The article is insightful and informative. However, I think the title should be written in the active voice: "Nokia set up the new MeeGo-based N9 for failure". If their platform is burning, it's because they lit the fires themselves.
Although sounds a bit jaded, the article does have a point. Nokia appears to unintentionally sow fear, uncertainty and doubt about its own products.
With both Apple and Google, you have some sense of where it's going to go (more of the same, just better). With Nokia, who can reliably predict where the platform's going to go in a year or so? Or even which one?
Still, N9 gives me a glimmer of hope. One can hope, right?
Given his clear commitment to WP7 at all costs, what would motivate anyone to buy an N9, much less develop for its "platform?"
The two top OS players in the market, Google and Apple, each have exactly one platform they push (Android and iOS respectively). If neither of those titans thinks it's prudent to support two entirely different platforms, how am I to reconcile myself with the idea that Nokia can successfully attack the market on two separate fronts?
It's possible they have a contractual obligation to Intel to release a Meego phone this year. Who knows. But clearly upper management is lukewarm on it.
Yeah, it's clear that if Elop had his way, the N9 wouldn't be released at all. Either there's an external contract, or there's some internal promise he made to board members/shareholders. This smells a lot like the Kin launch just to meet a contractual obligation between MS and Verizon.
The launch of a doomed product just to meet a contractual obligation--if that's what it is--is going to do a lot for Nokia's relationship with carriers in the future.
I agree with the obligation theory, because if the N9 looks really good to reviewers (whether it sells or not), it will be used as a counterpoint in any future bad or even neutral reviews of their first few W7 releases as an indictment of management competence. What makes that even more likely is that reviewers are geekier than the general population, just as Maemo/Meego is geekier than W7. So even an equivalent quality of experience is likely to create bad buzz in the shadow of a well reviewed N9.
If I were the management, I would be hostile to it and do whatever I could to bury it. We know from history that Nokia can bury their own phones, but I have no idea if they can do it on purpose:)
Of course, my hope as a geeky N900 owner is that the N9 catches on, Nokia pivots to releasing Meego/Harmattan phones along with W7 phones, and starts putting money into Meego again until it's ready for primetime. I don't think it's too likely, though, without a leadership change.
I wish it wasn't released. A Contractual obligation seems likely. Remember Microsofts failed Kin Phone? This looks linda similar. Mocrosoft lost a lot of PR points for releasing kin and then cancelling it in a few days. Elop doesn't seem to have learnt from that. At this time the thing nokia needs the least is some loss of face value and credibility.
> Elop seems determined to walk in Adam Osbourne's footsteps:
Rick Belluzzo's footsteps are a better comparison: (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo for more); He killed HP's processor business (giving it to Intel for free), then destroyed SGI (killing MIPS and IRIX in the process).
The main beneficiary in all three cases (Nokia, SGI, HP) is actually Microsoft - where Belluzzo got a job later, and I'm sure Elop will go back to later to collect his reward -- after all, he sold Nokia to MS for $1B, way below market price.
Bought Unix Systems Laboratories, Wordperfect, Quattro Pro, and DR DOS, and squandered them, accelerating Microsoft's dominance of PC operating systems and office software.
Nokia is doing a credible job of burning through the largest phone developer ecosystem in the world.
Making the switch to WP7 might or might not have been a good decision for Nokia, but it was a decision to largely part ways with that developer base and jointly gamble with Microsoft that they could build a credible alternative developer base to iOS and Android.
It's funny to be writing this; four years ago, I would have been frankly really surprised to think that Nokia developers could become somewhat irrelevant so quickly.
These journalists winsomely pretending that the N9 ever had any kind of chance are crazy. A slick UI is utterly unimpressive - it's the bare minimum a consumer might expect. WebOS's underpinnings were far more impressive upon release several years ago than the N9 is today. The Playbook has a very attractive interface... and no marketshare to speak of. Android tablets are off to a halting start despite a great interface, proven branding and technical leadership in many respects.
I'm not trying to worship Apple - I expect Android, at least to compete - but I don't see anything to indicate that the N9 is remotely competitive.
The reason its not competitive is not because of the hardware its the software. As a software my resources are split if there are more platforms that I need to develop for. There are already too many. iOS, BB, WP7, android (with all its fragments). I think it was very wise of Elop to pick a software platform that they are not burdened to support. Nokia's competency is and has always been hardware and they should focus on that. HP will realize this soon...
> especially when you consider the fact that much of the software is native code, not hampered by the resource overhead of a managed code runtime.
Really Ars? Really? Sure, they're probably right there is a difference, but have they actually measured it and shown it's significant enough to warrant statements like this?
Is Android, with JIT-enabled Dalvik, significantly more "resource intensive" than comparable functionality on MeeGo? Perhaps I missed that article.
If it will fail if Nokia wants it to fail. If they try to support and promote the N9 and Meego as well as they can, I think it will gain traction fast.
WP currently requires all third-party apps in the marketplace to be entirely .NET/CLR-based. There are a lot of hints that this will eventually change, possibly at the same time they port to a Windows NT kernel, also hinted to be in the works. This might explain the confusion over Qt, if they plan to eventually port it but can't say so without revealing Microsoft's roadmap.
Why is it that when I go to https://meego.com/ I don't see any software that looks like the N9 or any news associated with the product? Is it a proprietary skin on Meego or something else? It looks fishy to me that the last Meego release was October 2010. Are they just really far behind open sourcing their latest stuff or what is up?
FTA: "It's actually a hybrid that is largely built on Harmattan, the legacy Maemo 6 code base that Nokia shuttered when it committed to MeeGo. It seems sort of dubious on the surface to call the software MeeGo when it's really still Maemo, but the hybrid is apparently designed in such a way that it has full API compatibility with MeeGo 1.2."
Yes, the UI is propriatery skin (that's not intended to get open sourced) over the open source internals. That's how the previous Maemo-based devices worked, too.
This is somewhat analogous to Android (which is open source) and HTC's Sense UI on top of it (which is specific to HTC). Google's Android pages don't neccessarily link to HTC' products.
That explains everything, but what with no releases since October 2010. That release was pretty bare bones as I recall, have they really made this much progress since then (and in the middle of layoffs/turmoil)?
The very first thing I see on meego.com is "MeeGo 1.2 Release ... 19 May, 2011".
EDIT: I realized you were probably talking not about the MeeGo platform but about the reference handset user interface. I don't know who has been developing that. Nokia announced their intention to differentiate with their own proprietary UX a while back as I recall. The only project I've heard of that uses the reference handset UX is the Community Edition of MeeGo for the Nokia N900.
