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Promising, but never deliveringPromising, but never deliveringPosted Aug 28, 2011 23:02 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)In reply to: Very late, but promising by AndreE Parent article: LinuxCon: MeeGo architecture update My thoughts exactly. Why spend so much time protecting users' data when there are no users and no data to protect? Why rewrite most core components when there are only a few discontinued devices out there? It sounds crazy. Perhaps they should have better built a new framework, rather than rework Maemo completely; it wasn't so great to begin with (although I liked my N770, I have to recognize its time was short). My first thought was to imagine what android devs must think when reading this report, and how hard they must laugh. Get something out the door, now! Meego does not sound compelling even now, so imagine in a few years time. As a litmus test: how many cool KDE apps do you miss on your android phone?
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Promising, but never delivering Posted Aug 29, 2011 14:44 UTC (Mon) by n8willis (editor, #43041) [Link]
It seems like you're repeating all of the "if it's not big now, it never will be" memery that people also said to put down Android during its first three years or so. That wasn't entirely prescient.
Nate
Promising, but never delivering Posted Aug 29, 2011 22:55 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] To be honest I wasn't trying to be prescient. In fact you have misinterpreted my comment, and no wonder because it was a mess. Android browsing tends to disorganize the best minds, so imagine what could happen to mine.Anyway, the intended meaning was even less original: it was basically "if there is no apparent need for your product and no one is asking for it, then don't bother building it". The same could not be said about Android in 2007, by any stretch: there was a measurable need for an open, hackable phone with a wealth of mobile applications. Just look at the competition at that point: closed iPhones, weird Symbians, annoying Windows Phones, botched Neo 1973, even phone-less N800s. Android does very well in many respects: open, open source, popular, well done, likable and easy to program for. Perhaps it is in the hackable axis where it fares worse, but the OpenMoko project has shown that market for hackable devices per se is (sadly) not near commercial sustainability. At this point a new platform should be more open than Android and more attractive than iPhone to be viable, and I don't think that a consortium without mobile phone manufacturers can do that. Having said that, perhaps there is a market for tablets, set top boxes and in-vehicle infotainment where Meego can shine. Perhaps the unnecessary retooling and reworking of most internals was really necessary, and in a few years they will get there. Perhaps it will even be Free software after all. I wish them best luck, but I could hardly care less.
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