The story of Nokia's Maemo and MeeGo
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 11th Oct 2012 21:41 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless It's a long read - but totally and utterly worth it. After interviewing ten former and current Nokia employees, and combining their insider information with publicly available information, Sampsa Kurri has written a long and detailed article about the history of Maemo and MeeGo within Nokia, and everything that went wrong - which is a lot. It's sad tale, one that reads almost like a manual on how to not run a large company. Still, between the bad decisions and frustrations, there's a red thread of hope that leads to Jolla.
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RE[4]: Remember...
by zima on Tue 16th Oct 2012 23:55 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Remember..."
zima
Member since:
2005-07-06

(hm, not sure I hit a limit before - oh well, the post continues...)

Surely a sufficiently large amount of people will get fed up with this race to the bottom at some point, the question is when and what will happen next. Will we just go from an extreme to another and claim that everything was better in the past [...]

Yeah, I see an issue of sufficiently many people believing myths about their past, hence also ultimately about themselves (and acting and/or voting on it)

A quote before, you're looking at the past through very rose-coloured glasses already. This is how it actually often looked like a century or two ago:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phossy_jaw ( http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~belghist/Flanders/Pages/phossy.ht... )

- the peasantry in many places was effectivaly in a state of slavery right up to XIX century.

- France also had ~colonies, with widespread forms of - effectively - slavery; and even Algeria war was quite dirty.

- hell, Sweden was responsible not-so-long-ago for the death of a significant portion of, for example, Polish population... (wars of XVII century)

- recently at my place I had somebody who was deeply convinced in ~"something like Poznań 1956 protests could never happen in the West, in the US" ...thing is, it could and it did:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre even also had, well, a tank
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre this one also rang a bell with him, considering the ethnicities... (many more in the table at the bottom)

And those are quite recent times, when we were already becoming moderately... civilised (plus, surely not the only nor the worst examples - but some I could quickly recall and find, because they were memorable or in recent browsing history)

any interesting activity involves some level of risk that has to be acknowledged. If we are not ready to take it, or if the environment we work in is not flexible enough to let us do so, then undesirable side-effects like stagnation, quality regression, and Patriot Acts are bound to appear...

But, overall, it's a question of finding the right balance. And Apple for example (of which you seemed sort of dismissive here) seemed to find that balance much better than Nokia...
(I stumbled once on comparison of their budgets from 2 or 3 years back - Symbian division alone consumed more funds than the entire R&D of Apple... Symbian never even beeing, IIRC, the primary cash-cow of Nokia - S40 was it throughout the last decade)

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