Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

Android isn't perfect, and yes, I do own redundant phones and this is a sad requirement. But my operating rule is that I try to run stock firmware if possible, and I don't just randomly update it. I don't consider it a failure of Android if there aren't updates for older phones. If Google (or whatever phone vendor) want to push an update out to existing users then cool, great, it ought to work, but if they don't, it's not a failure if some user/developer downloads a build of Android (or makes one) and it doesn't work with an older phone. That's like expecting your car manufacturer to field upgrade last year's model through a recall just because there happens to be a newer in-dash software system available that you don't need.

> Oh, come on. Android is a sufficiently ill-defined platform that applications often end up broken on subsets of devices. It's not difficult to find cases of breakage going between version updates.

Yeah and this may cause severe problems for Android and possibly on a surprisingly short timescale. Some groups are convinced that Android is going to fall from being the dominate phone platform this year or the next due to these problems.

Microsoft learns from it's mistakes and has enough money that they will keep trying over and over and over again if they think it's important enough. They believe that the mobile platform is critical to the future of their company. They will examine Android and copy what works and abandon what doesn't. Unless Android can keep up then they will lose market share massively.

> Android's not massively worse than other mobile platforms, but we never had an opportunity to figure out whether or not Meego would have provided any level of stability.

I agree.

Meego was a dead on arrival due to the judgement mistakes of people that ran the projects. I don't know if it's a problem with Nokia or other groups (ie: who in particular bears the responsibility), but I do know that what happened is due to mismanagement. When projects and corporations fail in endeavours like this it is 100% a management problem and not technology.

I can safely say this because Meego technology never made it to the market. Consequently, not a technology failure. THAT sort of thing is the failure of the leaders. It can only be their failure. They had years, lots of money, lots of talent, and lots of attention and they didn't do a good job. We can't say that the technology provided X and Android did Y because their is no real information to go off.

The only thing we can do is try to examine why it never made it to market and learn from their leadership mistakes. Their wrong decisions and wrong directions. Why they missed the boat.

(well, in all actuality leaders bear the responsibility and source of most failures. (there are exceptions, of course) Technology problems stem from bad decisions, but in this case it's easy to see, at least from my perspective, the technology never had a chance)

Nokia had Linux tablets on the market in 2006. That was 2 years before Android. That was a year before iPhone. It was 4 years before the iPad. I don't know exactly why it took them from 2006 to 2011 to add telephony capabilities to what they shipped on the Nokia 770, but I have my theories.

Then on top of that even after shipping a development mule type product (N9) to their target developers they decided to go through another rewrite, which seems a bad move.

It's not a fun subject. I loved the concept of the platform.

(This is a bit different from the situation with Linux and netbooks. They were able to get it out and for a while it was very popular (Linux systems topped Amazon best sellers, for example) and had a lot of attention. Unfortunately the platform(s) was soundly rejected by the consumer public in favor of more expensive systems running Windows.)