Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

aaplinvestors.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 314 posts

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#271

Post by panick21_ »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #168
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…

I worked in Nokia at the time this happened and saw from the inside how the company was ran into the ground by internal incompetence, years of mismanagement, arrogance, and ineptness. Stephen Elop gets the blame for this often but he was merely the messenger boy. Put there by a board that allowed all this to happen long before he was installed to quickly execute what had been decided by that board. And that board was…

For me as a young outside software developer I saw the N900 and it was my dream phone. I couldn't afford a smartphone but I was ready to buy the N1000 when it came out. And then, it just didn't.

In the IT school I was at Nokia was a regular topic of conversation. All of us completely frustrated that they were apparently unwilling to invest in a Linux based phone and everybody eventually getting an Android or IPhone.

They really had a chance, they were at the right time with the close to the right product and just failed.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#272

Post by panick21_ »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #214
oriolid wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What was wrong with MeeGo? The way I remember it was that at the time the management-forced merge of Maemo and Moblin to Meego and the sudden switch from Gtk to Qt were thought to be risky moves and it was well known that Symbian supporters are doing anything they can to sabotage other platforms. Later I was told that N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required m…

> 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.

Can somebody explain what Maemo and MeeGo means here?

I remember the N900 coming out and wanting Maemo.

Then years later when I didn't care anymore I MeeGo peaked my interest, but I didn't really care anymore.

What other then GTK vs QT is different.

And why was it needed, I never understood why they simple didn't go forward with Maemo.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#273

Post by panick21_ »

ggm wrote: post #19

Great hw engineers let down by less than stellar software decisions. Nokia owned a significant slice of late stage pre internet telephony infrastructure level equipment, bridged over to the emerging mobile world and .. kinda missed the boat when Apple happend in with iPhone and then Android's emergence killed them. A lot of people loved their handsets. Just not enough in any single market to make up for some bad deci…

Internally they didn't miss the boat. They literally were on the boat and were crushing it. But they failed to make actual products and continued selling crappy Synbian based phones.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#274

Post by panick21_ »

tananaev wrote: post #8

Nokia had a chance, but their developer experience was terrible. They should have invested in it. And also open source. They could have open sourced their platform and compete with Android. What did they do instead? They made an extremely stupid bet on Microsoft, which by that time was even further behind in mobile world than Nokia itself.

If your platform is trash just opening it up doesn't matter.

And their linux based phones were pretty open but they had no power in the organization and having an open source platform with no phones is pointless.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#275

Post by panick21_ »

bawolff wrote: post #10

People pick on nokia for making the wrong choice, but i dont think they were wrong. Apps are important and they are a bit of a winner takes all market (or at least half). Nokia was screwed and i think the memo correctly identifies that. Unfortunately identifying the problem is only half the battle. Figuring out what to do next is the other half, and that is where nokia failed.

As everybody at the time was pointing out. If you are unwilling to make your own platform (Maemo/MeGoo) work, then just make Andoird phones. It wasn't really tha difficult and many people had been screaming about this since 2009.

But instead they just continued with the Symbian feature phones that nobody wanted.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#276

Post by panick21_ »

aj7 wrote: post #41
thematrixturtle wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The memo is from 2011, so that hardly matters?

I'm really having trouble understanding why this is even relevant in 2022. Who cares what the excuses and problems were within Nokia in 2011? Is Nokia's inability to keep up with cell phone technology in 2011 and important part of technical history? Business history? If so, why? I didn't even really get the burning oil rig analogy. It was a pretty melodramatic way of describing being beaten by a competitor, which hap…

Nokia was one of the larger European company. A true competitor in the global tech space. Its total collapse is very important for European tech history.

Many of us also really liked what they were doing with N900 and wanted it to continue. But it didn't.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#277

Post by toyg »

panick21_ wrote: post #272
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.

Can somebody explain what Maemo and MeeGo means here? I remember the N900 coming out and wanting Maemo. Then years later when I didn't care anymore I MeeGo peaked my interest, but I didn't really care anymore. What other then GTK vs QT is different. And why was it needed, I never understood why they simple didn't go forward with Maemo.

Maemo was debian-based and built around GTK. Its device target was effectively the N900. Nokia then rebuilt the interface (at fantastic dev speed, it has to be said) in QT (which had been blessed as the UI framework in order to facilitate onboarding of Symbian developers, who had been told to use Qt for new Symbian apps) and shipped it in the N9.

By then, however, management had struck an agreement with Intel to join forces over a Linux OS for devices. Intel had its own Linux distro, Moblin, which was based on RedHat. Moblin and Maemo were meant to merge into "MeeGo", a distro based on RedHat but with a QT interface. The project started fairly quickly but, by then, the N9 was basically ready, so Nokia effectively shipped what they had beforehand and just called it MeeGo.

Beyond the UI, iirc, the differences between Maemo and Moblin/MeeGo were the packaging system and some service daemons. The most annoying part, really, was that third-party apps built for Maemo would have had to be repackaged and retested for MeeGo, effectively throwing away all community efforts made over several years. Despite the best efforts by Nokia to placate folks, the community they had built around Maemo was completely pissed off and largely gave up, focusing on the actually-profitable systems. And then the burning platform memo happened.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#278

Post by panick21_ »

toyg wrote: post #277
panick21_ wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can somebody explain what Maemo and MeeGo means here? I remember the N900 coming out and wanting Maemo. Then years later when I didn't care anymore I MeeGo peaked my interest, but I didn't really care anymore. What other then GTK vs QT is different. And why was it needed, I never understood why they simple didn't go forward with Maemo.

Maemo was debian-based and built around GTK. Its device target was effectively the N900. Nokia then rebuilt the interface (at fantastic dev speed, it has to be said) in QT (which had been blessed as the UI framework in order to facilitate onboarding of Symbian developers, who had been told to use Qt for new Symbian apps) and shipped it in the N9. By then, however, management had struck an agreement with Intel to join…

Thanks!

This really reminds me of the Unix wars. Constantly companies announcing partnerships and then there developers spending time merging proprietary systems. And before they are ready another partnership bringing in some other thing that has to be merged. Not sure what exactly they gained with this Intel deal.

I guess they should have just continued with Maemo and attacked other software developers in general, rather then rewriting the whole stack just to attract Symbian developers.

A year after the N900 they should have been an N1000 by 2010. By the time late this memo happened the N1100 should have been ready to drop.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#279

Post by whaleofatw2022 »

spookie wrote: post #209
jonasdegendt wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a ton of free Nokia phones back in the day through these weird incentive programs. I was told at a meetup by one of the employees that each Microsoft division was to get N number of new apps in their local store each quarter, and they’d have developer programs along the line of “publish 5 Windows Phone apps, get a free Lumia phone.” There were zero requirements other than publish N number of apps, there was zer…

To be fair, let's not forget that Google had their apps in there and then got them out. At least the YouTube-like app I used had YouTube premium features at no cost, I guess.

The main 'premium' feature I remember from that app, being the ability to play the audio/video while running another app, and not having restrictions about WHAT you could do that with.

Honestly that's a bullshit feature to lock behind premium, given a PC can do it without.

But then Google more or less gave them the 'fuck you' and made the app unusable. Which I still feel has some antitrust connotations, as they waited until the platform became competent to do so.

Re: Nokia’s Burning Platform Memo (2011)

#280

Post by seba_dos1 »

peteri wrote: post #262
seba_dos1 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 doe…

True but the UI did often require the stylus to be pulled out. Compared to the capacitive screens it was pain to use. I did try and I used the N900 as a daily driver for a good couple of years but that UI wasn't designed for use without the stylus. I still however miss Windows Phone, there were some major mis-steps by Microsoft (the intial side load / developer story) forcing a software break with the move to Windows…

> True but the UI did often require the stylus to be pulled out.

Interesting, I have used N900 for almost a decade and I found its stylus completely unnecessary, never used it. As mentioned earlier, the touchscreen started to be annoying to use in its final years once it started to misbehave, but before that I absolutely preferred it to capacitive screens as it was harder to trigger accidental touches with it.

Post reply on HN