Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora [LWN.net]

Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

Posted Jul 9, 2012 6:05 UTC (Mon) by drag (subscriber, #31333)
In reply to: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora by mjg59
Parent article: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

> 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.)

(Log in to post comments)

Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

Posted Jul 9, 2012 13:23 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

(The referenced article is really good, but it's not possible to say so on the blog, so I'll say so here.)

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.

"We can't give the consumer everything at the same time - this is not a phone!" is probably a very large one. As for the general reasons about Nokia snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, here are a few:

Always having the benefit of another iteration to get things "right": unlike the Apple and Android people, developing and then immediately delivering wasn't seen as feasible or even desirable. The five step plan is very telling, I think, and hints at the attitude mentioned above.
Turf wars: I wonder how many e-mails were exchanged about getting access to hardware people for hardware details and specifications, and how many feathers were ruffled because some department head's pet project was going to be upstaged by the N-series tablets.
The obsession over control: people who would have been happy to develop for these platforms were constantly rebuffed when it turned out that various parts were proprietary or secret, and Nokia representatives appeared to want to cultivate the impression that it was their "show", on their terms, and that outsiders should feel lucky to be able to participate in a limited way and, of course, popularise and legitimise the platform by developing for it.
The exercise of control: every time Nokia iterated and changed the platform, no-one had anywhere else to go to for hardware (or support for that partially open hardware) in order to continue what they were working on, being forced to either rebase and keep up with the circus or give up and do something else. It's the rodeo style of community management.

I'm sure there are plenty of other reasons, but each one of those is pretty significant.

Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

Posted Jul 10, 2012 18:02 UTC (Tue) by Kluge (guest, #2881) [Link]

Which is why it seemed sensible to me to move from GTK+ to Qt, since Qt has had more success running on multiple platforms. Providing a Qt-based API for all their platforms seemed like a good way forward. Though I can't say whether Qt offered the right kind of abstractions for a mobile platform.

Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

Posted Jul 10, 2012 19:31 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Moving to QT was a bad move because they abandoned something that was working for something that didn't and wasn't going to for years.

The whole cross-platform thing was a complete red herring and could not possibly make up for the loss of productivity. Even if GTK is non-portable, which it isn't, there is vastly more productive ways to solving that problem.

Another problem is that the toolkit is mostly irrelevant. GTK has warts, but so does everything else. No matter what you choose you are going to have to work with it and modify it to fit your system.

Application developers care about things like documentation and developer tools. As long as the APIs are not completely stupid they will tolerate it the same way that a guy driving a pickup tolerates the fact that he is driving a truck with white cab and automatic when he wants to have one with a white cab and manual transmission.

Customers care about applications and UI.

Changing the architecture over and over again served no purpose but to waste resources and time is a core reason why Meamo/Meego/etc failed miserably.

Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

Posted Jul 10, 2012 19:37 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

> Even if GTK is non-portable, which it isn't,

Eww. bad double negative. 'even if gtk is non-portable, which it is portable,' was the intended meaning.

Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

Posted Jul 11, 2012 16:53 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Move to QT was OK. The programming environment in Meego is/was pretty cool.

However, the way they did this move is certainly suboptimal. They could have gradually phased in QT instead of throwing away everything (including DEB->RPM move).

No user value

Posted Jul 15, 2012 14:26 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Mandatory Spolsky reference of the day: Things You Should Never Do, Part I. Solid advice. Developers might be happier, but users did not care one bit about graphical toolkit or package management.

No user value

Posted Jul 15, 2012 14:36 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Yet without developers there won't be good programs. So you have to keep developers at least somewhat happy.

Microsoft understands this ("Developers, developers, developers, developers!") and provides nice tools for their platform.

Devs without users are no good

Posted Jul 15, 2012 14:43 UTC (Sun) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Ideally you should keep both users and developers happy; but if in doubt, always please your userbase first. I submit Sony PlayStation as an (anecdotal, second-hand) example: even if their dev tools have sucked for a long time, it was not until their users were really unhappy about upgrades that users started leaving the platform.

Devs without users are no good

Posted Jul 15, 2012 15:02 UTC (Sun) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Actually, PS3 is a good example. It took a couple of years for decent games to appear on PS3. That's why PS3 sales were initially growing very slowly.

Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora

Posted Jul 9, 2012 19:30 UTC (Mon) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]

> 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.

Yeah. I was excited about the platform and got me a 770 as soon as they became available. I really wanted to develop for it.

About a year later they dropped all support for the 770 as the N800 came out, and alarm bells started ringing. Another year after that they announced the current platform based on Debian and GTK+ had no future, and that developers where basically wasting their time and should switch to QT, but oh yeah, QT devices weren't available and wouldn't be for several years. Or, “how to kill your developer base as quick as possible”

I dropped the platform completely right then and there as it seemed to be a project that was completely mismanaged with no future. I'm sorry to see that what I feared came to pass; just glad I didn't invest any more effort in it in the last four years.