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Posts: 25 | Thanked: 42 times | Joined on Aug 2012 @ Athens, Greece.
#44
Originally Posted by Plankku View Post
Based on the translation, it appears mostly accurate. Some of the translation is too sloppy to understand completely.
This article opened old wounds. It is painful to recall how much potential there was at Nokia only to have poor management throw it away.

A good point touched on in the article is how subcontractors from different regions were all heavily involved. This is true.
All the Nokia internals were always focused on Symbian. The first time I saw Diablo platform, I was not too impressed. When I saw Fremantle and got to work on it I was very excited. I thought this signaled the new direction that could make Nokia huge again. Especially in NAM region (weakest sales). I gave 150 percent and volunteered to work more than my schedule to be a part of Fremantle (Rover). The end results I can say felt like my own child. A child that was brought up very well only to be kicked out of the house at a young age and left to fend for himself. My morale and good feeling about Nokia began to sink.
But back to subcontractors. I worked a lot with them and it was always people from India primarily as well as Asia Pacific. Only when problems were very high up did Finland internals get involved. This meant that a lot of bugs never got past some of the contractors or did not get enough push to make it to Finland managers. Harmattan would be different.

Harmattan had a large budget but for small team. Actual budget though was smaller compared to other projects at time. There was big push in US to work on X7 for a US carrier. This took a lot of people (managers and SW teams that could work on Meego) away from Harmattan and meant more contractors must do bulk of work for N950. N950 was being designed with ATT in mind at one point, but ATT has very demanding specs for their software. Contractors especially with the language barrier in India and Asia did not comprehend that. It was being worked on without regards to carriers from their end. That mean ATT would not approve it as is.
N950 was very poor after that. Too many changes and compromises. Not enough people to work on it. The simple UI went from good to bad and was regressing at one point. When layoffs continued to occur, Meego team had a very low morale. Incentive to do great work and continue was not there. And the subcontractors in India/Asia were not aware of internal struggles. Bugzilla reports looked like comments from a bathroom wall.
People held back too much information that could have helped the project sometimes. Credit for work was also stolen or not given often during these times. Just like Symbian groups.
Basically Meego was outsourced and polished internally by the few who cared (Jolla team). When N9 came out, it was due to N950 being in very bad shape. No way it could be released like that. N9 had more internals working on it but bulk of work had already been done. I never got to see Senna but I know it was planned. There was rumors of a smaller ebook reader at one point but that may have been tied to Senna rumors. I was already laid off so do not know about that. The power struggle was always a problem.
That was the problem right there. We, the consumers, lost faith in Nokia delivering something good in time or even keeping it alive for that matter.

They waited too long to make radical changes to Symbian while on the other hand they had Maemo on their hand which they didn't promote or develop and even when MeeGo came to be, it was nothing like Maemo. Talk about inconsistency.

And then came the burning platform memo.......

Personally, N9 is my last Nokia, no matter how great (or not) Lumias will be, I refuse to waste any more money on a company with no loyalty to its customers.
 

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