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If I read it correctly, that was specifically in relation to the "declarative UI" approach not the whole UI. Also, to be fair, Nokia's acquisition of QT occurr

If I read it correctly, that was specifically in relation to the "declarative UI" approach not the whole UI. Also, to be fair, Nokia's acquisition of QT occurred when Nokia already had a GTK UI, it's not like the GTK UI didn't exist beforehand. (One of the interesting conspiracy theories someone shared with me was that the Symbian team orchestrated the Trolltech acquisition to give Symbian more time and slow down/make redundant the GTK-based effort. :) )

narrator 16y ago
All this internal politics between different UI teams seems like evidence of a clear lack of technological vision at the top.
- pavlov 16y ago
  I suspect that the top management at Nokia got stuck with the old idea that networks are the strategically important technology in their business. They always seemed to treat software as basically "the boring last part when outsourced peons implement feature checklists" rather than anything strategic. When you look at where Nokia was coming from, the emphasis on devices and network tech made sense. They bet the whole company on GSM in the early '90s and reaped amazing rewards. (Finland was the first country in the world with a GSM network, which gave Nokia a nice push into the market that would explode to billions of customers worldwide.) In the late '90s, networks were similarly a matter of corporate life and death as the European companies battled Qualcomm and the Japanese over the fate of 3G. Meanwhile Nokia was essentially outsourcing their core software. Symbian was set up as a separate corporation in Britain. Maemo was an underfunded Linux skunkworks operation in Brazil. Nokia didn't even care enough to do the Series 60 user experience design themselves. Instead, this crucial task was outsourced to a German company (I think they were called Mango Design). With nobody in the company fighting for the UX vision, it's not difficult to see how it got so neglected.
  - uytgyhjmnb 16y ago
    Not quite - Symbian was a British company that Nokia bought. It was originally the OS on the excellent Psion PDAs before they gave up on the hardware business and split the OS off as Symbian.
    - bergie 16y ago
      I remember being astonished on how bad the S60 UX was, when compared to the mid-90s Psion that was built on the same codebase.

narrator 16y ago

All this internal politics between different UI teams seems like evidence of a clear lack of technological vision at the top.

pavlov 16y ago
I suspect that the top management at Nokia got stuck with the old idea that networks are the strategically important technology in their business. They always seemed to treat software as basically "the boring last part when outsourced peons implement feature checklists" rather than anything strategic. When you look at where Nokia was coming from, the emphasis on devices and network tech made sense. They bet the whole company on GSM in the early '90s and reaped amazing rewards. (Finland was the first country in the world with a GSM network, which gave Nokia a nice push into the market that would explode to billions of customers worldwide.) In the late '90s, networks were similarly a matter of corporate life and death as the European companies battled Qualcomm and the Japanese over the fate of 3G. Meanwhile Nokia was essentially outsourcing their core software. Symbian was set up as a separate corporation in Britain. Maemo was an underfunded Linux skunkworks operation in Brazil. Nokia didn't even care enough to do the Series 60 user experience design themselves. Instead, this crucial task was outsourced to a German company (I think they were called Mango Design). With nobody in the company fighting for the UX vision, it's not difficult to see how it got so neglected.
- uytgyhjmnb 16y ago
  Not quite - Symbian was a British company that Nokia bought. It was originally the OS on the excellent Psion PDAs before they gave up on the hardware business and split the OS off as Symbian.
  - bergie 16y ago
    I remember being astonished on how bad the S60 UX was, when compared to the mid-90s Psion that was built on the same codebase.