Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Full Story

This is a good sign Nokia is serious about competing with the iPhone and their app store.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Hmmm. Sometimes major moves like this lead to major shakeups in products and platforms...

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

geez - the way these Apple guys are getting poached, I'm amazed they still have any employees http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/0...gers-and-staff

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Only if the executive is Steve Jobs himself =)

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

On which side? I don't want anyone who's ever worked at Apple even as a janitor touching Maemo :mad:

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

What brilliant line of reasoning lead to this comment, if you don't mind me asking ;)

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

A deep-set hatred of Apple marketing & profiteering
EDIT: oh and Steve Jobs

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

and thats how you know you've picked a bad exec


generally jumping in and mucking about with existing plans too fast quickly leads to failure in most businesses

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

bad news. :(

hope this person will not bring everything that's wrong and bad with apple over to maemo. it's a bit like celebrating the fact that a successful criminal was hired to lead your local bank.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

First of all, I think this is a good thing, since Apple knows how to do compelling products.

And second of all, if he works in the Maemo organization, he will work for Mr. Jaaksi who I believe still has the vision what Maemo should be. This guy will not run Maemo.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

"compelling" is highly exaggerated. they managed to fill a certain niche. i wouldn't want maemo (or anything within nokia) to move towards this niche... because there's nothing there that i would want.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

What is this niche? At least it seems people in the USA like this niche and it also seems Apple can make the highest profits on the market from this niche.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Super-simplified products with zero learning curve, but impossible to do what you want with after the initial likeability wears off.

Combine that with a desire to force everyone to use iTunes and prevent them from installing their own apps, and it should be obvious why we should be wary about this man.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Please also read what I originally said about the second thing.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

so what? i'm not in the US, i don't care what the people there like or don't like and i'm also not interested in profits that any company other than my employer makes.

what i'm interested in is the product i hold in my hands. having two distinct philosophies, apple's iphone and nokia's maemo, is a good thing. it allows me to choose what a want.
anything that will poison the maemo-philosophy with apple-concepts will make a half-baked wannabe-iphone. not good enough for those who want maemo (like us), not good enough for those who would have bought the iphone, anyway.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

No reason to worry about. Ask to Ari or Peter next week if you want to know more.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Maemo is developed by an entity that makes decisions based on profit. If it doesn't eventually cause Nokia to make money, it will be abandoned and it will be a long time before another company puts so much faith in such an open platform again.

Design is critical in consumer products, and though I'm no fan, Apple is better at it than Nokia.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

that kind of thinking might well prove fruitful in the maemo context. software intuitiveness does not have to include closed garden philosophy

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

people are repeating this over and over again.
it's still not logical.
we lose the open platform if it doesn't generate profit.
and we lose it if it turns into something different in order to generate more profit.
either way, we lose. how is one of those scenarios better than the other?

the only good thing we should hope for is that we can keep this open platform the way it is - because enough people will like it the way we do. if they don't, there's no way to save it.

i doubt that. whenever i have to operate any apple product (desktop pc, iphone, ipod), after 3 minutes i feel the urge of throwing it against the wall or trampling upon it. these beasts never do what i want them to and, worse, they never communicate clearly what i could do as a next step in the workflow. i usually sit and stare at the screen, helplessly pressing the same buttons over and over again...
it's design that may work a minority of people with an exceptionally high IQ. i'm too dumb for it.

(oh, maybe by "design" you meant the looks of the UI... that's a completely different thing. we have enough themes.)

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

We were worried that they'd destroy the openness *now*. It doesn't matter whether the platform fails or not if that happens.

Zero learning curve is nice, but it rarely coincides with being good for any kind of advanced or even prolonged simple usage. Having both would be great.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

See? You are starting to see the light of truth :)

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

i have one question for those who see this as a bad move.

would you rather swirl or pinch?

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

neither. give me a hardware button for zooming in and out - oh! we already have that. next question, please.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

how long have you been stuck in the 80s?

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

2½ years.

next question, please.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

sorry i changed the question slightly

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Wow, the way everybody's going about how an Apple executive will taint Maemo as a whole makes me incredulous.

Do you think a corporaton and its directions and strategies are so neboulous that one excutive willc hange it all in a flash ?

Secondly what gives that an Apple excutive will make Maemo more Apple like ? Nokia must have selected him based on certain merits and qualifications - and not necesarily to make Maemo more Apple like ? Apart from changing the way Maemo's openness is , there may be othere ways he can bring some positives - like in the Marketing dept and how to position the N900 to consumers .. etc etc.

I think all this talk about "oh, now we are tainted" is just reflexive Apple hatred creeping in. At least as a eye opener look at how Apple executives did manage to change Palm for the positive (granted Palm never set out to do an open OS).

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

10 years then. next question, please.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Benny, you do realise that if Nokia doesnt make a profit from the device and, even then the n900 is dead.

This is the whole balancing act of open source being used by corporations - to make a profit from an open platform by selling something on top of it (the open platform). Its not some charity and open source ideologue that Nokia is out to prove to the world. It doesn't work that way.

As must as we cherish open source and open source ideology, it has to earn the bread at the end of the day - and the two need not be mutually exclusive either.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

you mean like... - what? a broken distribution system for 3rd party apps? (there's a thread about it somewhere here)
no distribution at all outside america?
increasing losses?

oh...

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

It's a job, not a religion. I got news for you - Nokia hired an Apple guy to design and launch their flagship stores. If you've ever been in a Nokia flagship store, and you didn't mistake it for an Apple store, well maybe that should tell you something. :)

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

you do know Nokia sells phones, right?

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

I guess when you read financial results, you don't read the whole of it.

Palm financial looses are for the older divisions pre-pam Pre. Only taking the Palm Pre results (which hast been out that long as yet), its results would have been positive actually.

Don't skew the facts.

And distribution channels are a different matter - its not as if 3 Apple executives are going to change the whole Palm company which just goes to prove that one Apple executive at Nokia will not change Nokia.

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

with three phones, Apple has invaded Nokia's marketplace. I would like some of that back frankly! (as typed on a MacBook)

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

How come this comes down to a discussion about iTunes or iPhone and profitability?

On that one only has to look at the PC business over the past few years... I think Nokia did and concluded that a closed OS married to specific hardware at first attracted a lot of market but eventually lost out to a user friendly closed OS that ran on user configurable hardware. In the end however a user friendly Open Source OS is the one that continues to grow.

Nokia sells phones.


***

I hope this guy does well in whatever he does for Nokia. Whatever it is, it will not result in short term radical change of anything, imo.
For me, using the "positive paranoid" concept that geneven recently introduced me to, this means that Nokia believes that this Maemo thing just might "take off" and give them a rare chance at an OVI store "do over". Perhaps they want people with experience in position now so they do not miss any opportunity..

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

I hope that apple guy don't have any rule on Nokia product design! I don't want my device to be simple-basic with some white-y and slim design.I want to be fatty as possible without losing any functionality!

If that executive is going to do anything, then I suggest he starts with making maemo-store (I hate OVI & rebuilding it is time consuming , just build new one!) after that let him try to get some of the big names into it. As a hint: We don't need to get programs as OSS have self-sufficiency in that aspect , just games!& remember that maemo doesn't need DRM to sell games as Windows don't have it. (I read this line here somewhere, just forget who mentioned it :) )

If this guy have to do anythings with the design , let him add *R1,R2 & L1,L2 buttons or have R1,L1 is enough for gaming. After that release a version with Phone Chip and other one without (This will kill iPod touch)


(People call this shoulder keys , for none PS/Sony guys)

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

My fear: Maemo --> Open, Apple --> closed.

But it could be groundless paranoia. Hoping for the best...

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Is that a rhetorical question or do you really want an answer?

For me it's yes. I worked at a US-based international corporation that hired a CEO who singlehandedly half destroyed operations. Don't forget CEOs bring in other people, and this guy did. His infiltrators did an extreme amount of damage in a short time and, like locusts, fled afterward.

He was also president and chairman of the board of directors (part of his contract) so he wielded great power.

When he was fired for poor performance by a board that rediscovered its gonads, he collected over 50 million USD severance and moved on to his next victim.

The American way. :rolleyes:

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

Yeah, but this guy will not replace Jaaksi, who is the CEO of Maemo. Why is this such a big deal? We don't even know what this guy's title is in Nokia, or do we? Would it be equally bad if Nokia would hire software engineers from Apple?

Re: Nokia hires ex-Apple executive
 

seriously this is no big deal, one person does not effect a company like nokia what is massive in size and employees