Summary: journalist visits a Nokia software development site in Tampere, where everybody used to work on two mobile operating systems that Nokia is phasing out.
Understandably, these people are not particularly willing to admit that the software they spent years on wasn't good enough to keep up with Apple and Google, so the old conspiracy theory plops up: the Nokia CEO must be a "mole" who's intentionally driving the stock price down.
The root cause of this myopic idea is neatly summed up near the end of the article:
Linus Thorvalds, Linux’s Finnish founder, says that “Microsoft-hatred is a disease” among open source programmers, but in Tampere it’s more of an epidemic.
How about MeeGo Harmattan, which is said to be even ahead of iOS in terms of usability, performance and polish. Definitely ahead of Android. Elop stated that they couldn't get it ready until 2014, but surprisingly it's on markets before the WP phones. Nokia store is also way ahead of WP marketplace. It's just huge downplay of Nokia's products, while WP is not at all proven platform.
Elop's statements were understandable back then, when nobody had seen the N9.
Harmattan was supposed to ship in fall of 2010. It's a year late.
Yet, even if the MeeGo mess hadn't happened and Nokia had shipped a Harmattan phone on the original Maemo schedule, would it have made any difference? It would have been hamstrung by Nokia's confusion over Symbian's direction, and steamrolled by iOS and Android just the same.
It's not Elop's fault that Nokia's software is in shambles. The damage was done years earlier.
Put yourself in Elop's shoes when he arrived a year ago. There's Symbian, an OS that has become extremely expensive to develop. It has been open-sourced and modernized at great effort, but the resulting product (Symbian^3) has critical bugs and a lackluster UI. The people in charge tell him that the big leap forward is just around the corner... But apparently that's exactly what they were saying two years earlier.
Then there's MeeGo, a Linux variant that used to be one VP's hobby project. Recently it has been promoted to become the company's new flagship -- except that nobody is quite clear on how it should be positioned alongside Symbian. There's a powerful Symbian lobby inside the company that's determined to see the "eternal upstart" MeeGo fail. The technical state of the OS doesn't inspire much confidence either: the UI framework has been reset several times in the past few years, so although they have a sprawling Linux distribution, there isn't really a phone UI yet. "Don't worry," say the people in charge, "this latest framework is so great that we'll whip up a smartphone experience in no time!"
Faced with these options and all their internal political baggage, is it any wonder that Elop went looking for an operating system outside the company?
Dumping Symbian made a lot of sense. Replacing it with MeeGo seemed like a decent idea, but it was never clear if MeeGo was really ready to replace it (thought early reviews of the N9 made it look promising at least), and Nokia wasn't ready to dump Symbian. Ditching both for something else was a hard call, but probably wasn't the wrong one.
But, why announce when he did. The chosen OS wasn't out at the time, and Nokia had just gotten ready to ship their shiny new MeeGo flagship as well as a handful of new Symbian handsets. That announcement basically made all these new devices worthless. He could have at least kept the announcement silent for 6 months and see if the phones gained any traction. You can argue that they wouldn't have, but at least their sales numbers would have looked better. His timing was terrible; HP terrible.
And why WP? The OS wasn't finished and was missing some pretty basic features when it finally was launched. As countless people have said already, Android would have made a lot more sense here. They could have customized it and potentially even brought Symbian apps over and it had the added advantage of already having a solid foothold in the market.
I never got to understand all that maemo, symbian, meego operating system differences. Couldn't they just use linux and get some QML frontend in front of it. It seems really a lack of direction/duplication of efforts.
Well, it was their strategy all along with Qt, but it's been slow ride. Everything is Qt on new Symbian, MeeGo and upcoming Meltemi. Qt is natively on the new BBX and will probably be on Android. Qt is also their main strategy besides WP, so we will see how things pan out.
If I'm correct, the Qt Lighthouse is integrated in Qt 4.8 (now RC1), which means easy porting for any platform, including Android. Remains to be seen if Nokia and Google come in terms with this officially though. Of course, you can already distribute Qt apps on Android, using third party ports like Necessitas: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/ .
MeeGo Harmattan isn't as polished as iOS - it's got a lot of first-generation performance issues, definitely requires some babysitting to keep it running well, but it's miles ahead of Android.
It feels like the Harmattan team at Nokia really understood good UI and good design, and wanted to build a product around those ideals.
The N9 is also a really slick piece of hardware. Someone designed and loved this thing, and wanted it to be amazing. It doesn't have any weird bulges or outcroppings like all the Android handsets; the appearance of it is minimalist; even the camera module on the back looks like it fits the style. I always found the Android cameras to be just another annoying outcrop, never fitting with a cohesive design.
The N9, and Harmattan, have that cohesive design. It's a royal shame that it's the best phone no one will ever use...
I think the guys at Nokia design will be very happy with that comment. Fortunately most of them are still employed with Nokia and working on exciting stuff.
I feel bad for most of the MeeGo devs though. Most of them were laid off or quit in frustration over having their baby flushed down the toilet. Quite a large number of them ended up with Intel to keep working on MeeGo, just to see Intel drop the effort as well. Must be incredibly frustrating.
Disclaimer: I work as a software engineer at Nokia in Australia.
Please pass on my remarks to the design team - I'm very impressed with their work, and I do wish that they continue their excellent designs.
I truly wish that Nokia had gone behind the N9 with everything it deserves. I feel it's the first time that Apple has actually been challenged in design, in integrity towards an ideal, in making something that exemplifies that internal drive.
After seeing the WP7, even knowing it was coming, I know that their lovely design work was cheapened by that release. It's still good design, but it lost something tangible and wonderful, that sense of being something different and better. By shipping WP7, it became something that exists secondary to another goal, instead of a goal unto itself. Cheapened, as though a device that exists not symbiotically with the software designed to run on it, but any random garbage that can be sold with it.
What makes you say that MeeGo Harmattan is definitely ahead of Android. I do not think so. I also do not think that it's enough for MeeGo to be better in terms of usability, performance and polish.
For instance, I hate Android's built-in browser. The UI sucks. But the native apps for the online services I use, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Skype and Flickr -- are kick-ass. This happened slowly and for a looong time people complained how poor the experience is on Android with those apps. Heck, Flickr wasn't even available for Android 4 months ago.
But now they are. And I also replaced the browser with Firefox Mobile, which is very resource-hungry, but has a pretty sweet UI and syncs everything with my desktop.
I can do that because Android is freaking popular. And even in regards of polish and user-experience, Android 2.3 gets pretty close to my ideal and while iOS is still better, I prefer Android for a whole bunch of other reasons.
I AM pretty sad that MeeGo failed to get the traction and resources needed. Competition is good, but Nokia needed to do SOMETHING because they were clearly failing to deliver. I also think picking Windows Mobile was the dumbest move they could make, but whatever.
Can't agree with you more about Nokia picking up Windows Mobile. They should have gone with Android customized it to their liking (just like what Amazon did with kindle fire), taken advantage of already existing apps and ramp up from there just like what Samsung is doing right now. A big transition to a nascent mobile platform slows them down further, they seem to be heading towards the same fate as Palm.
Nokia is incomparable to Palm, you'd be more likely to know that if you've spent considerable time in Europe or Asia (apart from Japan). There are millions of people there who will blindly buy a Nokia phone regardless of the software. How do you think Symbian is still pushing so many sales?
Palm? It has nothing on Nokia, 'Nokia' is synonymous for 'cell phone' in many countries.
It has nothing on Nokia, 'Nokia' is synonymous for 'cell phone' in many countries
I live in Australia, where this used to be true. It is no longer the case.
How do you think Symbian is still pushing so many sales?
Because it runs on very low-end hardware, which makes it cheap. That advantage is slowly dying as low-end mobile chipsets get more powerful (eg, Android phones are down to $80 here, with no contract)
Well it looks like people at Nokia have tried really hard to release N9 even if it has problems. It is far from polished and I have hit some critical functionality that has API but is not working on Harmattan (most probably it works on Symbian). As well there are some functions that do not work from UI. I have reported bugs but that's the best I could do (maybe I can fix some of them). Overall I love how MeeGo Harmattan works and I love this OS - I'm happy owner of N950 (I'm using it as my main phone without problems).
Here is another thing that looks suspicious. New feature phones (that will run Meltemi) will have 1Ghz processor and as far as I'm aware N950 must have processor like this (at least I was hinted that it has slower processor than N9). Here I don't get why new OS is written when they have working one. As well it looks illogical to waste experience gained during Harmattan development (having in mind that Meltemi is developed in Germany and not Finland). It looks like not everything is revealed yet from Nokia side.
The first update is almost released with 3500+ improvements. The current software was ready in spring already and they have been working on the first update since. Also, I think the software on N950 is somewhat older/different release.
Meltemi is supposed to have different kernel, and it's really targeted at very low-end, in feature phone markets. Although, very low-end is 1Ghz in a couple of years.
OK. Maybe I was not clear enough but I wanted to say that swipe (http://swipe.nokia.com/) function from MeeGo Harmattan grown into me very fast. I have iPad as well - I have tried to swipe program in iPad naturally one day and that has not worked for me because there is no such function in iPad. My point is that Nokia has done something really cool from usability/user experience perspective.
Or maybe I'm downvoted only because I insulted all iOS device owners by saying that their device is not coolest gadget anymore...
It doesn't matter. WebOS was fantastic too. There is no demand. Consumers want iOS or Android. They don't want anything else. The only possible way they might is to introduce something that iOS or Android do not have ... and none of those operating systems introduce anything that would represent a significant innovation in the consumer space. They do the exact same thing, only incrementally better. That is not reason enough for people to switch.
WebOS lacked proper push and more capable hardware. Also, on global markets, Palm was a miniature company. I don't know if they even sold WebOS devices overseas. Android sell well because of multitude of devices and very cheap prices, not because it's good or popular.
Forget webOS even Windows Phone OS itself is way ahead of androind and even iOS in terms of usability. But you are right. People have ignored it so far. All they want is android or iOS.
A growing number of people "want" Android today but your average customer had no idea what Android was when Android beat the pants off WebOS in 2009/2010. WebOS was a great OS stapled onto the biggest laughingstock of marketing and shoddy production quality in memory.
WP7 was late and less polished but also suffered from carriers-dont-push-it-itis.
I'm curious about the misspelling of Torvalds. Was that a naive transcription of the spoken name, or a naive transliteration from a Finnish character similar to "eth"? ( https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Eth )
Just a mistake I think. Finnish doesn't really have any "special" characters except ä and ö. (Torvalds is written just the same in Finnish; besides I think it's a Swedish name anyway)
It is very suspicious that they jumped on Windows Mobile. All of the other companies that were in their exact situation went Android and are doing very well thus far. Even if we take it for granted that Meego was a non-starter, the question remains "why windows mobile?". It has shown absolutely no success in the marketplace and it is as much of a crapshoot as Meego.
This guy has atleast a plan after Nokia realized it needs a big shake, unlike RIM which is in a similar situation but burning it's hands with 'me-too' tablets that no one wants and handwaving about the awesomeness of QNX instead of pivoting quickly before it's too late. How a QNX based OS will save them is beyond me, because 99.9% of smartphone buyers wouldn't even know what that means.
As Elop said, the mobile arena has moved from a battle of devices to a war of ecosystems. If you can't break past the chicken and egg problem of creating an ecosystem and court developers, it's a death sentence. Just see Palm, they had a nice product, but they never had a chance.
So for that reason they decided to go into the rich Windows Mobile ecosystem? What kind of installed base is there for Windows Mobile nowadays? 5.7% and falling steadily.
Sorry but if the richness of the ecosystem is the main reason for change, then the obvious answer is Android.
Multiple reasons imho: They got a great deal from Microsoft that Google wasn't willing to match, the OS is beautiful, plenty of existing Xaml developers, great platform + language and better tooling than Android or iOS.
Everyone is under the impression that the waters are poisoned or they'd be flocking to the platform.
XNA is actually a decent toolkit, and the Visual Studio environment is way better than the Android Eclipse mish-mash.
What's preventing uptake is a complete lack of understanding in their market, an inability to take down even weak competition like RIM, and no clue how to leverage their success from the 360 on to a phone.
If they'd just called it the Xbox Phone it would've sold ten times better.
To a degree Apple is a poisoned brand. "Everyone" thinks their products are way more expensive than the alternative. It's a mindset they've had to work to undo.
Even as an Apple fan, I always thought the 8-core Mac Pro was expensive compared to the alternatives, yet the Dell equivalent is about $800 more.
Understandably, these people are not particularly willing to admit that the software they spent years on wasn't good enough to keep up with Apple and Google, so the old conspiracy theory plops up: the Nokia CEO must be a "mole" who's intentionally driving the stock price down.
The root cause of this myopic idea is neatly summed up near the end of the article:
Linus Thorvalds, Linux’s Finnish founder, says that “Microsoft-hatred is a disease” among open source programmers, but in Tampere it’s more of an epidemic.