In other words, it's about knocking the leader off the pedestal.

don't knock them off, just surpass them by building a taller pedestal. no need to do the "im a mac and he is a PC" bull. just be better.

I'm going to backtrack a bit and start again, because I've been having a pretty off day I'm being grumpy and petty, so let's start this again.

Matthewcc you are absolutely correct and I'm glad you responded.

This is what got me agitated:

I'd like to understand what makes you think Nokia wouldn't want fan-based marketing. If you were on my marketing or PR team I would fire you based on that belief alone. Also if you capitalize 'you' in a comment to someone they are likely to take it personally.

The single most bothersome thing about this forum is something I've seen mainly on linux and development forums, which is a pervading secret (and sometimes not so secret) desire for The Product in question to not be a roaring success, because of the belief being one of the few people with The Product makes them special and unique. This is usually hung under a banner of "no selling out", but fortunately that doesn't apply here.

This way of thinking is fine if it's personally, but not when it involves trying to shoot down ideas that would bring larger success to the organisation or company that owns The Product.

So knock that **** off.





ok i'm done.

So you're in agreement then with the others, that the N900 is competing with the iPhone. Because even though you're creating a different pedestal you're still trying to compete with them since you said you wanted to surpass them. And if they weren't competition you wouldn't even be referring to them.

The N900 has been marketed as a mobile computer/tablet first and a phone second. But in the end it's going to be in the class of smartphones. Both the iPhone and N900 have different means to the same end.

I don't think I've ever seen a successful fan-based marketing that tries to follow a commercial advertising\marketing campaign template. Most of them seems to be word-of-mouth campaign, ad hoc, natural and spontaneous..

Well said...

My only comment is that the different means to the same end.

I want them to be divergent, the i-phone became a toy first and tool second. I would prefer the opposite. I think that the iphone will be in crises in the future because of this and will need to re-invent itself in-to a world without i-phart apps and the like. I think that nokia has the experience to keep this from happening in the first place and to allow a maemo device to come in flavors.

It is my stupid little dream, but at unboxing I would like to choose a flavor -Mameo Business/Social/Games etc. that would preload in all the tools I want for my needs and let me know that I can always add or remove things. I want to be able to give one to my 68 yo mom and i can make it meet her needs with large font, news feeds of the obits, and big buttons to dial. imo this is the grail. to be able to use all the functionality and help distribute it by bundling it and empowering users to change it.

Now many of you will say YES, thats the beauty of ROOT. but i swear to Christ my mom and much of the market is far more interested in a pill reminder than root access.

This is not just a fan community but also a developer community and I expect that developers are listening to our ideas and implementing them if you want help, im sure some of the average joes would love to help you come up with cool tools, and i include myself in there as I cannot even manage to ssh in to amazon-aws without help.

Right, my response including the different means to the same end was mostly pointed at showing that most of these devices are in the same competition. But you brought up a really interesting idea which reminded me of the Malcolm Gladwell TED talk where he refers to how people do know what they want you just need to give them options and that taste or preferences for a certain thing sometimes isn't always a vertical scale.

To me all these devices will continue being updated to satisfy the majority. Sometimes it will be a hit and sometimes it will be a miss. In the end if we are cheering for Nokia to be successful then it boils down to informing the public of misinformation and letting them make a decision because it is theirs to make or we can apply for a position at Nokia and make one kick *** device that re-brands the company in a much more favorable light to the public.

Two things:

First, don't assume the opinions of a (sometimes vocal) minority necessarily represent the majority.

Second, at least a part of the "desire for The Product . . . not to be a roaring success" is based in people not wanting the platform that suits their needs now to stop doing so in the future. Nokia's moves toward mass market have been slowly eroding away all of the features that make the devices appeal to the people who currently own them. Dual SDHC slots, a useful number of buttons, real d-pads, larger screen size, more usable hardware keyboard layouts, etc. These are all things that we've lost as Nokia has tried to take this platform the mass market.

It's tough to watch a product that started out nearly perfectly suiting your needs slowly become yet-another-generic-plastic-slab, but this "opposition to success" doesn't have anything to do with the punk rock before-they-got-popular attitude—it's about the unfortunate compromises that have been made to try to make a product succeed with the average consumer.

While I am sorely tempted by everything about the N900 (except the unsubsidized price that we are seeing in the States), the statements above are a problem.

We now know what it's not. Of course the same three statements could be made about a loaf of sliced bread.

The N900's problem, as I see it, is a lack of definition as to what it is. Even on these forums, different people see it differently. What do people think it offers a non-developer that cannot be gotten with something like the Samsung Moment (to pick the latest announcement: http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/07/s...ing-to-sprint/ )? While it may work in politics, defining yourself by what you are not tends to be a losing proposition in product marketing.

And please note that any use of the word Linux will immediately condemn the phone to failure. There's a reason that Windows netbooks advertise the fact that they run Windows but Linux netbooks do not advertise Linux. Linux is scary to the average user. Remember that a heck of a lot of people (most importantly, schools) were willing to pay extra for Apple over Windows solely because it was simpler. Apple's mouse had one button and Windows mouse needed two.

P.S. The Linux mouse has 13.5 buttons all of which are user configurable with jumper cables which can easily be made using the instructions available on HacksRUs.com

Who is trying to sell the N900 to anyone? Certainly not Nokia, it has no footprint in the mainstream media (I don't mean MSM in the political sense, but media that a non-Linux-techie would be exposed to).