd need to spend extra time and money. Kutsuplus also drives you almost door to door, and you can come up to the pickup point at the prearranged time without waiting, or even track the bus in real time.
Random strangers are called the society. Here, the society is not that scary in general; most people would rather stare at their shoes than acknowledge your existence, unless you need help.
And who says innovation comes only from the private sector!
This project has been developed by a private company, and it aims to be profitable.
Such a service would be very useful in rural areas, indeed. For now, though, Kutsuplus is piloted within Kehä I, AKA the perimeter of civilization around Helsinki:-)
I tried the service shortly after it was opened to the public. It's awesome. You can track your bus in a mobile browser in real time. On a screen inside the bus, you get ETA information for your destination (possibly after other passengers' stops if they get out earlier).
Curious to know people's thoughts on this: how necessary are projects like MATE now that GNOME 3 has a supported-in-the-long-term "Classic" mode
Why, there should always be a project that people will loudly "threaten" to switch to every time somebody makes a development commit affecting their favorite workflow habit.
Damn it people, so much emotional attachment to a company because it once had the distinction to cock up an OSS-based project.
Please get it through your heads: Nokia shareholders' objectives do not include supporting the cause of Linux, or Qt, or whatever. It is, plainly, to make money. They are fucking happy to see something sellworthy made out of the dysfunctional wreck that Nokia was in 2010.
I'm a bit suspicious about that. Almost every smartphone upstart these days claims ability to run Android apps, and in the end it comes to very little.
Please realize it's not just Dalvik emulation that you need to do to make an Android application work. There is a whole lot of services and intent handlers that an app may rely upon, many of them digging into system internals, most of them are not under AOSP. These need to be implemented compatibly on an alien platform, basically from scratch. So, it's a major effort to undertake, in addition to your platform development. And there will inevitably be a long tail of apps that just don't work because you missed some little detail, or bug-for-bug compatibility.
Has anyone actually tried those myriad Android apps that were claimed to be ported to Blackberry OS 10?
(Sigh) Please read this. Keep close attention to the dates and how each device is named. I hope it will help to remove a lot of confusion from your postings. As someone who was in on the events described, I can attest that the article is mostly correct.
What myth? It's in numerous sources backed up by financials and information from Nokia itself.
Continuation of this discussion would require you to provide the sources.
Never mind the accolades Ahonen has received over the years, nor his lectures at Oxford, nor his authoritative books, nor his amazingly accurate record of predictions in the Mobile Phone industry, year after year, nor his personal network of staffers at almost every Mobile Phone company and provider in the world... nor how many times he made other supposed expert analysts look like fools (ZDnet, Howard Forums, etc. etc.)
Never mind that, because very little of it is actually true. For the record of his predictions, here's one. Sorry, but Tomi is really a tedious moron who passes himself off as an expert to gullible people.
Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
And RIM were selling quite a lot of Blackberries until it was too late.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
That's what the powerpoint said. In practice, there were... issues.
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers.
Nokia had another issue: being the company that allowed the N97 to be released. That was in 2009, years after iPhone was on the market. All that happened after was, in essence, karmic justice.
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market.
Your time window for "just about to be released" must stretch for half a year. And, I'm afraid, your description of a presentation has no basis in documented reality. It was known since February that Nokia is pivoting towards Windows Phone and everybody knew that the N9 was a dead end. Moreover, it wasn't ever meant to be a proper MeeGo device. It was fucked up by internal politics long before Elop came on stage.
Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios.
I'm sorry to see you believe in a myth with no credible evidence whatsoever.
Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.
Right as Elop took over, Nokia took a 180 turn away from Meego. They spent 3, 4 years completely redeveloping their processes, completely revamping their developers, wasting countless resources that were Meego-based, just so they could put Windows Phone on their hardware.
What alternative timeline you live in? The turn was announced on February 2011. The first Lumia was released in November the same year.
You can follow a workflow of painstakingly designing and documenting every commit in the development head, but I don't think every project does. And the commit in question was indeed found to be premature and removed by one of the developers, well before it became a front-page story for the hate brigade.
The post you linked to said they aren't ONLY planning to remove middle-click paste. The design document on the Gnome wiki goes into further detail about what they are thinking of doing with middle-click instead.
It does not go into any detail on that, yet.
Another developer in the same thread said this IS the right time to voice objections to removing middle-click yank. It's not out of thin air. Middle-click was already removed, then it was decided to wait on removing it until the new middle click replaces it. The new middle click menu is still being designed.
Can you point at exactly the instances where anybody remotely relevant to GNOME development is publicly proposing the things you have mentioned? All factual evidence so far is a reverted commit.
See, this whole story is blown out of thin air. Almost everybody commenting to this Slashdot story have shown themselves to be knee-jerk idiots with no capacity for critical thought. YOU CAN GO HOME NOW. Or better, finally fuck off and forget about all things GNOME. Both you and the GNOME project will be better off this way. Ah well, who am I kidding, this stupid shit has been going on ever since GNOME (and KDE, for its own part) was released.
C++ is a superset of C. It includes all the functionality of C, along with an implimentation of OOP. The low level stuff is there. The problem is most FOSS contributors are apparently dinosaurs who never learned how to program in object-oriented fashion.
They did. They also know that C++ is a bad language for that, so much so that programming object-oriented constructs in C is better.
Sorry but if you knew anything about Symbian and smartphone development and Nokia processes you would know that at release minus six months the final hardware and software was basically available.
If by "basically available" you mean being able to boot up and run a few carefully chosen smoke tests, then yeah. As a product ready to go to market, no way in hell.
Regardless, the "oh shit moment" leading to cancelling MeeGo happened some weeks before the announcement, and it was caused by the fact that no matter what shape the N9 was in, the actual MeeGo platform to be developed for years to come was in total shambles and not scheduled to be ready until late 2011 at the earliest.
I had the N9 too, and I had the Lumia 800. The one that didn't cause me to miss calendar appointments won. Guess which one it was. Sorry, the nice UI was not enough, neither was Linux inside (is it ever), and Windows Phone UI is arguably even better.
Meego was another Maemo, not WebOS, it have its own lineage as example.
I used WebOS in a figurative sense: an also-ran mobile OS that was too little, too late. They muddled the lineage by banding up with Intel, meaning that the platform was going to be rebased on Moblin.
Was sabotaged by Symbian fans inside Nokia first, then the days before it was released Elop said that it had no future, cut all future hopes for development for the platform, and released just one phone with it, just because already made it.
Revisionism. The strategy change announcement was made half a year before the N9 was released. And well before Elop, it was decided internally that the software on the N9 is a one-off with no future, because MeeGo proper was being developed in parallel, with a late 2011 shipping date in mind (yes, that's when they shipped the Lumia 800 after the big turnaround). See, Nokia was really big on nonsensical parallel development back then. Anyone who knows the development story of the N900 and the N9 can confirm that.
Is even against that that sold pretty well.
This is a myth created by Tomi Ahonen and a few commenters on a tech blog.
the Windows 7.x phones that Microsoft killed before they come out to the market saying that they will have no future neither (but most people that buys windows phone only hears windows phone, not version, so even with that had sales).
You mean the phones that are still supported and getting newly released apps? Keep telling that to people stuck on buggy Gingerbread phones.
Taking Nokia board's intent at face value, Elop was invited to do something to help the situation. Once they'd decided to concentrate on Windows Phone, they became so dominant on the platform that the other WP OEMs started having second thoughts. So Nokia's devices unit became a more and more attractive purchase target as it went along. Keeping the R&D diverse might have been a good hedge against that, but it does not look like a good business strategy to me: after all, companies exist to make money, not to shit into their books for the specific purpose of staying independent.
Selling the unit to Microsoft might have been the plan B from the beginning, too. But I think it's naive to assume that Nokia's board and shareholders fell victim to the evil scheming M$.
Slashdot Mirror
The writeup assumes that no version of Internet Explorer can be thought of as a modern browser. This is not true for IE 10 and 11.
That said, a countrywide de-facto standard forcing vendor lock-in is bad.
Android is not Motorola. If Motorola is losing money it doesn't
follow that Android is.
Motorola's losses show other players in the market either that being an Android OEM is unprofitable even if it's Google itself, or that Google is willing to sustain losses to better compete with other Android OEMs. Neither interpretation bodes well for other manufacturers using Android.
Android is popular because any manufacturer can make a fully functional phone for very little development cost. Free is a strength, not a weakness. Microsoft has a closed proprietary phone and it isn't doing well at all.
As an upside to keeping their cards close to their vest, they have easily rolled out a "fuck your OEM/carrier, here's a dev preview directly from us if you're not afraid of voiding your warranty", and it's not reported to be causing many problems to people trying it.
Google cannot push an update for the above-hardware parts of Android and expect everything to work, because the device vendors have been tweaking those as well. So the tinkerers have to use third-party mods like Cyanogen, or stick with a Nexus.
It is a win-win proposition for everyone and that is why it does so well.
In practice, it shifts control to the manufacturers, and the benefits for the vast majority of the end-users are not so clear cut.
This comment, and its moderation, show why I read Slashdot comments with slightly nostalgic condescension these days.
Sure, old buddy, but... we have moved on.
Bus stops are ubiquitous around metropolitan Helsinki. They not only use the stops used by "main line" buses, but also stops on smaller residential roads that are served by minibus lines catering to seniors and other people with reduced mobility (a Kutsuplus vehicle is basically the same minibus equipped with high-tech gizmos). They have even invented new stops for themselves in places they notice people often go to.
With any luck, our government will also tax our gas to the point where paying $10 to wait for a bus in the rain and then ride in it with random strangers for an hour all over the town will make more sense than driving directly there in comfort of your own car in 15 minutes.
You don't need the government for that. Rising oil prices may do this sooner than we all switch to electric cars, natgas, or something else. Pretty much every datum in your rainy day scenario is sheer hyperbole as far as Helsinki capital area is concerned. Car commute is pretty fast, but if you need to park downtown, you'd need to spend extra time and money. Kutsuplus also drives you almost door to door, and you can come up to the pickup point at the prearranged time without waiting, or even track the bus in real time.
Random strangers are called the society. Here, the society is not that scary in general; most people would rather stare at their shoes than acknowledge your existence, unless you need help.
And who says innovation comes only from the private sector!
This project has been developed by a private company, and it aims to be profitable.
Such a service would be very useful in rural areas, indeed. :-)
For now, though, Kutsuplus is piloted within Kehä I, AKA the perimeter of civilization around Helsinki
I tried the service shortly after it was opened to the public. It's awesome. You can track your bus in a mobile browser in real time. On a screen inside the bus, you get ETA information for your destination (possibly after other passengers' stops if they get out earlier).
i think Nokia cannot compete....unless it shifts to andriod...
... and introduces an Android-specific cable connector.
Never go full retard.
Curious to know people's thoughts on this: how necessary are projects like MATE now that GNOME 3 has a supported-in-the-long-term "Classic" mode
Why, there should always be a project that people will loudly "threaten" to switch to every time somebody makes a development commit affecting their favorite workflow habit.
Damn it people, so much emotional attachment to a company because it once had the distinction to cock up an OSS-based project.
Please get it through your heads: Nokia shareholders' objectives do not include supporting the cause of Linux, or Qt, or whatever. It is, plainly, to make money. They are fucking happy to see something sellworthy made out of the dysfunctional wreck that Nokia was in 2010.
I'm a bit suspicious about that. Almost every smartphone upstart these days claims ability to run Android apps, and in the end it comes to very little.
Please realize it's not just Dalvik emulation that you need to do to make an Android application work. There is a whole lot of services and intent handlers that an app may rely upon, many of them digging into system internals, most of them are not under AOSP. These need to be implemented compatibly on an alien platform, basically from scratch. So, it's a major effort to undertake, in addition to your platform development. And there will inevitably be a long tail of apps that just don't work because you missed some little detail, or bug-for-bug compatibility.
Has anyone actually tried those myriad Android apps that were claimed to be ported to Blackberry OS 10?
(Sigh) Please read this. Keep close attention to the dates and how each device is named. I hope it will help to remove a lot of confusion from your postings. As someone who was in on the events described, I can attest that the article is mostly correct.
What myth? It's in numerous sources backed up by financials and information from Nokia itself.
Continuation of this discussion would require you to provide the sources.
Nah, it's still alternative history.
Never mind the accolades Ahonen has received over the years, nor his lectures at Oxford, nor his authoritative books, nor his amazingly accurate record of predictions in the Mobile Phone industry, year after year, nor his personal network of staffers at almost every Mobile Phone company and provider in the world... nor how many times he made other supposed expert analysts look like fools (ZDnet, Howard Forums, etc. etc.)
Never mind that, because very little of it is actually true.
For the record of his predictions, here's one.
Sorry, but Tomi is really a tedious moron who passes himself off as an expert to gullible people.
Funny how they were still selling quite a lot of them until Elop came around.
And RIM were selling quite a lot of Blackberries until it was too late.
FYI - All those Symbian devs and their Symbian apps had a migration path from Symbian to Maemo/MeeGo.
That's what the powerpoint said. In practice, there were... issues.
Also Nokia didn't have the same issue BB had in having a central network that was essential to the platform and have a major crash that took weeks to fix and caused headaches for their customers.
Nokia had another issue: being the company that allowed the N97 to be released. That was in 2009, years after iPhone was on the market. All that happened after was, in essence, karmic justice.
In 2010 MeeGo wasn't out. It was just about to be released when Elop wrote the "burning platform" memo; and during the presentation to the press he stood up on stage and said "We're not doing this; look I have another one running Windows Phone and that is our future" - intentially sabotaging it before it even hit market.
Your time window for "just about to be released" must stretch for half a year.
And, I'm afraid, your description of a presentation has no basis in documented reality. It was known since February that Nokia is pivoting towards Windows Phone and everybody knew that the N9 was a dead end. Moreover, it wasn't ever meant to be a proper MeeGo device. It was fucked up by internal politics long before Elop came on stage.
Yet, as others have pointed out, with no marketing the MeeGo Phone outsold the Lumias wherever they were both sold in the same markets - and not by small margins - by 3:1 ratios.
I'm sorry to see you believe in a myth with no credible evidence whatsoever.
Just before the first Meego phone (N900) launched, Elop took over. It was killed without even given a chance. To answer your question, that is why Meego never competed with Android and the iOS.
Huh? The N900 was released in 2009. The N9 program was launched some time before that, and the device was released, after all, in late 2011.
Right as Elop took over, Nokia took a 180 turn away from Meego. They spent 3, 4 years completely redeveloping their processes, completely revamping their developers, wasting countless resources that were Meego-based, just so they could put Windows Phone on their hardware.
What alternative timeline you live in? The turn was announced on February 2011. The first Lumia was released in November the same year.
You didn't refer me to anything. The only design page I came upon was this one, and it does not yet have any detailed plans for middle-click.
You can follow a workflow of painstakingly designing and documenting every commit in the development head, but I don't think every project does. And the commit in question was indeed found to be premature and removed by one of the developers, well before it became a front-page story for the hate brigade.
The post you linked to said they aren't ONLY planning to remove middle-click paste.
The design document on the Gnome wiki goes into further detail about what they are thinking of doing with middle-click instead.
It does not go into any detail on that, yet.
Another developer in the same thread said this IS the right time to voice objections to removing middle-click yank. It's not out of thin air. Middle-click was already removed, then it was decided to wait on removing it until the new middle click replaces it. The new middle click menu is still being designed.
Can you point at exactly the instances where anybody remotely relevant to GNOME development is publicly proposing the things you have mentioned? All factual evidence so far is a reverted commit.
Just to prevent as much tedious unnecessary rageposting as I can, here's a mailing list post from one of the developers:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2013-September/msg00065.html
See, this whole story is blown out of thin air. Almost everybody commenting to this Slashdot story have shown themselves to be knee-jerk idiots with no capacity for critical thought. YOU CAN GO HOME NOW. Or better, finally fuck off and forget about all things GNOME. Both you and the GNOME project will be better off this way. Ah well, who am I kidding, this stupid shit has been going on ever since GNOME (and KDE, for its own part) was released.
C++ is a superset of C. It includes all the functionality of C, along with an implimentation of OOP. The low level stuff is there. The problem is most FOSS contributors are apparently dinosaurs who never learned how to program in object-oriented fashion.
They did. They also know that C++ is a bad language for that, so much so that programming object-oriented constructs in C is better.
Sorry but if you knew anything about Symbian and smartphone development and Nokia processes you would know that at release minus six months the final hardware and software was basically available.
If by "basically available" you mean being able to boot up and run a few carefully chosen smoke tests, then yeah. As a product ready to go to market, no way in hell.
Regardless, the "oh shit moment" leading to cancelling MeeGo happened some weeks before the announcement, and it was caused by the fact that no matter what shape the N9 was in, the actual MeeGo platform to be developed for years to come was in total shambles and not scheduled to be ready until late 2011 at the earliest.
I had the N9 too, and I had the Lumia 800. The one that didn't cause me to miss calendar appointments won. Guess which one it was. Sorry, the nice UI was not enough, neither was Linux inside (is it ever), and Windows Phone UI is arguably even better.
Meego was another Maemo, not WebOS, it have its own lineage as example.
I used WebOS in a figurative sense: an also-ran mobile OS that was too little, too late.
They muddled the lineage by banding up with Intel, meaning that the platform was going to be rebased on Moblin.
Was sabotaged by Symbian fans inside Nokia first, then the days before it was released Elop said that it had no future, cut all future hopes for development for the platform, and released just one phone with it, just because already made it.
Revisionism. The strategy change announcement was made half a year before the N9 was released. And well before Elop, it was decided internally that the software on the N9 is a one-off with no future, because MeeGo proper was being developed in parallel, with a late 2011 shipping date in mind (yes, that's when they shipped the Lumia 800 after the big turnaround). See, Nokia was really big on nonsensical parallel development back then. Anyone who knows the development story of the N900 and the N9 can confirm that.
Is even against that that sold pretty well.
This is a myth created by Tomi Ahonen and a few commenters on a tech blog.
the Windows 7.x phones that Microsoft killed before they come out to the market saying that they will have no future neither (but most people that buys windows phone only hears windows phone, not version, so even with that had sales).
You mean the phones that are still supported and getting newly released apps? Keep telling that to people stuck on buggy Gingerbread phones.
Taking Nokia board's intent at face value, Elop was invited to do something to help the situation. Once they'd decided to concentrate on Windows Phone, they became so dominant on the platform that the other WP OEMs started having second thoughts. So Nokia's devices unit became a more and more attractive purchase target as it went along. Keeping the R&D diverse might have been a good hedge against that, but it does not look like a good business strategy to me: after all, companies exist to make money, not to shit into their books for the specific purpose of staying independent.
Selling the unit to Microsoft might have been the plan B from the beginning, too. But I think it's naive to assume that Nokia's board and shareholders fell victim to the evil scheming M$.