Now that we're coming up to the 1 year anniversary of the Jolla device being out, just thought I'd create a topic to talk about the success of this venture.

I guess that success for this project can only be gauged by shipments. Has anyone got any numbers on shipments? I am in the UK, and I have yet to meet a single person with a Jolla in the wild. Looking at the Jolla store, the top apps have not been too heavily downloaded. Even if you take the top app, then double or triple that number, you still have a fairly low 5 figure number for active devices. From what I see online, there's a hardcare of folks on Twitter who are talking about Jolla, but it's not more than a few hundred people. The funny thing I've noticed is the number of Jolla employees who actually tweet using iphones, that certainly makes me wonder.

I don't wish to be disparaging. I love my Jolla, I use it as my daily driver, but from what I can see, the traction behind it just hasn't been great. At some point, this company will need to stand on its own two feet. If we're only selling a 5 digit number of devices, I don't think the company can do that. It seems to me that there just aren't enough people who care about a proper Linux-based OS.

Thoughts?

Unfortunately even here in Finland, even though Jolla launch was on the news, I have met only very few people who know what Jolla is. Most "techies" of course know, but those people are in the know of all things related. Regular consumers have no idea, and I don't believe Jolla has ever advertised in TV or magazines. DNA (Finnish carrier) only had some magazine ads during the first month or so.

I think they are doing well, in the sense that they are entering more and more markets.
However, they are probably late compared to their first hopes.

So the true question to me is 'how long can they cope with having mid-success?' or said differently, how long their investors can wait for a return.

I am still optimistic as the cost in running their business is pretty low (due to the size of the company) while their prospects is pretty high: even a 1% of the market is huge for them (that means many devices sold per Jolla employee).
Additionally I believe the brand is more and more well-known, due to their different launches (estonia, kazakhstan, hk, india, namibia) and to the use of the android community (xda-dev).

What is still pending is their success in promoting the OS with other phone makers. This is still to come. Or maybe they have changed their plan and will only delivers to consumers directly (via Android launcher and hadk), as makers are not responding yet...

At the end, I have no idea how many Jolla they sold but during HK launch, I think the CEO was quite ambitious:
http://www.phonearena.com/news/Jolla...ile-OS_id59610

I have to disagree. The success of this project is more than evident already: It's the product in our hands.

To build something as complex as a smartphone with technology taken almost exclusively from the GNU/Linux desktop world (plus a little magic and a stroke of genius) and actually sell it on three continents, even have deals with picky carriers... And to achieve all this as a company that until not long ago had less than 100 employees... This is what I call success.

(The fact that it turned out to be such a beauty and didn't copy age-old UI concepts, but brought a new one that's years ahead of the one I have to use on my Samsung, makes the success even bigger by magnitudes.)

In other words: There are so many milestones that similar projects in the past never reached and that Jolla successfully passed (usually even in time) that I still can harldy believe what I'm holding in my hands today. (I'm coming from the days when I waited for the Neo1973 to become a consumer-ready, "free" smartphone. I've seen quite a few failures in this business.)

Number of shipments is one additional aspect, and I hope they sell at least enough so they can build a second or even third model. But after all that we've seen in this industry, saying that success only depends on shipments is just so wrong....

Jolla launch = success
Jolla phone = success and failure
Jolla phone name = failure
Jolla pricing in Europe = failure
Jolla pricing in India = success
Jolla not selling battery = failure
Jolla not deliver any useful Toh = failure
Jolla sales = unknown

Now that I finally have one, I feel entitled to comment

Agree.

Agree. The specs are Just Right™; the "failure" part is convincing Joe Average that it is so.

Strongly disagree. I know Dave is trying to push his - sorry but I have to use that word - idiotic contraption that not only sounds horrible but would also be an invitation for law suits. But I personally think that "Jolla phone" is much catchier than e.g. "Xiaomi M3".

Agree on all 5 accounts.

I'm not sure 'shipments' or even 'profit' is a useful measure early on in a company's life.

From both of those however you can facilitate growth and Jolla don't seem to have grown their staff greatly yet the list of development tasks still to be done is large. I do hope their expansion into new markets improves the shipment and profit as the one that matters to me is seeing the software improve and that requires investment in people.

I'd be shocked if they've sold more than 25k so far, and that's being extremely generous. Given the lack of community activity or interest, and lack of app downloads, if they have achieved that kind of number or in excess of it, then the percentage of inactive phones / users must be MONUMENTALLY high ... and I think we already know it is very high.

I guess it's possible with the sales by DNA in Finland they've exceeded it ... but it just doesn't seem to tally with activity. I visited Finland this summer and went into a couple of DNA shops ... neither had Jollas. Never saw any Finns in Helsinki with Jollas, and most people I talked to casually had no idea what it was (they thought it was an old or maybe unreleased Nokia) when they took notice of the phone. They had no idea what Sailfish was, though all knew of or remembered the N9 / Meego. A couple of more tech savvy people did recognise it, but said they almost never saw people with them, and were amazed that a foreigner had one.

Re: Jolla employees using non-Jolla phones to tweet or as their personal / business phone. Is anyone surprised? Between basic, necessary features still being missing (copy-paste, voicemail notifications etc), terrible connectivity problems when roaming, the awful battery life, and poor e-mail .. it's not exactly a great companion for professionals working in the tech industry, or any industry.

It's not about it being a 'proper Linux OS'. It's just Sailfish, for many people who've bought Jollas or others who might be interested simply isn't viable as a main phone yet, and the hardware is poor quality and low specced which further compounds problems.

I suspect most 'interest in proper Linux' will go straight to Ubuntu once it's released, unless Jolla actually come up with a selling point for Sailfish, or there's widespread adoption by Chinese OEMs. The Meizu MX4, which will receive an Ubuntu ROM in December, and be sold in an Ubuntu version (as opposed to Android) has already had pre-orders exceed 10million. If 1/100 people install and stick with Ubuntu, that's 100,000 users just from the preorders, on one phone (first of many). I really, really don't like the UI and web-appiness that Ubuntu Phone currently has, but Canonical are much more open about development, direction and what's being implemented than Jolla, and whilst the Ubuntu Edge's PR campaign was horrifically mismanaged, their PR machine is much bigger and much smoother than Jolla's, and if they get the mobile flavour into reasonable shape, I'm sure many Ubuntu / Linux desktop users will happily migrate to it.

On the flip side ... Ubuntu and the MX4 ROM run on Libhybris, so porting Sailfish to it *should* be very easy and relatively problem free ... and it's a superb piece of hardware.

Agree, but I feel like they sidetracked themselves with things like the Jolla Launcher (now delayed), TOH and choosing to go with a bespoke (low quality) phone after the ST-E / Ericsson withdrawal instead of a good quality off the shelf design from a Chinese OEM. For such a small company they gave themselves far too much to do, in my view. I hope some of the management issues from the old Nokia didn't creep into the new company, but focus and priorities do seem a little funky.

IMO it's an inevitable consequence of a company run by geeks. No business acumen. Still, as someone said in another thread, what the big guys would call a failure can be a success for a small startup.

Pulling figures out of a hat: 20k units sold, profit €100 per unit... total profit €2M. I would LOVE to start a company making that kind of profit in the first year.