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I'm not sure everyone here fully appreciates just how bad things are at Nokia. It's been a LONG time coming. Their software development structure, from top-to-b

by enjo 16y ago

I'm not sure everyone here fully appreciates just how bad things are at Nokia. It's been a LONG time coming. Their software development structure, from top-to-bottom, is just awful. You can see it in Symbian (which was developed independently but with much the same issue). I have to tread lightly here, as I don't want to get anybody in trouble... but I can assure you that the new CEO is doing very much the right thing. Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it. Their best hope to survive today is to tie themselves to a much healthier eco-system. I would have thought Android to be the very logical choice... but the Microsoft move certainly makes sense.

pavlov 16y ago
Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it. That's the honest truth. When Nokia opened the Symbian code three years ago, it offered a peek into their software development process... And it wasn't a pretty sight. I used to spend a fair bit of idle time browsing through the Symbian Foundation wikis and forums (all now offline). It seemed that there were basically two kinds of people working on the operating system. The guys in England, who used to work for Symbian Ltd, were pretty smart but arrogant; in old-school programmer style, they were only concerned with managing some extremely narrow domain and couldn't take any criticism. Then there were the Finns at Nokia, who were either completely uninterested and oblivious to the world around them, or just obviously incompetent at the job they'd been given. An example of the latter was the "Direct UI" proposal in 2009. It was supposed to outline a completely new touch UI paradigm to ship in Symbian^4. All there was was a few pages in broken English that essentially said "it should be like iPhone because touching stuff is cool". Unsurprisingly, Symbian^4 was canned last October after years of development. I'd like to know who had made the decision to put the same people who had mismanaged the previous S60 user interface in charge of creating the replacement... But that's how it went at Nokia. No one ever lost their job for screwing up the software -- until now.

by enjo 16y ago

pavlov 16y ago

Software development is not a core competency (or even a competency) at that company. It's just not. I'm not surprised that about half of tampere left, they are going to be hard hit by this. They should be.. the quality of the work just hasn't cut it. That's the honest truth. When Nokia opened the Symbian code three years ago, it offered a peek into their software development process... And it wasn't a pretty sight. I used to spend a fair bit of idle time browsing through the Symbian Foundation wikis and forums (all now offline). It seemed that there were basically two kinds of people working on the operating system. The guys in England, who used to work for Symbian Ltd, were pretty smart but arrogant; in old-school programmer style, they were only concerned with managing some extremely narrow domain and couldn't take any criticism. Then there were the Finns at Nokia, who were either completely uninterested and oblivious to the world around them, or just obviously incompetent at the job they'd been given. An example of the latter was the "Direct UI" proposal in 2009. It was supposed to outline a completely new touch UI paradigm to ship in Symbian^4. All there was was a few pages in broken English that essentially said "it should be like iPhone because touching stuff is cool". Unsurprisingly, Symbian^4 was canned last October after years of development. I'd like to know who had made the decision to put the same people who had mismanaged the previous S60 user interface in charge of creating the replacement... But that's how it went at Nokia. No one ever lost their job for screwing up the software -- until now.