Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

I know it's popular at the moment to lay all the blame at Elop or at Nokia management (current or past). But maybe the truth is really that MeeGo was just to late and not good enough?

The impression that I get from various threads here and elsewhere is that at the moment MeeGo is still nowhere near ready, and an end-user ready release is at least another 6 months away. Now in the alternative world were Nokia did decide to ride it out with MeeGo, by the time it's finally market ready (autumn? winter?), was it actually going to be better for mass market end users than the iPhone 5 or the Samsung and HTC Android 3.x devices it would be competing against? Somehow I doubt it.

Of course, I don't believe that Nokia WP7 devices are anywhere near ready yet, and they may take even longer to get on the market. So it's not like I'm endorsing this move. All I'm saying is, maybe Nokia's fate was already sealed a long time ago. Maybe the only way they could have turned the tide was if they had reacted faster, developed faster, delivered faster than they could.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

I think you'll find that platforms that never have a product released for them invariably fail.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

was android perfect upon its release? how is it doing today?

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

That's the point, I assume that Meego is too late and too weak at the moment. I assumed that Elop was brought in to fix the SW development problems Nokia has. I assumed Nokia has an execution problem and a new CEO is capable to fix that. I bought into the strategy Qt/Symbian/Meego.

Elop has been with Nokia for how long, 5 months now?

And now he kills their existing smart phone business (based on low to mid range Symbian), and concedes the high end.

And Nokia's first WP7 phone will be out late 2011. Sell in numbers 2012??? Good luck...

I am not a Nokia insider, but let me tell you something: I believe that a lot of Nokia employees will be fed up with this new direction. Nokia is also said to lay off thousands of employees. Does anyone believe that under these circumstances Nokia's execution will be improved?

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

When the iphone was release, it changed the landscape. In 2 years, Android had become the platform. Has WP7 done anything that makes anyone think it has the capacity to do what the iphone and Android has done/are doing? WP7 has less features than systems older than it.

Nokia has stated that 2011/12 are to be transitive years. So at best, it will be 2013 before they show something wizbang that might change the landscape. You're telling me, they could take the same amount of time and do Meego right?

Nokia has more devices out there than anyone. They had a plan to get apps on a lot of those devices and their future devices. They pissed it all away by moving to WP7. I suppose Nokia is banking on most if not all their users switching with them. Well based on what I've seen since their announcement, it certainly doesn't look that way.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

is meego too late as wp7 which will be properly featured in 2013 by nokia?

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

MeeGo was going to be late, regardless. Folks are too unwilling to admit that.

So instead, spread anger about WP7 - which, is easier to do since it's not full-featured as of yet nor is it a successful seller at the moment either.

Pick the easiest to do, run with that. That's what is happening on these boards. Easier to blame Elop than face the fact that nothing is shown a ****ing year later after the initial MeeGo announcement that can be purchased rather soon.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Depends on what you mean by "Nokia's execution"...

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

I read somewhere recently that Nokia had 10 guys working on meego...Elop could have hired 10 x the developers....sounds more like a msft flunky is invading it's competition and then letting it die.

Anyone who can't put 2 and 2 on this one must have fallen off the fruit truck comming into town.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

To follow up on my snarky response, I don't think you can say either way about Meego. Maybe it would have failed, maybe it would have succeeded. But it never got the chance to step onto the field.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

For me the biggest insanity in this isn't about WP7 being bad, or some ideological openness question. It's the seemingly disproportionate ratio between what Nokia is giving up (past, present and future) and what they are gaining.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

We will never know what really has happened until someone deep inside Nokia start writing about it. This will probably happen sooner than later when people start to leave Nokia.

But one thing is for sure, what went wrong happened several years ago. Elop and MS is just the end of it.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

As I stated in my opening post, I don't believe WP7 is actually an improvement on the previous path.

All I wanted to say is, on these boards it's tempting to blame Elop/WP7/Microsoft/Nokia management for the failure of the project. But maybe the prosaic truth is simply that MeeGo failed because developers couldn't get something good enough finished quickly enough.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

You're probably right. But this also means that Elop is a weak leader.

Steve Jobs did not sell off Apple. He re-innovated.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

So meego can be considered too late but a beta version of WP7 that just came out in November is not huh? Really the last update of WP7 just released a week ago added what should have been in at launch, a bunch of crap is still missing from it to be added in the next update and the development sdk is still missing a bunch of core API things to come later in the year

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

I really don't know, gerbick, and you may be right. But with scraping it like this we will NEVER know.

I feel no need to become an apologist for Nokia's management. I thought things were messy when Meego was announced a year ago, but there is no match to the mess we're going to see the two years to come. What with WP7 completely undercooked (no multitasking, no copy/paste), and at the same time need to write all hardware drivers to put it on Nokia's devices. Will WP7 run well on the low range phones that currently use Symbian?

As I said, I am no expert at all, but my gut feeling tells me Nokia's problems aren't just going to go away with a new OS.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Well some is maybe because of this :-(

http://thenokiablog.com/2011/02/12/m...vice-rejected/

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

No its not the end of it. The problems will continue... The one who scares me most is what will happen to Qt :-(

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

I truly doubt it was 10 folks only working on MeeGo; however if that's the case, that was Nokia's pre-Elop decision.

If Elop didn't see the value in MeeGo, then that was the board's inability to convey that. They were supposed to show all aspects of their operations, including future iterations of OS's and how that would be advantageous to their next set of projects going forward.

That... somehow didn't happen.

So what happened? He talked about what he knew... a MS OS. And the board didn't fight against it well enough to stop it. We can all wonder why, but it's just what happened. Speculate on your own - there's tons of theories.

The MSFT flunky that invaded Nokia was invited by Nokia's board of directors.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Funny how any critic of MeeGo is now automatically assumed to be a supporter of WP7 (despite the fact that I made it clear in my opening post that I believe WP7 actually makes things worse).

And FWIW, I believe that WP7 was far too late too, and that that's one of the bigger reasons for its lack of success so far.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Also WP7 is not backward compatible with 6.5, nor does the sdk resemble anything from 6.5 nor are the dev tools the same.

All Microsoft did was release into production an incomplete sdk and a new incomplete mobile os to get some early adopters to point out what is missing and broken... In other words they did what they usually do release beta use consumers to beta test try to get a drop on the market, fix and make product complete in the following 12-18 months after release.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

There is no problem wih WP7. With help of Nokia it will success.

Reason is simple: In a year Microsoft will be as hyped as Android and Iphone is today in media because its "something new".

Microsoft has PLENTY of money too feed the media.

Nokia will loose at the end when all other mobilemanufactors go WP7 2012 also. SO the most stupid thing Nokia did (except going WP7) was that they didnt even get the rights to be the only WP7 manufactors. Stockholders knows this and thats why the stock falled 12 percent. At the same time stocks at Microsoft raced.

Simply the plan for Microsoft is world domination as always. And as always they will succes because people are stupid enought buy everything that is most hyped atm. Just take a look at the PC market. You can buy any non Microsoft computer today. Not even a keyboard without selfish Microsoft shitty logotype and that makes me wanna puke!

Personally I dont give a **** what happens to Nokia but its more bad for Trolltech engineeers (that is Qt) and Meego engineers ofcourse and open source.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

True, we'll not know fully... but here it stands we're faced with nothing shown a year later on any hardware that we've not seen before (read: Not on the N900)

100% agree. Sadly, I was feeling that way when MeeGo was announced. This is all déjà vu.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

This really is very similar to what happened to Sony Ericsson. They had Symbian and UIQ with more or less full control over UIQ at least. But UIQ reached a dead end (and at that point, so did Symbian as well), and eventually SE reached a point where they had to simply stop throwing money out the door. Thanks to Android they are still alive - for now.

Nokia could also go the Android route, but chose to go Windows Mobile. In the long run this will be better than Android, if they succeed. How bad it is going to be for Nokia until it becomes better, is entirely a result of how well they handle Symbian the next couple of years, but I guess MS has promised to step in with cash as well?

In the end, I don't think Nokia had much Choice. It was either Android or WP. Lucky for Nokia, MS was in a tight spot as well, so they had some leverage in the negotiations.

We should also remember that what Nokia and MS are saying now, is not necessarily what is going to happen. I still find it hard to believe that Nokia will let Symbian die just like that, and my bet is that we will see Symbian devices for a long time some way or the other.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Bull. Look at the average blokes in the shops. They don't need 200'000 apps. They want a nice UI and good basic apps. Many people I know realised they don't need many apps on their android devices, just the basics.

So Nokia would have been able to keep their market share with something better than symbian.

And especially something uniquely Nokia, that is how you keep customers. Actually its the reason why nokia until now still sold more symbian devices than all others android devices.
It is also how apple survived in times of crisis.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

They haven't given up anything. It was already gone. Major markets viewed Symbian the way they viewed station wagons... as outdated. Smart phones are the future and new buyers were not going to buy Symbian. Android is appearing on cheaper and cheaper phones, and Symbian can't compete against Android. It's done. Game over.

You can mourn a loved one, but if you leave them around for too long after they're gone they're only going to stink up the place. Elop brought a shovel and he's finally burying the corpse. Now, Nokia can move on with their lives.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Did I miss the sale of Nokia? Apple entered new markets. Nokia isn't in a position to do that, so Elop did the only thing he could do to fix problems NOW before the company entered a death spiral. What do you think Nokia should have done if MeeGo wasn't an option? Ask everybody to work harder and just kinda think of something better really quick isn't an option either. MS offers full customization; Google doesn't. And your decision is to do what, and why?

People are either complaining about the decision without offering an alternative, or they're in denial of the stated facts and offering implausible alternatives.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

The question is: What will make me wait for Nokia and not buy a WP7 device now? I don't wanna buy it now, and won't buy it in a year.

Good luck Mr. Flop.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Meego was an option. We've seen android, WebOS, QNX from RIM. Do you think Nokia is too stupid to put together a decent OS?

And Apple did not resurge by entering new markets, they just made more desirable products. The iPhone came in 2007, before that Apple was already going strong again.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

And ten billion Microsofties are working on it right now... not ten or fifteen Nokia employees. Microsoft started over from scratch and managed to produce WP7 and the first update. Despite the comments here, WP7 generally got very good reviews and the fellow who runs Nokia Insights called it the most stable phone OS he's ever used. Microsoft also has Zune this and XBox that to tie into WP7 and they'll certainly deliver better desktop integration. Does MeeGo even have an interface yet? Putting your chips on the idea that the world's biggest software producer can churn out an OS quicker than you can is not an unwise bet.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

I do not understand the discussion here. Probably because I never tried Meego. Maemo was good enough for me.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Maemo just like Android an user shell on top of Linux? And the same for Meego? I bought an Archos last week, and Android drove me mad until I got a terminal and started exploring the filesystem and I felt a lot more confident from there, just like when I got the xterm on the N900.

Nokia got itself a winner when they put the N900 on the market. Sadly enough they never followed it up, but pulled the rug from under it by starting on Meego when Maemo could have profited by strong support and development.

Ah, well, water under the bridge. Right now, the N900 does everything I expected from it, and even if no more updates and improvements come along, I still expect it to function satisfactory the nezt few years.

Paai

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Zune? lol, even ovi music reaches more people than zune, its likely nokia is gonna provide the music stuff for wp7. XBox live? Nice, does Apple need it for lots of quality games? Nope.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

What I find curious is how an unknown banking analyst, clueless about MeeGo, was able to conveniently write an open letter to Nokia and Microsoft urging Nokia to adopt WP7 and his thoughts on MeeGo: "Get rid of your own proprietary high-end solution (MEEGO) – it’s the biggest joke in the tech industry right now and will put you even further behind Apple and Google.". This piece was published and all over the web.

In the days before the announcement there was also a piece about Nokia's huge R&D spending that suddenly showed up also out of thin air. There are far too many coincidences in the lead up to this event. He decided to go with WP7 long before the day before the announcement as he has said.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

It looks like Elop was simply hired in to make the deal with Microsoft and do the dirtywork firing people in Finland. Judging by that Memo he wrote, he doesn't strike me having too much knowledge about what is going on. Steve Jobs is a true technological visionary, Elop is a bureaucrat. Too bad that Steve Jobs also is an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Hold you conspiracy theories here. Nokia's large R&D spending has been noted a number of times in the financial press in the past, see e.g.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/24/pal...ng-rumors.html,
http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...-update2-.html,
http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...-update2-.html

The first link is quite enlightening: Nokia spends over 8bln on R&D, which was several times the entire market value of Palm (2.4bln in 2009, just after WebOS release, eventually purchased by HP for 1.2bln). And Palm developed WebOS pretty much from scratch and shipped an end product in less than one and a half year time.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

There was a plausible alternative offered, that was the old strategy. Are you familiar with it? Even if you are, I'll just have to disagree with you.

This will not speed up anything. They probably won't have WP7 devices out any faster than they would've had MeeGo phones. Their market share is going to tank even more now that Symbian is officially a dead end. And they just flushed years worth of work down the drain pretty much when it was finally about to bear fruit.

With this deal they're going to benefit others in the WP7 ecosystem much more than themselves, IMO. Not to mention that even if it "wins" over Google's or Apple's ecosystems, it doesn't still mean Nokia wins. They gave up their chance to be a big player with their own ecosystem and the markets reaction to that was pretty clear. And I believe they really had a chance. They did an unconditional surrender while being second only to Apple in profits and biggest by market share in both overall and smartphones. Now they're just an OEM among others.

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

I think the Nokia leadership is so obsessed with services that they couldn't even get the OS right. I mean they were talking about that for years. It seems this decision is a continuation of their obsession..

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

A quick correction, from a person who has used and enjoyed Apple products for years (since the Apple ][+): Steve Jobs is in no way a technological visionary. Nothing that Jobs has ever done in the last twenty years has ever pushed the limits of technology, and in fact, up until the last few years Apple hardware and software have consistently been inferior to similar products in the PC world.

The one and only good thing about Steve Jobs is, as you say, he's "an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate". Let me rephrase that statement: Steve Jobs is an anal-retentive perfectionist who believes that every technological device should be just as easy and intuitive to use as absolutely possible, and drives his people hard to deliver products following that rule.

Apple is a leader in the technology industry not because it creates visionary products, but because unlike pretty much every other company out there today, it at least has a leader with a goal. Compare that to Nokia, fumbling around with lots of different kinds of phones, lots of different operating systems, lots of divergent goals; honestly, Nokia hardware and software should be beating Apple's even today, but without consistent leadership, there's just no way the company can hope to keep up...

Re: Maybe the unpleasant truth is that MeeGo really was too late and/or not good enough?
 

Ah - someone here is starting to think with the right mindset.

All articles that appeared in the media like this are part of a information campaign - its no coincidence.

The appointment of a M$ guy as CEO by the board is also no accident and is deliberate.

When asking the question WHY WP7 was picked instead of Meego, TECHNICAL considerations of which is a better product should be TOTALLY ignored - business people at a high level who make these decisions dont know technical **** - they only know buzzwords and talking points.

You would be better off looking at the money trail, who talked with who in public and who loses and who gains in each viable outcome.

Assuming that Meego was dropped for WP7 for technical reasons just shows that you have never worked in a corporation at a high level.