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Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo DiasporaBergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo DiasporaPosted Jul 9, 2012 18:40 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)In reply to: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora by AndreE Parent article: Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora
*Microsoft* needed Meego dumped – Nokia was financing all kinds of existing desktop & kernel infrastructure enhancements (gtk-side, gstreamer-side, qt-site) for Meego that could all be reused to attack Windows on the desktop and that were all slowly producing results. That's exactly how Red Hat and Suse made Linux a success server-side (and conversely why Canonical is not dangerous for Microsoft – too little infra work, too much NIHism).
In other words, Nokia was not only a threat for Microsoft's phone business, but also for its core products (Tizen and the EFL? ROTFL)
I've no doubt killing Nokia Linux initiatives was part of getting a better Microsoft deal, and that the choice was easy to do for Elop, once he decided he cared more about Microsoft than Nokia (and that was not a given, Paul Maritz did switch priorities when hired VMWare-side).
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Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 9, 2012 18:44 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]
Why would Nokia target two smartphone platforms at once? The Series 60/Meego situation was hardly a stunning success, and there's no reason to believe that Meego/Windows would have gone any better. Dropping Meego development in favour of letting Microsoft do most of the OS development was a completely rational thing to do even without any fringe benefits to Microsoft.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 9, 2012 20:06 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
No it's perfectly irrational, because Nokia is not a platform vendor it's a phone vendor. A Nokia Meego phone sale is not stealing Lumia sales it's stealing Samsung/Apple/HTC/LG/Motorola sales. Nokia hardware is not here to sell software platforms it's an end in itself. Every Nokia competitor understands this and will use any software platform that will help it sell its hardware, platform purity be damned. None is single-platform (except for Apple, but then Apple controls its software well enough to make sure it will fit its future hardware products).
That's why Nokia is on a death march today: Elop decided it was more important to sell the products of its partner than to sell its own.
Windows Phone is not developed at Nokia but at Microsoft. No amount of Meego/Symbian killing was going to make Windows phone improve faster. OTOH the direct result of this killing was Nokia's inability to deliver differentiated phones (a must for a mass-market vendor, not for a niche player like Apple that focuses on the high-revenue segment). There is little difference between Lumia models because they are all declinations of the same Windows reference platform, that is too immature to permit much hardware differentiation (or even to keep compatibility with older hardware platforms, see how the current Lumia line has been obsoleted by Windows platform changes).
On a PC platform it does not matter much what the hardware is because of wide compatibility. In the embedded world if software and hardware do not fit you have nothing to sell.
The Series 60/Meego was not massively hipped but it *was* a massively profitable. The Lumias have been massively hyped (with record marketing expenditures and astroturphing) and try to emulate another massively hyped product line (Apple's) but they're not bringing any revenue. Now if you want to measure success in app store submissions Lumia is a stunning success. I'll take real users and real money any time.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 9, 2012 20:18 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
(to give an idea of the massive idiocy at play at Nokia in Elop years: they had to close factories and dump whole supplier chains because Microsoft had no drivers for the chip families Nokia was used to work with; they had to drop phone features because the hardware Microsoft had drivers for was less capable than their usual hardware; they broke with their main carrier partner in China because it had been sold on Meego and saw no future on a Microsoft platform – and all this to see global windows phone market share shrink even lower because carriers and users do not want it)
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 9, 2012 21:50 UTC (Mon) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
I'm not sure how you're drawing a line between the change from OMAP to Qualcomm, and factories closing, but that's so far from correct I'm not really sure where to start.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 4:32 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
IIRC it was not just a change from OMAP to Qualcomm, they had to drop chips at every level
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 7:38 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Still makes no difference. If Nokia factories could only handle one variety of display controller / power regulator / USB controller / etc, they would've been out of business long ago.
This is a company who had probably the single most diverse product portfolio in the entire industry, stretching to at least hundreds of products. Throw in the prototypes and you're up to thousands. And this is going from the very very cheapest 1110, right up to the N9 and other smartphones.
What you're saying makes absolutely no sense, sorry.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 8:30 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
It's one thing to handle different parts from the same supplier it's another to switch suppliers completely. Completely messes up supply lines, part stocks, procurement handling, logistics, tooling, etc. We're talking about hardware here, it's not a relink away.
IIRC (and please correct if you have any proof to the contrary) it went like this:
1. New CEO decides to partner with Microsoft. Winphone requirements demand massive hardware reorientation
2. Nokia can't produce winphones at once. To held self-imposed deadlines Lumias needs to be subcontracted to one of the usual taiwanese winphone producers. It wraps an N9-derived shell around something very close to the Microsoft reference design
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Lumia_800
What madness is that? You don't externalize your core business ever. That's a basic rule. And if Lumia production was not Nokia's core business at this point why did it kill everything else?
3. Nokia publicly disparages its old product lines, tries to strong-arm all its parters (carriers, resellers) to accept winphones instead of what was previously agreed. Refuses to sell other lines if the partner doesn't push Lumias
4. Everyone switches to Android, Symbian tanks, Nokia does not want to sell Meego
5. Consumers recognize the taiwanese winphones they didn't want last year under the new Nokia cover and don't buy them
6. Nokia closes factories
I don't know if between 2. and 6. Nokia made any serious effort to re-internalise production, and even if they did (and taking into account that Compal almost certainly insisted on some volume commitments before producing) Lumia sales are so underwhelming they can't justify retooling most existing factories nor retraining the workforce.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 9:56 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
> 1. New CEO decides to partner with Microsoft. Winphone requirements demand massive hardware reorientation
It's not a massive hardware reorientation. Remember that Nokia had one of the most diverse product lines in the world, and I can assure you that they weren't reliant on a single supplier.
Even when they were, yes that does take time to ramp up in terms of sourcing and logistics, but it has absolutely nothing to do with shutting down factories. Zip, zero. The plant tools don't care whether the chip came from TI or OMAP or Sharp or Toshiba or Samsung.
Yes, it does take time, but Nokia - for all its strategic faults recently - has long been praised as one of the best handlers of its supply chain and logistics in the world.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 10:59 UTC (Tue) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
> The plant tools don't care whether the chip came from TI or OMAP or
> Sharp or Toshiba or Samsung.
Really? Are not the test processes vendor-specific?
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 11:01 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
Part-specific, but a lot more of it's done in software than you'd think.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 9, 2012 20:14 UTC (Mon) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]
Do you know know many screen resolutions does WP7 support? The answer is 1. WP8 will support 3 screen resolutions. Nokia will not be able to buy any other screen than what is explicitly supported by MS.
The same thing with cameras. Why do you think Nokia put their best camera ever on a Symbian phone? Well, MS' drivers do not support that camera and the WP7 probably can't handle images of that size.
Nokia is screwed, not because MS is setting the SW development but because they have to buy the HW that MS support. And that is not a nice place to be if you are a HW manufacturer.
Endogamic hardware Posted Jul 10, 2012 0:10 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Funny. And of course one processor manufacturer (Qualcomm), which locks Nokia up with exactly one supplier. Nice!
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 1:29 UTC (Tue) by daniels (subscriber, #16193) [Link]
> Do you know know many screen resolutions does WP7 support? The answer is 1. WP8 will support 3 screen resolutions. Nokia will not be able to buy any other screen than what is explicitly supported by MS.
Not much change there then, as ITOS on the 770/N800/N810, Maemo 5 on the N900 and MeeGo-Harmattan on the N9, only supported one resolution each.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 8:56 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] It's one thing having an internally developed platform that only supports one resolution; you can in principle fix that yourself, and on any given platform the only resolution you need to support is the native resolution of your discrete-element display. It's quite another having your one-true-resolution imposed by your upstream OS vendor (especially if you don't fabricate your own displays - I'm not sure whether Nokia do or not).
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 10, 2012 15:18 UTC (Tue) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
> *Microsoft* needed Meego dumped – Nokia was financing all kinds of
> existing desktop & kernel infrastructure enhancements (gtk-side, > gstreamer-side, qt-site) for Meego that could all be reused to attack > Windows on the desktop
I'd say it was the most probable reason for Microsoft to bribe Nokia to kill Meego. They are in general trying to sabotage any success of Linux technologies which can benefit the Linux on the desktop. But it's still just a speculation.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 11, 2012 11:28 UTC (Wed) by tf (subscriber, #85123) [Link]
Haha, if in doubt, go down the conspiracy theory route.
MeeGo was a *brand* which never really got beyond the PR releases, conference swag, and half baked compliance documents, to producing tangible technology. The decision to form MeeGo from Moblin and Maemo was technically ill informed and lacking in the most basic understanding of the two platforms. The profound incompatibility between the two meant that while either Moblin or Maemo were viable platforms in their own right, MeeGo never was, and so it's not very surprising the promised platform (as opposed to the brand) never materialized; what was shipping under the MeeGo brand (N9; 'Moblin aka MeeGo' Netbook) were essentially two different, incompatible (and discontinued) platforms.
The Nokia decision to pull the plug on its MeeGo involvement was not only perfectly rational, it would have been managerially irresponsible not to. If anything is irrational in the MeeGo story, it is both Nokia and Intel thinking it was a good idea to start with.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 11, 2012 12:39 UTC (Wed) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
It was not just a brand. If you've not seen all the most excellent work Nokia people and contractors did upstream in the past years at all levels of the stack (from kernel to high-level frameworks) you've not followed a lot of the projects lwn is about.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 12, 2012 8:09 UTC (Thu) by tf (subscriber, #85123) [Link]
I don't think you understand what a platform is, the same way that MeeGo publicity had systematically failed to differentiate between an aspiration ('aims to') and reality ('is').
If you look up the MeeGo About page, you will see the statement 'the MeeGo project *provides* a Linux-based, open source software platform for the next generation of computing devices ... designed to give developers the broadest range of device segments to target for their applications, including netbooks, handheld computing and communications devices, in-vehicle infotainment devices, smart TVs, tablets and more – all using a *uniform* set of APIs based on Qt.' -- by this definition MeeGo as a platform never existed. (Emphasis mine.)
On the 1.1 release, the LinuxFoundation stated 'MeeGo supports a magnitude[!] of mobile client devices (handsets, connected TVs, in-vehicle infotainment ..., netbooks, and tablets)'. Again, this statement confuses aspiration and reality; MeeGo by its self-definition never supported any of these; looking at the 1.1 release page, it officially 'supported', netbooks, handsets and IVI, but only the netbook was of release quality (see the 'known issues'), and the Netbook continued to be just Moblin rebranded! This had not changed by the 1.2 release, except by then the handset as a supported platform is no longer on the release page.
So, the only form factor that MeeGo (as released) ever *really* supported (i.e., you could deploy the OS in production) was the netbook, and the netbook was based on the Moblin software stack, which is completely different from the MeeGo common APIs (clutter, gtk).
Harmattan was, by Nokia's own statement Maemo under the MeeGo brand; it overlapped with MeeGo only to the extent to which MeeGo borrowed from Maemo (see http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p=529073).
So the only two things that ever shipped under the MeeGo *brand* were Maemo and Moblin rebranded (and both of these would have happened without any great differences, just under different branding, if the MeeGo project was not created; this is worth reflecting upon).
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 12, 2012 9:00 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]
I don't seek I *care*. 'platform' is a marketing ideal that does not exist in real-life. 'Platform' is what you would get if only you could rewrite everything at once in a single homogeneous whole. 'Platform'-oriented people battle their own partners to prevent them from getting useful stuff done now and insist they should wait for the pure 'platform' solution that will materialize someday (just like SUN fought tooth and nail to get everyone to use the universally hated swing, and ended up with no gui presence at all)
Real-life successful products are mongrels that accept the holy platform is an ideal that won't be attained, and make it easy to reuse code written for previous platform endeavours.
Bergius: The Dreams of the MeeGo Diaspora Posted Jul 11, 2012 20:42 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link]
Not at all. As we can see Mer project collected what was good in the Meego project, and addressed what was bad there (in particular the bad corporate control). Now both PlasmaActive and Jolla found Mer to be a good base. Nokia *could* play it right, but they failed or intentionally didn't do it.
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