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Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

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Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#231

Post by dsr_ »

stuaxo wrote: post #213
theshrike79 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The teams that did Maemo stuff etc. weren't allowed to ship any features before the Symbian side (which had more political and monetary power) had achieved feature parity...

Aah that's awful. I remember when Maemo first arrived wanting one, and they never made it mainstream.

Let's compare the Nokia N900 (Nov 2009) to the Motorola Droid (Oct 2009).

They arrived at about the same time. They used the same CPU. They both had (approximately) 800x480 screens, which at the time was flagship class. They both used slide-out keyboards, removable batteries, a 5MP camera, 256MB of RAM, and some on-board storage plus a microSD slot. They weighed within 20g of each other.

The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative. Both had an official price of $600-650, but would actually be sold for $200-250 when bought with a 2 year carrier plan (that was the norm back then).

Maemo had a small developer community. Android had a medium-sized dev community. Android had marketing -- for about 2 years, people were calling all Android phones "Droids". Maemo had none.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#232

Post by seba_dos1 »

oriolid wrote: post #228
seba_dos1 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued That was probably because N9 didn't really use MeeGo - technically it was still a Maemo based system that was only disguised under MeeGo brand.

The version of the story I was told that the Maemo/Moblin mashup was just as bad as the idea of combining two different frameworks that do essentially the same thing sounds like, nowhere near production ready, and the Harmattan aka MeeGo-branded Maemo with Qt was the only way it could be made to work at all. I haven't heard anyone say that genuine MeeGo would make things better.

That was the sentiment of my comment as well, I guess I weren't clear enough - Nokia N9 was made to work great on what technically was still Maemo, but since they were supposed to go with MeeGo afterwards it would still require a lot of work to actually do that.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#234

Post by PopePompus »

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…

Yes, the under appreciated secret sauce Apple had was a brand with enough prestige that they could dictate terms to Cingular Wireless. Cingular couldn't put bloatware on it, they couldn't load it with crappy video "services" that played 15 second clips of football games for $19.95 per month. They couldn't charge a fee for a map app. They couldn't even paste their logo on it. Etc., etc.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#235

Post by [deleted] »

grishka wrote: post #217
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…

Isn't the carrier concern US-only though? In many other countries carriers know nothing about phones. Carriers sell cell service, electronics stores sell unlocked phones.

[deleted]

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#236

Post by Zash »

pengaru wrote: post #66
alfiedotwtf wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nokia N9 was the best phone I have ever owned. I'll counter with the Nokia N900. > I believe, they should have pushed with Meego. With vendor support their OS could've been a hit. So say we all.

> I'll counter with the Nokia N900. I've never understood this about N900 fans. My experience with the N9 was great, and never left me wishing I could go back to something more like a Sharp Zaurus with modern cell connectivity. What is it that makes the N900 appealing? Is it strictly the physical keyboard? So the N950 would have been the N900 killer? Or was there something else about it?

The physical keyboard was certainly nice, especially for a linux sysadmin / programmer. I also miss the camera, the "normal" and familiar Linux environment, the unified messaging (native XMPP support, with A/V calling!). It was sturdy despite the moving (keyboard) parts. Phone experience was decent, certainly better than my current Android, but can't beat my first phone, the Nokia 3310.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#237

Post by helf »

frr149 wrote: post #158
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…

HarmonyOS is the only thing really new that I've seen , but I wouldn't touch it with a 10 ft pole.

Um. HarmonyOS is literally just Android. It’s not even remotely new. There’s even. Android/Google copyright notices left in it.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#238

Post by seba_dos1 »

dsr_ wrote: post #231
stuaxo wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aah that's awful. I remember when Maemo first arrived wanting one, and they never made it mainstream.

Let's compare the Nokia N900 (Nov 2009) to the Motorola Droid (Oct 2009). They arrived at about the same time. They used the same CPU. They both had (approximately) 800x480 screens, which at the time was flagship class. They both used slide-out keyboards, removable batteries, a 5MP camera, 256MB of RAM, and some on-board storage plus a microSD slot. They weighed within 20g of each other. The N900 had a resistive touc…

> The N900 had a resistive touchscreen, the Droid was capacitative.

N900 touchscreen was great. Not only was it perfectly readable in direct sunlight, it was also much more accurate than capacitive screens and not anywhere close to cheap resistive screens' clunkiness people usually imagine when hearing the term. The only issue I had with it was that they tend to develop issues after years of use, so my Nokia N900 does some very annoying ghosting these days.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#239

Post by zenogantner »

iamflimflam1 wrote: post #130

I can really recommend reading “Operation Elop” - https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ it’s a fascinating look at everything that happened.

As a former Nokia/HERE employee, I agree. A really interesting read!

It is a book originally written in Finnish by two journalists who start out with the question of whether Elop was placed at Nokia with the goal of "handing over" the phone business to MS. Their final answer is "no": it is unlikely that this was the case, according to their research. Most decisions that were taken were rational and explainable, many of them risky but adequate given the desperate situation ...

I was not at the company at the time of the memo, having joined in 2012. I do remember the morning when every employee at Nokia got an SMS on their phone saying that the phone business was sold to Microsoft. I was part of the maps division that was later sold to a consortium of German, an event that was way less spectacular ...

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#240

Post by black3r »

shp0ngle wrote: post #62

I mean the Nokia-Microsoft phones were great Everyone who had one said so. It was the best of all the “third option” OS devices. All the WebOSes and such. But the market just doesn’t want a third option… even back then the Android and iOS were ossified

The market's only thought about the OS is what features it supports. And lots of them are provided by 3rd party apps. Lots of people switch from Android to iPhone and back. People mostly just want to keep using their TikTok, Instagram, WhatsApp, ...

It's the app developers (and their companies) who wouldn't be happy with a third option, because the existing two cause enough problems, just think about how many frameworks for cross-platform app development exist, they were created for a reason..., and even with them you still have to do OS-specific stuff to tackle different app store policies, different privacy features, updated APIs breaking your app on new OS versions... or you can have two entirely separate teams working on two separate codebases and try to keep the feature parity...

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