Submitted by As the third high-profile departure at Nokia in recent months Ari Jaaksi, vice president of MeeGo devices and operations, who had worked at the company since 1998, told Finnish newspaper Talous Sanomat that he resigned from Nokia last week. According to Nokia Communications Manager Tapani Kaskinen the departure will not affect MeeGo’s development schedule. Nevertheless the news cast doubts on whether we’ll see a MeeGo-based device from Nokia before the end of 2010.
Not all top line change is bad. Nokia needs to do something to change it’s current direction. Keeping fingers crossed.
But I thought Nokia was right on track? (I kid, I kid!)
Sorry, couldn’t resist
Microsoft’s silent takeover of Nokia started. They have overtaken CEO position, and Ballmer looks happy about that http://www.microsoft.com/Presspass/press/2010/sep10/09-09statement….
Now Elop is firing MeeGo guy, and will probably put Microsoftie at his place. Yahooization of Nokia is imminent.
Same happened to HP recently, Microsoftie become chief of software division, hence in charge of WebOS. Then Hurd got ousted and relaced with Apotheker who is significantly more Microosft friendly than Hurd. Now HP is announcing Windows 7 slate instead using Android or their own stuff.
It looks Vista Phone 7 must succeed, even if that means Microsoft must infiltrate/sue every competitor and every OEM. Sad demise for MeeGo and WebOS, death by Microsoft entryism.
Has there been as change in direction for HP? Last, that I had heard Slate was a enterprise only special order device. Meanwhile, they’re working on a webos tablet as well as new phones. I think there are some android printers as well, if memory serves me correctly.
They put Leo Apotheker, former SAP, in charge.
Elop was only at Microsoft for three years, which according to you was apparently enough time to brainwash him enough to favor Microsoft’s interests beyond those of the company that just made him CEO, a position that he was very unlikely to attain if he remained at Microsoft. I find this interpretation of event unlikely.
More likely this is just office politics, by hiring from outside the company a lot of people felt they missed out on promotions they could have gotten had Nokia elevated someone internally. So you have defections of people who feel they can get a better position elsewhere then by waiting around at Nokia for another spot to open up in the top ranks. And even if another spot does open up, who is to say Nokia won’t go for another outsider again. This is a much more reasonable explanation then falling back on conspiracy theories.
Also you may have missed it but the recently hired Peter Skillman, one of the design guys behind webOS, to work on Meego ui. They have not given up on Meego just yet or they would not still be acquiring talent to work on it.
Your report of MeeGo’s demise is highly exaggerated, as your theory has several glaring flaws.
First, MeeGo’s primary sponsor is Intel, not Nokia. Intel sponsored MeeGo largely because Microsoft didn’t provide much support for Intel’s Atom in their many products. For Intel to give up on MeeGo because of a change in a *Nokia* executive position would be to give up on their entire Atom product line – and that is a truly ludicrous prediction.
Second, MeeGo covers a broad spectrum of the embedded consumer market – IVI, TV, phones, netbooks, tablets, etc. It has over 30 corporations supporting it, some already with shipping products, not to mention inclusion in major Linux products such as Red Hat. WinP7 is just another phone OS (hence the name Windows *Phone*), and not a very good one at that (no multi-tasking, no cut and paste – welcome to 2007). It doesn’t pretend to scale to the same extent as MeeGo. For this broad industry to abandon a strong product such as MeeGo because of a change in Nokia management would also be bizarre.
Third, focusing just on Nokia, their cash cow is Symbian. Symbian is now programmed using the open source QT4 framework, which Nokia owns. MeeGo is also programmed using the QT4 framework. However, WinP7 is programmed using Microsoft’s proprietary .NET framework, which goes with QT4 like oil to water. A switch by *Nokia* from MeeGo to WinP7 would replace a logical roadmap well-received by developers and under Nokia’s full control with an illogical patchwork dictated largely by Microsoft. Even a switch from MeeGo to Android would make far more sense for Nokia than to WinP7 – at least they’d be switching to a proven winner rather than a long-running loser.
But there’s simply no indication that Nokia is second-guessing its strategy, much less the broader MeeGo consortium. Next month’s MeeGo conference is likely to make that very clear, otherwise I’ll be chewing mighty hard or these words. 😉
But props for having a vivid imagination.
Actually, you can develop with Qt4 in .NET by using https://techbase.kde.org/Development/Languages/Qyoto Qyoto, which provides bindings to .NET.
Edited 2010-10-07 19:16 UTC
Thanks, I didn’t know that!
However, this doesn’t make it possible to develop an app that runs on both Windows Phone 7 and Symbian. It makes it possible to write a Symbian (or MeeGo) app in C#, at least in theory. That’s a very different thing.
In other words, Qyoto is a C# wrapper for QT4 classes. To write a WinP7 app, though, you wouldn’t use the QT4 classes, but rather the Silverlight and XNA classes.
So replacing MeeGo with WinP7 still makes zero sense for Nokia IMHO.
The two main development platforms on mobiles today are Android and iOS. That’s it. Nokia currently has no answer to them.
Meego should be that universal platform, but you’ve got factions of the company who can’t accept that Symbian is likely dead in the water, as we can see from the pointless Qt port. Meego itself still seems to be as muddled a mess as Moblin ever was and is a long way from being usable in any way.
Actually, by dropping Symbian, Nokia would basically shoot themselves, not in the food but rather in the head.
Meego is something which aims at making money on the expensive toy (or high-end touchscreen smartphone if you prefer) market. Hence the goal is to make a lot of money on a small, rather wealthy user base, where they don’t have a good reputation compared to the several competitors which are already there.
So nokia will have to differentiate themselves in some way. It’ll certainly not be app catalog, nor battery life (there’s no magical way to make an old-school desktop kernel like linux easy on battery, as can be seen with Android). As far as hardware, usability, and OOB features are concerned, they can and probably will provide something nice, but that will take a long time and is not enough to make developers target a small OS.
So Nokia’s bet is to enlarge the smartphone market greatly. To provide users with the same applications to toy on highly diversified hardware, with proper performance and a reasonable price for those who want it. And to make this possible, they DO have a smartphone OS which can run on almost anything above €150 with a wireless connection. Which is why they are still a big player in that market.
From that point of view, Symbian is Nokia’s killer feature. Properly tweaked and with its few issues fixed, it can give Nokia access to a huge user base. Some Android handset manufacturers have already understood that neglecting the mid-end market was a big mistake and try to change this, but they hit the limitations (and bloat) of the underlying OS and are forced to keep old releases of it, bringing little to no innovation and poor performance.
Symbian has the potential to completely crush Android on the mid-end market, because it’s much better at the core level and is becoming better at the application level too. Said market is huge, most people rightly think that spending €700 in a mobile phone is just crazy. Gaining enough momentum, it can, due to application compatibility, give Meego a good developer base to start with, which is mandatory on these days for a platform of this kind.
So as you can see, although you dislike it, Symbian is a key part of Nokia’s ecosystem, now more than ever. Dropping it is not an option. And dropping QT on Symbian for app compatibility between it and Meego is not an option either, since it would simply kill both symbian and meego in the end.
While I see you don’t seem to have a high opinion of the high-end touchscreen market, I would agree with you with the caveat: Today. MeeGo is meant for the high-end market today.
Battery life issues aren’t with Linux, it’s with the higher-end functions like graphics, compsiting, etc., that are killing the battery life. iOS is based on just-as-old (even older) desktop BSD, and the battery life is phenomenal. The issue is maturity of Android’s finer tuning and/or hardware components (those big screens draw big power).
The problem with that is that today’s high end features are tomorrows mid-market features. Is it easier to take a high-end OS and go down-market, or easier to take a simpler OS and go up market? History says the later is very tough, which is why Nokia is going to MeeGo. Symbian works great today for the mid-market, but what about tomorrow? The needs of the mid-market will continue to evolve, and Symbian is having trouble evolving (which is why Nokia, Symbian’s biggest fanboy, is adopting MeeGo).
You mean phenomenally bad, right ? 1-2 days of average use is just ridiculously bad, no matter who the brand who achieves such an infamous record is. The cheapest dumbphones on the market last at least 3 days, and on Symbian-powered Eseries 4-5 days of rather heavy use (web browsing on wifi, youtube) is common.
I doubt it. Battery technology has physical limits and large touchscreens with correct pointing efficiency are both expensive in terms of money and electrical power. Except if manufacturers plan to introduce solar-powered devices (not as silly as it sounds : consider a pixelQI screen instead of those backlight battery hogs), porting the current high-end phone experience on cheaper device while keeping above the bare minimum phone battery life of 1 day will prove to be extremely difficult. That’s why mid-end phones will, in my opinion, continue to have good keyboards and horrible resistive touchscreens for quite a long time.
Both approaches have their drawbacks.
A high-end OS has been written under the assumption that it’s going to run on top of monster hardware and has to act like a jewel, so it wastes hardware resources (CPU, GPU, RAM, mass storage, display area, energy… anything you may think of) in every single part of its code in order to look better. History shows that making software use less resources (ie optimizing) is much harder than making software use more resources. That’s why mid-end devices are stuck with Android 1.5 and 1.6.
On the other hand, even the simplest and fastest code has its legacy. Making it run on a different kind of hardware will require some hard work at the lowest level. Making it waste power in shiny 3D animations will require a major rewrite of a well-optimized UI stack able to run on a 200MHz CPU with no GPU into a monster requiring a recent GPU for proper operation with no usability gain. The problem with all of that being extensibility : in the abstraction/performance trade-off, OS running on lower-end mobile hardware generally has to go to the “performance” side.
Only time will tell… For some reasons, part of which are described above, I think that Symbian has at least 10 years of lifetime left.
Maybe. Myself, seeing how Nokia kept the excellent s40 when buying Symbian, I’d rather see Nokia adopt an “An OS for each kind of phone, applications running everywhere” approach, where each class of hardware runs an OS that’s adapted for it (seeing current low-end phone hardware compared to past low-end phone hardware, I’d say that current mid-end phone hardware has a bright future).
But again, only time will tell…
Edited 2010-10-08 20:37 UTC
While there’s a limit, screens get more efficient. Processors definitely have gotten more efficient, giving more power for the watt. That’s why data centers are replacing hardware 2-3 years old; not because they’ve gone bad, but because you get 2-3 times the power per rack amp with newer systems versus older ones.
Every point you make may have some validity, however it’s Nokia is acting like they don’t. They’re throwing their weight behind MeeGo, and going full bore into the multi-touch full screen high-end market where they’ve been getting their clocks cleaned.
Symbian is making boatloads for Nokia now, but Nokia knows it’s not going to last.
As far as I know, screen manufacturers have a hard time making them eat up less power. OLED can theoretically reach much better results than LCD (becauses of additive color synthesis), but as far as I know current AMOLED screens are still pretty much on par with them as of today. Processor are less power-hungry, but not enough it seems, especially since phone manufacturers prefer more powerful processors over more power-efficient ones.
The sole thing that can evolve fast in the computer world is software, and I fear that in the current state of things, more engineers work on GPU acceleration than real power management (ie make hardware do less, not ask it to magically consume much less when doing the same thing)…
Well, my point was not that Symbian scales better on high-end hardware than Android scales on low-end hardware, but rather that the contrary is false, contrary to what was originally said.
Not sure of that. An impressive amount of care has been put into symbian in the last few years, too. QT port and full integration planned for Symbian^4, a lot of bugs fixed in the newer nokias like the N86, and they put a lot of love in symbian’s touch UI too. Compared to that, Meego sounds like some random vaporware open-source project. Apart from portability on non-phone devices, nothing mind-blowing has been shown yet – only mockups and trunk builds of something which looks like a pixel-perfect copy of Android and iOS so far. I’d say that the real work on Meego has not yet started.
Indeed, that one is true. Nokia traditionally always managed to keep one phone for each need as one of their main strenghts, so their current failure at delivering a good enough touchscreen experience to those who like it is probably a major issue for them.
That’s not certain, even if touchscreens became the norm. If security became a major concern in the mobile space, as an example, symbian’s microkernel foundations would be ready where other OSs are not. But again, only time will tell…
Edited 2010-10-09 19:31 UTC
Symbian is dying. It’s market share is steadily falling and all manufacturers now seem to be switching to Android.
The rest of your post at this point is just some justification as to how Nokia can ‘crush’ Android without any answers as to how Nokia is going to reverse the current trend of Android phones. They don’t have the development platform or the app store.
Hmmmm, I find these comments curious – especially the part about me ‘disliking it’. That’s kind of the attitude I was hinting at when I talked about factions within the company trying to save Symbian as it is right now.
As it stands they will hang together. They need a universal platform. Symbian just isn’t it in the face of the competition right now and Meego just isn’t amounting to anything.
Ever heard of iOS, QNX, WebOS, Bada, and Windows Phone 7 ? It’s not as if manufacturers were switching to Android as a whole, they are rather spreading across many platforms currently.
That’s a good thing actually. It shows that the lesson of Windows on the desktop market has been at least a bit memorized.
Besides, what you seem to forget is that symbian’s market share is still quite high. Although the touchscreen hype currently favors low-priced junk with a resistive touchscreen slapped on top of it as an afterthough, how long it is going to last before people start asking for a working and up-to-date product, and not a gadget for showing off that’s not good at anything useful ?
1/They have. QT is ready on symbian^3, it’s only a matter of months before every single Nokia phone can run it. And about the app store, there is OVI…
2/Buying a phone just to run applications on it is superficial thinking or falling in the trap of ads that overrate them. Most people buy a phone first, with toys running on top of it as a bonus to kill time during long travels. Once it is widely known how bad Android is as a mid-end phone OS, the Android team will have some serious work to do to improve that aspect, while on its side the Symbian team is close to having completed its own homework.
Yup, they need an universal platform… But it is QT, not some specific OS. Code once and deploy for phones, tablets, laptops, and the desktop, using a superior and universal framework… That is, again, nokia’s chance of adding value to the phone market. If they do it right and let QT target any phone on the market, they can actually kill Apple and Google’s current strategy of incompatible software and let software vendors code for every single phone on the market, including theirs. Most of them would jump on such an opportunity. The OS would become irrelevant as far as apps are concerned, and increasingly relevant in other areas where Nokia is strong, like good mid-end phone experience, battery life…
Edited 2010-10-11 18:57 UTC