Upvote if you knew immediately where this "CEO from Microsoft" is headed.
Wow, didn't realise he went to Telstra. Sounds good to me, Telstra suck, if he can help to kill them then all the better.
Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
51–60 of 66 posts
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never did figure out what was supposed to be wrong with MeeGo/Maemo. Always thought it had a lot of potential and some great UX ideas that were nowhere else.
The problem was twofold: - Internal politics and the "old school" symbian developers not buying into this ecosystem - MeeGo/Maemo was more worried with Free Software "circle self pleasing" and rewriting stuff every couple of months than actually shipping a product How did Android approach the same problem? Kept the kernel and replaced X and most of userspace with dedicated libraries and binaries. Focused on shipping…
I think that's a bit unfair. Meego was scheduled to use Wayland instead of X. While I don't remember if it did, Sailfish definitely does. Maemo was also quite of an early adopter of Pulseaudio. Thus, the whole Maemo-Meego-Sailfish saga has been one of the pioneers in changing the stack SysV/X/ALSA -> Systemd/Wayland/Pulseaudio and friends.
The N9 was a really polished product. Offline navigation was incredibly good. I still use it. With a bit of care it could have been a nice product.
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#53The old Nokia crowd seem to have a tough time admitting that all of Nokia's old software operations were beyond salvage by 2010. Symbian had turned into a sprawling pile of crap, and Maemo/MeeGo was painted in a corner by internal politics that had marginalized its development. Nokia was spending ten times as much as Apple on R&D, yet had very little to show for it. Having two competing OS teams was a bad choice made…
I agree with you until the WP part. WP was always destined to be a failure in the context of that time. It didn't matter that Microsoft paid Nokia billions, because you can't fix everything by throwing more money at the problem. Microsoft learned that the hard way with its investments in the app stores, too, and in other markets, too. People who followed the ecosystems very closely then knew that even Android was luc…
> I agree with you until the WP part. WP was always destined to be a failure in the context of that time.
WP's problem was in the length of time between flagship phones, and the length of time between updates.
WP7 came out, with a big marketing push, and it was an overall good OS. The initial wave of phones were received OK, but the platform had some warts that needed to be cleaned up.
What MS did is announce that they were going to release an update, and then do a huge rewrite. 7.5 came out, fixed all the obvious show stopper issues, and then all MS needed to do was keep iterating the platform.
But they didn't. They waited 2 years to release 8.0 instead. Which regressed features from 7.5, asked developers to learn a new API, and had features missing from that API that used to exist in 7.5.
At this point the platform has lost a lot of mind share, new phones need to come out yearly, not on some random scattershot schedule. iOS sees regular platform updates, and is iterating much faster. Android is still a dumpster fire at this point, and could have been eclipsed.
So then WP8 finally comes out. Android is in a much better spot, and iOS looks pretty damn spiffy.
New API, huge chunks of functionality are missing, making many types of apps not even possible to write.
But hey, the Lumia 1020 comes out and gains a TON of attention. The best mobile camera ever made!
And then Microsoft up and does nothing for another two years. They stop releasing flagship handsets, and basically let the brand die.
Finally 8.1 comes out, but by this time it is too late. No developers, the APIs finally aren't terri-bad but they are still miserable to develop for compared to anything else, and all mind share has been lost. 8.1 is actually a good OS (unless you are a developer), but 7.5 was also a good OS, 4 years earlier.
If MS had released updates to the 7.x line every 6 months, focusing on making the developer's lives easier, they could have won. 7.x required far fewer resources than Android, ran much smoother, and performed well on lower cost devices.
But instead someone in the MS engineering department won, and Windows Phone underwent a complete OS rewrite. The reason was merging the Mobile org and the Windows org together, and Engineers played politics instead of writing software, thus one of the kernel teams had to go.
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty confident that the choice of Windows Phone over Android really didn't have to do with the UI, or even with Elop's past Microsoft connections: it had to do with services. Nokia wanted to bring their own services to the platform, especially relating to maps and navigation, and they wanted to have the new OS vendor be a full branded partner. With Google, that was an either/or choice: they could have used AOSP…
> Personally, I think they should have gone with AOSP It's certainly complex to armchair quarterback the idea, but I don't think Nokia would have had any more luck than Amazon's FireOS (or the failed/doomed commercial attempt at Cyanogen, for that matter) if they had attempted that. AOSP has long been a seemingly open carrot with far too many hidden and closed sticks in Google's control.
Do you mean the FirePhone specifically?
FireOS is still used on the Fire tablets, which appear to be one of the most successful non-Apple tablet around. At least successful enough for it to be on its 7th generation with yearly refreshes, anyway. Similarly FireOS continues to mostly track AOSP, with the Android 7.1-based FireOS 6 being the latest release.
I wouldn't be so quick to blame FirePhone's failings on FireOS vs. Google given the number of gimmicks FirePhone tried to do, like the weird 4 front-facing cameras doing pretend-depth on the UI. I think would be hard to definitively state FirePhone failed purely because of FireOS not being Google-certified. FireOS probably didn't help, sure, but I don't think it was FirePhone's exclusive failure point, either.
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meego could have been killer, if they'd made the devices available, and shipped Alien Dalvik to bootstrap off of Android's app ecosystem. I've been using a Xperia X running Sailfish for the last week, and can't get over how well Android apps run along side beautiful native Sailfish apps. While Google Play Services are kinda hacky to get up and running, if you can live out of F-Droid and/or the Amazon app store, every…
BlackBerry tried that exact strategy with BlackBerry 10: brand new OS with an Android app compatibility layer. It didn't work. Nokia was coming from a similar position as BlackBerry, so I don't see how it would have worked for them either.
I just switched from my final BlackBerry after 10 years in the B.B. ecosystem to an iPhone X. The Android app compatibility extended the life of my Classic for an extra year but was hamstrung by being painfully slow. I could run Spotify or Google Maps but only just so, and forget about multitasking.
I still miss the BB10 workflow. Messaging, multitasking, swiping was all perfected ahead of the mediocre implementation of those in iOS 11, but the X is so fast, I can just brute force my way around the UI gaps and get shit done more quickly.
Nothing will ever replace the Hub, though.
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem was twofold: - Internal politics and the "old school" symbian developers not buying into this ecosystem - MeeGo/Maemo was more worried with Free Software "circle self pleasing" and rewriting stuff every couple of months than actually shipping a product How did Android approach the same problem? Kept the kernel and replaced X and most of userspace with dedicated libraries and binaries. Focused on shipping…
I think that's a bit unfair. Meego was scheduled to use Wayland instead of X. While I don't remember if it did, Sailfish definitely does. Maemo was also quite of an early adopter of Pulseaudio. Thus, the whole Maemo-Meego-Sailfish saga has been one of the pioneers in changing the stack SysV/X/ALSA -> Systemd/Wayland/Pulseaudio and friends. The N9 was a really polished product. Offline navigation was incredibly good.…
> Offline navigation was incredibly good.
It definitely still is. It's unfortunate that map updates are no longer available.
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#57I wonder if Nokia would have done better had they focused on markets outside of the US/North America rather than partnering with Microsoft and abandoning Symbian and Meego.
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#58I still love my N9 and I still reminds how fluid is UI was, especially at the time of slow Android...
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#59Actually looking forward to getting a new Nokia w/Android soon now. :-)
They seem to be nice devices, but they are made and mostly designed by Foxconn. Only thing from Nokia in those is the brand licensing.
Re: Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem was twofold: - Internal politics and the "old school" symbian developers not buying into this ecosystem - MeeGo/Maemo was more worried with Free Software "circle self pleasing" and rewriting stuff every couple of months than actually shipping a product How did Android approach the same problem? Kept the kernel and replaced X and most of userspace with dedicated libraries and binaries. Focused on shipping…
I think that's a bit unfair. Meego was scheduled to use Wayland instead of X. While I don't remember if it did, Sailfish definitely does. Maemo was also quite of an early adopter of Pulseaudio. Thus, the whole Maemo-Meego-Sailfish saga has been one of the pioneers in changing the stack SysV/X/ALSA -> Systemd/Wayland/Pulseaudio and friends. The N9 was a really polished product. Offline navigation was incredibly good.…
Why is it unfair?
If they had focused on shipping and improving the user/developer experience instead of rewriting their product every year or so (and while I didn't see the N9 I did see the N800/N900 and the experience wasn't great - also because of hw issues) we wouldn't be having this conversation
N9 was released in September 2011 that's 5 years after the first iPhone and Android had an ok product by then.
Had them focused on improving what they had on the N800 (released January 2007) instead of what they did they would have owned the market. Instead they let Android surpass them. They had everything to succeed and THEY BLEW IT