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Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#141

Post by bsimpson »

enjo wrote: post #129
musesum wrote: post #99

It was somewhat of a 3-body problem: carriers, oems, and developers. Carriers wanted branding and bundling. OEMs wanted to market a distinction design. Developers wanted a platform. Three cooks with competing tastes. For example: the Moto-Q ran Windows, shoe-horned in some AT&T UX junk, and a huge nubin that stuck out in the middle. It pioneered the ever present "pocket dial." Was thinking of developing for it, but a…

I worked an application that was distributed as part of the OS for pretty much every nokia symbian phone. We hired quite a few folks who had worked directly for Symbian. The stories were crazy. There were major components people refused to even touch (like messaging) because the code was basically unmaintainable. An aggressive refactor of the entire OS was needed but they never really got comfortable with that. Symbi…

I've heard rumors that Android was originally supposed to be an OS for digital cameras.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#142

Post by durnygbur »

sgloutnikov wrote: post #131
koiueo wrote: post #38

Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. To these days their gesture navigation implementation is the best. And they had Swype keyboard preinstalled. Speaking of apps: Here maps, SoundHound, amazing mail client and calendar... Gosh I miss that phone. I used mine for about 3 years, I think, and sold it for more than a half of its original price in literally a couple of hours (which means my price was too low). B…

Aw man the N9, good times. I still rock my glossy white N9 from time to time. Just realized that thing had 64GB of storage in 2011.

That thing had also fully functional car navigation with all maps for free, and it had busybox shell... gosh how miserable are we now with smartphone options...

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#143

Post by oriolid »

Apocryphon wrote: post #76

Has any Nokia B9 user also tried Sailfish OS? Is it a proper successor to the Harmattan Meego distro the N9 had?

I had the Jolla phone back in the day. It was kind of similar to N9, but nowhere the almost magical experience N9 PR1.3 was. The lack of apps was starting to show, the on screen keyboard wasn't that good, the browser was just bad (to be honest, N9 wasn't keeping up with the standards either) and the hardware didn't do anything to improve the experience.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#144

Post by microtonal »

yywwbbn wrote: post #137
microtonal wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They brought in a trojan horse with Elop. Any sensible company at the time would have bet on both horses. E.g. Samsung and HTC had both Android and Windows Phone devices. IIRC there was even one Samsung model (I think a Samsung ATIV) that you could install both Android and Windows Phone 8 on.

I don’t think there is or was a lot of money to be made just being yet another Android OEM.

Apparently also not in Windows Phone :). At any rate Nokia I know, not exactly the same company) is making Android phones now.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#145

Post by sofixa »

simonh wrote: post #136
prox wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if we ever going to see anything other than Android or iOS. A third ecosystem wouldn’t be so bad.

I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck with the Mac and DOS/Windows duopoly since the 80s. The problem is a new platform isn’t just competing with the established OSes themselves, it’s also competing with the associated peripheral, software and services ecosystems. Those consist of thousands of companies providing thousands of products and services worth trillions of dollars. There’s just no…

> I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck

In-between Chromebooks and generic Linux distros (say what you will about the year of Linux on the desktop, use is only growing; slow paced or not, doesn't matter), specialised Linux distros (SteamOS - you might think it doesn't matter, it's only for a handheld console, the Steam Deck, but it will force many games to have Linux compatibility. And one of the main things keeping many tech savvy users on Windows is gaming) i think a duopoly is a bit of a strong word, and it's getting disrupted.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#146

Post by walterbell »

https://maemo-leste.github.io/

> Maemo Leste continues the legacy of Maemo ... based on Devuan Beowulf (Debian Buster) and all the supported devices ship with recent mainline Linux kernels. We are currently in the development phase and we are actively searching for developers. For some devices, we have development images available - such as the Nokia N900, Motorola Droid 4, and the PinePhone. There is also a 64bit virtual machine you can use to try out Maemo Leste.

Software WIP status: https://leste.maemo.org/Status

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#147

Post by ilkkal »

pjmlp wrote: post #94
skavi wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s simple enough to see why Nokia thought Windows would be the right choice. It was far more polished than Android at the time. It ran well on cheap hardware. And they would have Microsoft backing them.

Elop did, Nokia engineering not so much. Our culture was pretty much anti-MS before he came on board. On the server side we were using HP-UX, Perl, C++, in 2005 the transition for Red-Hat Linux and Java started. On the devices, Symbian and the Maemo (Linux based). Symbian was finally getting usable with PIPS, Qt and Eclipse based Carbide. I happened to be in Espoo the week after this memo was published, I haven't fou…

I was a consultant working on two Meego projects at the time, fancy mechanics and some pretty interesting ideas about graph data storage and inference. Super talented crew of diverse hackers, kind of a tech head dream project thinking back on it now. This all was such a gut punch. I always thought they should have just rallied behind their own OS, but I don't claim to understand the business all that well.

(edit: a highlight was getting to meet Dan Ingalls once; he was cool)

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#148

Post by simonh »

sofixa wrote: post #145
simonh wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck with the Mac and DOS/Windows duopoly since the 80s. The problem is a new platform isn’t just competing with the established OSes themselves, it’s also competing with the associated peripheral, software and services ecosystems. Those consist of thousands of companies providing thousands of products and services worth trillions of dollars. There’s just no…

> I don’t see how it can happen, on the same way we’ve been stuck In-between Chromebooks and generic Linux distros (say what you will about the year of Linux on the desktop, use is only growing; slow paced or not, doesn't matter), specialised Linux distros (SteamOS - you might think it doesn't matter, it's only for a handheld console, the Steam Deck, but it will force many games to have Linux compatibility. And one o…

Oh sure, I was mainly addressing the current mobile OS landscape with the desktop as a historical case in point, but you're right. There have always been alternative options, especially for niche use cases. I think there are several things happening there right now. One is the erosion of the desktop as a native application platform, if you mainly only care about web apps then the desktop OS isn't an issue because the web is already a powerful platform.

The other is the advanced state of Windows emulation for games, you can bypass the platform effect if you can piggy back on an established platform's APIs. That's tricky though, plenty of mobile OSes tried to get traction with Android APK compatibility, but the problem with that is, why bother developing native apps for them? With games consoles it's a different situation, maybe emulation in the long term is just fine.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#149

Post by mnd999 »

eslaught wrote: post #15

I'm not saying this is a great letter, but he wasn't wrong. I owned both Symbian and Maemo devices, and the experience (both to use and develop) really was this bad. That's not to say everything about it was bad, or that there was nothing to like (as HN comments have often pointed out, there was), but it didn't hold a candle to iOS, or even Android. (And Android in those days was pretty hideous.) Now what Nokia did i…

The N9 was a better phone than anything they released subsequently. The TI OMAP being eol and the lack of 4g were for sure problems but Elops cure was worse than the disease.
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