The story of Nokia MeeGo (TaskuMuro) [LWN.net]

The story of Nokia MeeGo (TaskuMuro)

Posted Oct 13, 2012 16:04 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198)
In reply to: The story of Nokia MeeGo (TaskuMuro) by niner
Parent article: The story of Nokia MeeGo (TaskuMuro)

Now they have a shipping phone with a small but established software ecosystem around it. I don't think meego had any future even if Nokia backed it fully, they threw away their third party ecosystem by making gratuitous API/ABI changes. If they hadn't rebooted development, hadn't merged with moblin, had shipped something in the last five years they would have been better off.

As far as choosing another os like android or webOS, I'm not sure webOS was available at the time but it could have been another good choice. The Android market is pretty cutthroat and they didn't want to be in such direct competition, there isn't much brand loyalty or profit margins in the android market, they also probably wouldn't be able to finagle special treatment from google as they did from MS because MS is more desperate for a hardware partner.

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The story of Nokia MeeGo (TaskuMuro)

Posted Oct 13, 2012 16:11 UTC (Sat) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

Originally, the reason Nokia nurtured so many third party companies to develop Maemo/MeeGo was the expectation that by doing that, they would bootstrap the whole ecosystem of companies around the platform. When I first got involved I thought that a very smart strategy, and I still am convinced it would have worked. Other parts of Nokia's strategy were pretty brilliant, too. But then... Other parts again were so bad.

I remember the sudden burst of anger in Ruoholahti when the N8 was released with Symbian on it. Nokia people I talked too were genuinely surprised it wasn't a Maemo device.