Thread: Nokia shares dive after sales warning
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bobh is offline bobh
2011-06-10 , 14:29
Posts: 62 | Thanked: 62 times | Joined on Jul 2010 @ New Hampshire, US
#145
Originally Posted by kanishou View Post
If we have a conspiracy, then the whole board must be on it and pretty much prior to the hiring of Elop (since it was their doing).
I agree that this seems unlikely.

But isn't WP7 even less mature than Maemo/MeeGo?

I have seen this stated as a fact a couple of times, but it's complete nonsense. Maemo 5 wasn't even in the same ballpark yet with its half-baked UI and legacy issues. Could we have reached similar maturity if we had continuously developed Maemo 5 instead of basically starting from scratch again? Possibly, but it wasn't Elop who made that decision.

The bottom line is, that Harmattan is not a more mature Maemo 5, it's a new development that is just as significant a change as WP7 was for Windows Mobile.
And I think this is where Nokia went wrong. They kept changing their strategy. Putting the polish on Maemo, getting to step 5 of 5, and adding in Qt as a migration strategy would have made some sense.

Yeah, it would not have been as technically clean to have two different programming API's (Qt and GTK), but time was a-wasting. Starting over again with Meego at such a late date was a very bad decison, IMO.

If the work that went into Meego had gone instead into finishing Maemo, then Maemo could very well have been a competitive platform. Yes, Qt would not have been as integrated and they may not have had as smooth a transition from Symbian, but there are an awful lot of Linux developers out there too.

They shot for perfect instead of accepting good enough and trying to make it perfect over time. When that failed, Nokia had no good choices left. They were either going to become an Android OEM or a WP OEM. They had lost their chance to be a leader.

I still have some small hope that Harmattan/MeeGo/WhateverWeAreAllowedToCallIt will be able to establish itself as a fourth player, but it's going to be very very tough. We definitely won't make it, if we keep deluding ourselves and hide from inconvenient truths behind a smokescreen of ideology and conspiracy theories.
I am sad about the way things turned out because Maemo was so close to what I, personally, wanted. I am not all that interested in "media delivery platforms", I want a more PC-like device that I control and decide what to install and when and how. Maemo seemed to be headed in that direction.

But there is no enthusiasm, none at all, from the carriers for that kind of device. Nor from Apple, Google or MS. For all of them the device is just a way to extract value from consumers through an exclusive "app store" or ads or whatever. So they have little interest in making their systems truly open in the ways that the PC was.
 

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