121–130 of 173 posts
Why do people assume that MeeGo would have been a big success?
I think it would have been because it was a technically impressive OS with a beautiful UI created by at-the-time biggest smartphone maker in the world. iOS was first but that doesn't show it would win. Android now has marketshare and Android wasn't as good as MeeGo when it came out. I believe if Nokia continued to invest, MeeGo would have even gotten better and they would have survived (note I worked at Nokia's subsi…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every time a Linux sprouts out somewhere, Microsoft flamethrower comes over. Consumer market, academic environment, public office. I heard that Bill will cure malaria and covid just anytime now, the day after universal healthcare will be introduced in US.
I think that's over now, Microsoft is focusing on cloud and AI and doesn't particularly care which OS you run as long as they somehow make money. Plenty of reasons left to dislike and distrust them, though (cf. "cloud and AI").
From the article: "Elop oversaw the 2011 launch of a Linux-based smartphone, the Nokia N9. The N9 ran on a distribution of Linux called MeeGo. Reviewers at the time praised the new smartphone direction the Finnish phone maker had taken. 'Possibly the most beautiful phone ever made,' wrote one reviewer about the N9 for Engadget. But the N9’s accolades did not ultimately carry the day. Nokia announced its Lumia line of…
The N9 shipped when it did because the teams working on the successor project had been pulled back to support the N9, and Elop arrived to find a company betting its future on a new platform that had almost no existing third party support and which wouldn't have any follow-up hardware for another 2 years. Google has no incentive to work with Nokia rather than the existing vendors who'd staked themselves to Android, th…
Nokia's thinking of the time was to see each phone as a product. The big reset button pressed after release, separating each device from the previous one. Just look at the Maemo & MeeGo story: N770, N800, N900, N9. Basically, top management and did not understand the market early enough and the friction did the rest: it was phones with software, not software for phones. The same misunderstanding some of the media business went through a few years later; people were not buying paper, but news.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s all tradeoffs. Secure boot sucks for enthusiasts but wow would the phone security / root kit scene be a nightmare without it.
Would it? A bootkit doesn't give you any more access - only more persistence. At the price of having to tailor a payload to a hardware and software platform very carefully. For most attackers, that's just not worth it. Now, if what you want to "secure" is your ability to gatekeep what software users can and can't install? What sources they can and can't consume media from? What system-level spyware and adware users c…
Yes, because hardware is sold at or below cost, and giving away a general purpose computer without reaping the long term upside is a recipe for disaster.
But look at the prevalence of cheating on PC games versus console and tell me secure boot does nothing for actual security.
A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone. Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Win…
- Windows Phone had no brand value. It didn’t add to the Nokia brand. It detracted from it
- Windows Phone allowed very minimal UI customization. This meant that Nokia could add little to no Nokia specific functionality
- Windows Phone allowed minimal hardware customization. This meant all Nokia phones looked and behaved like cheap Chinese phones for less than half the price
- Windows Phone was closed source, which meant Nokia engineers could not add either hardware or software functionality beyond whar Windows Phone already supported.
- As part of the Windows phone transition, MS required Nokia to kill their own OS development. Switching to Windows Phone was a hard 1 way turn.
The alternative to Nokia at the time wasn’t Windows Phone vs Meego. It was Windows Phone vs Meego vs Android vs Android + Meego.
The obvious, both contemporaneous and in hindsight, choice was to go with Android which and continue Meego dev on the side as a fallback. Android brought Nokia up to speed on the hardware and app ecosystem side, while allowing them to innovate on the hardware side and using their brand + unique designs + hardware quality to be a leading Android developer.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nokia was already in deep trouble before windows phone. If they did not go windows phone they would have ended up a android OEM (still better for them than what ended up happening) but there was no realistic way for them to "domination" at that point. That would have required them to change strategy years before they first saw the iphone.
As an Android OEM they'd have zero chance in the Asian market due to cost/features but they'd likely compete very well in the shut-out-from-most-competition US market and a good chance to be a secondary player in the European markets. Not a leader anymore but a significant player for sure. Windows Phone was dead on arrival. Throwing yourself behind a losing platform was Nokia's death knell.
This is completely wrong.
The Asian Market is far more diverse than that.
The Nokia brand was extremely strong.
The Asian market was and is very capable of supporting high end phones. It’s a smaller percentage of the market than in the west, but the entire market is also a lot bigger, so the absolute size of the Asian high end phone market is not far off from either the U.S. or European high end phone markets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nokia was already in deep trouble before windows phone. If they did not go windows phone they would have ended up a android OEM (still better for them than what ended up happening) but there was no realistic way for them to "domination" at that point. That would have required them to change strategy years before they first saw the iphone.
Nokia fanboys would never accept anything other than Elop/MS fault. Even if you shove the sales values in their face and ask to explain why the revenue was dropping for a 3rd year by the time of the Burning Platform memo. https://www.statista.com/statistics/267819/nokias-net-sales-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... And it's always N900 and 'dEvelOpmeNt hIstoRy'. I'm pretty sure what m…
Going to Windows Phone 7 didn’t solve the fundamental problem they needed to solve. The ecosystem, while also eliminating the ability to differentiate or innovate.
> Partanen was also at Nokia’s post-iPhone launch meeting, and recalls that there was little concern in the room. “We felt okay,” he says. Which is a perfectly reasonable reaction, the first iPhone was an iPod with a sub-par Browser and a bad mobile phone, in a device which barely managed to last one day on a charge. Others also had sub-par browsers, comparable/more versatile Media Players and MUCH better phones, run…
Oh, come on. Yes, compared to any modern device the iPhone was a piece of shit (no cut and paste when shipped? No 3G?), but as someone who owned a high end S60 device at the time, the iPhone was a breath of fresh air - the Maps experience on its own was enough of an improvement to justify it. The problem Nokia and others had is that they were judging potential iPhone buyers against the people buying their smartphones…
To justify what?
What exactly are you defending in such an emotional way...?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nokia fanboys would never accept anything other than Elop/MS fault. Even if you shove the sales values in their face and ask to explain why the revenue was dropping for a 3rd year by the time of the Burning Platform memo. https://www.statista.com/statistics/267819/nokias-net-sales-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_mobile_ph... And it's always N900 and 'dEvelOpmeNt hIstoRy'. I'm pretty sure what m…
Because they didn’t sell Android phones? More specifically, they didn’t have phones that ran an OS for which all the apps were being built, which practically meant Android since Apple wasn’t licensing iOS. Going to Windows Phone 7 didn’t solve the fundamental problem they needed to solve. The ecosystem, while also eliminating the ability to differentiate or innovate.
They were making a supbar products and did them for quite a years and people moved while Nokia itself didn't. I need re-iterate what by the time of the memo it was already too late.
If you want - read my previous thoughts on the topic and don't miss the thing about Ovi in the second link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32699296