10 ms·

The 'oh sh_t' moment that Nokia decided to abandon MeeGo

80 points by lakshmikandh 15y ago

nl 15y ago
The only surprise there is that it took a whole day and a meeting with the new CEO to work this out. It was common knowledge amongst anyone who tried it that MeeGo was no where near ready for consumers, and it was reasonably clear that the hardware platform they were aiming at wasn't 100% sure either.
- hvs 15y ago
  It's often surprising in a large organization how much goes on that upper management is unaware of, either through incompetence or malice. I don't know enough about the specifics of this situation, but sometimes "everyone" knows that a product isn't going to ship in time, but maybe the product manager doesn't want to broadcast this fact for fear of his job. If his manager is asleep at the wheel, this kind of thing can happen. I'm guessing that the new CEO simply did something the previous CEO didn't do: ask the right questions.
  - kabdib 15y ago
    We having a saying here that once you make Director or VP, they force-feed you "stupid pills" that cause you to lose your mind. I'm sure everyone has stories.
  - yuhong 15y ago
    Yea, I am aware of the cover up culture. And yea, I still remember the Google tax evasion story. Clue: Google is not the only guilty party.
kleiba 15y ago
I don't understand this article. It's claimed that the company realized they cannot meet their scheduled goals with MeeGo, so instead they switch to Windows Phone. Yet the article call the latter "an OS still struggling to find traction in the heated smartphone market." If that is true why would they think it could solve their problem?
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  Because unlike Meego, Windows Phone came with giant piles of money.
- nl 15y ago
  Because WinPhone is a finished operating system, unlike MeeGo. Nokia's problem was they couldn't get a competitive product out quickly enough. WinPhone gives them a chance, MeeGo wouldn't have shipped in decent numbers until 2014.
DrCatbox 15y ago
Lies and deceit. Elop is a former employee of Microsoft and has huge share in that company. His reason to be at Nokia was to bring it to Microsofts lap and so destroy MeeGo and Qt.
- emwa 15y ago
  He sold all of his Microsoft shares and bought 150,000 of Nokia. http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-ceo-elop-sells-all-microsoft-shares-buys-nokia-2011-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-ceo-elop-sells-all-micr...
windsurfer 15y ago
I've never heard a Linux distro, especially one based on an existing distro, and made by people who have already made one before, only working on 3 pieces of hardware in 4 years. Could anyone explain this?
- fungi 15y ago
  Comes on the heels of a massive profit downgrade. It's PR.
- sethg 15y ago
  I suspect the answer is some combination of (a) getting device drivers to work on highly specialized hardware in spite of extreme memory/CPU constraints; (b) developing a user interface (and the widget toolkit for developers to use, etc.) that doesn’t suck. When my company was acquired by Nokia we had a choice of company-issued phones, and of course most of the geeks picked N900s (which ran Maemo, a Meego predecessor). After a few weeks using the N900 I was like “well, as a handheld Linux computer, it’s OK, but as a phone... meh.”
  - windsurfer 15y ago
    I have been using an N900 for almost a year, and I think it's a great "phone". Excellent voice quality, great microphone, easy to call people, and the best reception I've had with any device. It works well with all my hands-free stuff, and it works very well as a "phone". What complaints do you have?
    - zem 15y ago
      for one, a very, very annoying bug where, when you get a phone call, the phone app can take long enough to swap in that the caller gives up.
      - windsurfer 15y ago
        Ah, I forgot about that! I originally fixed that by installing a modified hildon desktop, but that's been incorporated in the community SSU: http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU EDIT: I also had to force the phone-ui to landscape mode so it wouldn't jump around on me.
cubicle67 15y ago
Here's the original article http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b4232056703101.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...
- krschultz 15y ago
  Engadget does an amazingly bad job of linking the original article. You would think that the sentence 'Bloomberg Businessweek just published an amazingly thorough piece on Nokia' would have a link in it, but it doesn't. No where on the page do they link to the start of the original story. The 'source' button links to the page/paragraph that the quote is from, but that isn't exactly the same as linking to the front of the other article. The only links in the content go back to other Engadget stories. I'd say its bad etiquette.
  - alfet 15y ago
    After the article they have a link after the word 'source' that links to: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b4232056703101_page_6.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...
  - ugh 15y ago
    Engadget always has a source link at the bottom of the article. They don’t link to anything but themselves in the article text for SEO reasons. Also note that the word “Source” at the bottom of the article is not text but an image – also for SEO reasons. (I don’t, however, know what that’s supposed to help.) This is a truly disgusting practice. The good thing about it is that once you know what’s going on, it’s relatively unproblematic. Whenever someone directs me to Engadget I know where I have to click. (In a funny twist, once you know where it is, finding the source is actually easier than when it is hiding in the article text.)
    - paraschopra 15y ago
      I will tell you how that practice might help for SEO purpose. A page has a limited link juice which gets distributed more or less equally to all links on the page. So if the article links to external page, some of that link juice flows to it. Why not rather limit it to your own internal pages?
powerhr 15y ago
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patrickgzill 15y ago
Shades of SGI getting killed off due to the actions of Rick Belluzzo; this was after he scotched the development of PA-RISC because of his view that Microsoft was going to take over the world... the difference being that Belluzzo joined MSFT after proving his ability to destroy MSFT's competition. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/13/sgi_belluzzo/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/13/sgi_belluzzo/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo A cynical view would be that MSFT is happy to see their management jump to their competitors...
- yuhong 15y ago
  >A cynical view would be that MSFT is happy to see their management jump to their competitors... Yea, I know: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209064 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209064
rrrazdan 15y ago
This, is a classic management lesson. Take stock. Confer with key stakeholders and the engineers. Draw a composite picture of the state of the system. And take a painful decision to abandon your approach, hopefully in time. Much as I liked 'Meego' as an idea, and much as I like Nokia as a phone company( Symbian phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always top class.), this was a correct decision. I hope Nokia can find its feet again and dazzle us with some amazing phones again.
- stcredzero 15y ago
  Symbian phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always top class. What's keeping Nokia from playing the same game that HTC is? Is it entirely manufacturing/labor costs? From the article: "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing." Maybe the culture and social organization of a company is analogous to its autonomic nervous system? A shock to that is very risky and not to be undertaken lightly.
  - rrrazdan 15y ago
    Because Nokia R&D spend is 8 times that of HTC, and 5 times of Apple for that matter.[1] Nokia needs the flexibility with the OS. In an ideal world, Nokia most certainly should make an OS by themselves, but clearly that didn't happen, so they choose the one that gives them the most flexibility to do what they want, much more than just putting a custom UI on top. And yes, the shock is risky. But the way things were going, very necessary. [1]http://www.itpro.co.uk/630721/nokia-r-d-spend-outweighs-apple-and-htc http://www.itpro.co.uk/630721/nokia-r-d-spend-outweighs-appl...
    - bad_user 15y ago
      What flexibility? According to Microsoft, WinMo7 is allowing less flexibility than Android, that being one of its selling points (less fragmentation).
      - 15y ago
ChrisLTD 15y ago
"Nokia is now on track to release at least one Windows Phone handset in 2011 with a dozen more in 2012." A dozen! With a dozen models on the market how are customers supposed to choose? Nokia should slow down and put as much TLC as possible into 1 or 2 products next year. Make each immaculate instead of figuring you can fix your mistakes in next month's model.
- WrkInProgress 15y ago
  Has having numerous models from a variety of manufacturers really hurt Android in terms of sales ?
  - Angostura 15y ago
    Are you suggesting that the number of models of an item that a company produces should in some way be comparable to the total number of models on the market?
    - WrkInProgress 15y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean, sorry. What I was trying to say was that I don't think having 12 models is going to make things confusing for consumers or be detrimental to sales. HTC/Samsung/Motorola releases a lot of Android phones in a given year and it hasn't hurt their sales. Edit: It must be noted that it isn't likely that any single market will have a dozen Nokia models available to the public.
- adestefan 15y ago
  Nokia distributes different models to different parts of the world.
bpeebles 15y ago
I honestly don't know why they feel like need to release a huge number of devices to compete against Apple and Android. Apple releases one every, what, 15 months? And for Android, it seems you really only need ~3 devices (one with a keyboard, and two without at different prince points) to make a dent into the target market for Android. It maybe that MeeGo was going even slower than that, but that's also their fault for deciding to more or less completely ditch Maemo instead of investing resources into that back from 2008 onward. If you look at what they had with the 770 a year and half before the iPhone, and the N800 5 months before, Nokia could have been huge. Instead they stuck with Symbian without really putting the correct work into it. And now they're stuck with Windows Mobile it seems. I'm not sure what it all really means, besides a reminder it really doesn't make sense to attach yourself too much for companies. What they do can change on a dime.
- ansy 15y ago
  Completely disagree about needing devices. Apple only makes one [phone] device per year, but Apple is losing market share to Android every month. Having a single device might be a good formula for profitability or user experience, but it's not the road to an empire. Compare to Android. It's not just about form factors. It's about hardware freshness. Android has had dual core, LTE, and double the ram for months. There are Android phones with 3D screens and 3D cameras. The iPhone 4 is looking long in the tooth. And the iPhone 4S will just be catching up to the Galaxy S 2. If I had to point to one reason why Apple is trading at such a low multiple it's because Apple is making too few devices to maintain leadership. Apple's market share has peaked unless it starts acting very un-Apple.
  - bpeebles 15y ago
    I mean, it's not that Nokia was only going to be releasing three devices before 2014, it was three MeeGo devices. I guess you could argue one/year is too slow to keep up, but they were going to continue to release Symbian phones. And I'm not sure if much of that "hardware freshness" is really what's getting Android market share. Are there (sizable numbers of) people buying a phone because it has a 3D camera? It may have made sense for Nokia to ditch MeeGo, but I think I was actually intending to mostly complain about how they got themselves into the corner.
shalinmangar 15y ago
What I often wonder is why didn't Nokia decide to try its hand on both Android and Windows Phone 7? Samsung has managed to do this while keeping its in house platform intact. Experiment and see what finds uptake rather than bet a huge corporation on a single platform.

80 points by lakshmikandh 15y ago

nl 15y ago

The only surprise there is that it took a whole day and a meeting with the new CEO to work this out. It was common knowledge amongst anyone who tried it that MeeGo was no where near ready for consumers, and it was reasonably clear that the hardware platform they were aiming at wasn't 100% sure either.

hvs 15y ago
It's often surprising in a large organization how much goes on that upper management is unaware of, either through incompetence or malice. I don't know enough about the specifics of this situation, but sometimes "everyone" knows that a product isn't going to ship in time, but maybe the product manager doesn't want to broadcast this fact for fear of his job. If his manager is asleep at the wheel, this kind of thing can happen. I'm guessing that the new CEO simply did something the previous CEO didn't do: ask the right questions.
- kabdib 15y ago
  We having a saying here that once you make Director or VP, they force-feed you "stupid pills" that cause you to lose your mind. I'm sure everyone has stories.
- yuhong 15y ago
  Yea, I am aware of the cover up culture. And yea, I still remember the Google tax evasion story. Clue: Google is not the only guilty party.

kleiba 15y ago

I don't understand this article. It's claimed that the company realized they cannot meet their scheduled goals with MeeGo, so instead they switch to Windows Phone. Yet the article call the latter "an OS still struggling to find traction in the heated smartphone market." If that is true why would they think it could solve their problem?

JoshTriplett 15y ago
Because unlike Meego, Windows Phone came with giant piles of money.
nl 15y ago
Because WinPhone is a finished operating system, unlike MeeGo. Nokia's problem was they couldn't get a competitive product out quickly enough. WinPhone gives them a chance, MeeGo wouldn't have shipped in decent numbers until 2014.

DrCatbox 15y ago

Lies and deceit. Elop is a former employee of Microsoft and has huge share in that company. His reason to be at Nokia was to bring it to Microsofts lap and so destroy MeeGo and Qt.

emwa 15y ago
He sold all of his Microsoft shares and bought 150,000 of Nokia. http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-ceo-elop-sells-all-microsoft-shares-buys-nokia-2011-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-ceo-elop-sells-all-micr...

windsurfer 15y ago

I've never heard a Linux distro, especially one based on an existing distro, and made by people who have already made one before, only working on 3 pieces of hardware in 4 years. Could anyone explain this?

fungi 15y ago
Comes on the heels of a massive profit downgrade. It's PR.
sethg 15y ago
I suspect the answer is some combination of (a) getting device drivers to work on highly specialized hardware in spite of extreme memory/CPU constraints; (b) developing a user interface (and the widget toolkit for developers to use, etc.) that doesn’t suck. When my company was acquired by Nokia we had a choice of company-issued phones, and of course most of the geeks picked N900s (which ran Maemo, a Meego predecessor). After a few weeks using the N900 I was like “well, as a handheld Linux computer, it’s OK, but as a phone... meh.”
- windsurfer 15y ago
  I have been using an N900 for almost a year, and I think it's a great "phone". Excellent voice quality, great microphone, easy to call people, and the best reception I've had with any device. It works well with all my hands-free stuff, and it works very well as a "phone". What complaints do you have?
  - zem 15y ago
    for one, a very, very annoying bug where, when you get a phone call, the phone app can take long enough to swap in that the caller gives up.
    - windsurfer 15y ago
      Ah, I forgot about that! I originally fixed that by installing a modified hildon desktop, but that's been incorporated in the community SSU: http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU EDIT: I also had to force the phone-ui to landscape mode so it wouldn't jump around on me.

cubicle67 15y ago

Here's the original article http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b4232056703101.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...

krschultz 15y ago
Engadget does an amazingly bad job of linking the original article. You would think that the sentence 'Bloomberg Businessweek just published an amazingly thorough piece on Nokia' would have a link in it, but it doesn't. No where on the page do they link to the start of the original story. The 'source' button links to the page/paragraph that the quote is from, but that isn't exactly the same as linking to the front of the other article. The only links in the content go back to other Engadget stories. I'd say its bad etiquette.
- alfet 15y ago
  After the article they have a link after the word 'source' that links to: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b4232056703101_page_6.htm http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...
- ugh 15y ago
  Engadget always has a source link at the bottom of the article. They don’t link to anything but themselves in the article text for SEO reasons. Also note that the word “Source” at the bottom of the article is not text but an image – also for SEO reasons. (I don’t, however, know what that’s supposed to help.) This is a truly disgusting practice. The good thing about it is that once you know what’s going on, it’s relatively unproblematic. Whenever someone directs me to Engadget I know where I have to click. (In a funny twist, once you know where it is, finding the source is actually easier than when it is hiding in the article text.)
  - paraschopra 15y ago
    I will tell you how that practice might help for SEO purpose. A page has a limited link juice which gets distributed more or less equally to all links on the page. So if the article links to external page, some of that link juice flows to it. Why not rather limit it to your own internal pages?

powerhr 15y ago

ONLINE STORE : ===( http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com )===== The website wholesale for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan,prada,, also including the jeans,shirts,bags,hat and the decorations. All the products are free shipping, and the the price is competitive, and also can accept the paypal payment.,after the payment, can ship within short time. free shipping competitive price any size available accept the paypal jordan shoes $32 nike shox $32 Christan Audigier bikini $23 Ed Hardy Bikini $23 Smful short_t-shirt_woman $15 ed hardy short_tank_woman $16 Sandal $32 christian louboutin $80 Sunglass $15 COACH_Necklace $27 handbag $33 AF tank woman $17 puma slipper woman $30 ===( http://www.etradinglife.com http://www.etradinglife.com )=====

patrickgzill 15y ago

Shades of SGI getting killed off due to the actions of Rick Belluzzo; this was after he scotched the development of PA-RISC because of his view that Microsoft was going to take over the world... the difference being that Belluzzo joined MSFT after proving his ability to destroy MSFT's competition. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/13/sgi_belluzzo/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/13/sgi_belluzzo/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo A cynical view would be that MSFT is happy to see their management jump to their competitors...

yuhong 15y ago
>A cynical view would be that MSFT is happy to see their management jump to their competitors... Yea, I know: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209064 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209064

rrrazdan 15y ago

This, is a classic management lesson. Take stock. Confer with key stakeholders and the engineers. Draw a composite picture of the state of the system. And take a painful decision to abandon your approach, hopefully in time. Much as I liked 'Meego' as an idea, and much as I like Nokia as a phone company( Symbian phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always top class.), this was a correct decision. I hope Nokia can find its feet again and dazzle us with some amazing phones again.

stcredzero 15y ago
Symbian phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always top class. What's keeping Nokia from playing the same game that HTC is? Is it entirely manufacturing/labor costs? From the article: "MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's not a nice thing." Maybe the culture and social organization of a company is analogous to its autonomic nervous system? A shock to that is very risky and not to be undertaken lightly.
- rrrazdan 15y ago
  Because Nokia R&D spend is 8 times that of HTC, and 5 times of Apple for that matter.[1] Nokia needs the flexibility with the OS. In an ideal world, Nokia most certainly should make an OS by themselves, but clearly that didn't happen, so they choose the one that gives them the most flexibility to do what they want, much more than just putting a custom UI on top. And yes, the shock is risky. But the way things were going, very necessary. [1]http://www.itpro.co.uk/630721/nokia-r-d-spend-outweighs-apple-and-htc http://www.itpro.co.uk/630721/nokia-r-d-spend-outweighs-appl...
  - bad_user 15y ago
    What flexibility? According to Microsoft, WinMo7 is allowing less flexibility than Android, that being one of its selling points (less fragmentation).
    - 15y ago

ChrisLTD 15y ago

"Nokia is now on track to release at least one Windows Phone handset in 2011 with a dozen more in 2012." A dozen! With a dozen models on the market how are customers supposed to choose? Nokia should slow down and put as much TLC as possible into 1 or 2 products next year. Make each immaculate instead of figuring you can fix your mistakes in next month's model.

WrkInProgress 15y ago
Has having numerous models from a variety of manufacturers really hurt Android in terms of sales ?
- Angostura 15y ago
  Are you suggesting that the number of models of an item that a company produces should in some way be comparable to the total number of models on the market?
  - WrkInProgress 15y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean, sorry. What I was trying to say was that I don't think having 12 models is going to make things confusing for consumers or be detrimental to sales. HTC/Samsung/Motorola releases a lot of Android phones in a given year and it hasn't hurt their sales. Edit: It must be noted that it isn't likely that any single market will have a dozen Nokia models available to the public.
adestefan 15y ago
Nokia distributes different models to different parts of the world.

bpeebles 15y ago

I honestly don't know why they feel like need to release a huge number of devices to compete against Apple and Android. Apple releases one every, what, 15 months? And for Android, it seems you really only need ~3 devices (one with a keyboard, and two without at different prince points) to make a dent into the target market for Android. It maybe that MeeGo was going even slower than that, but that's also their fault for deciding to more or less completely ditch Maemo instead of investing resources into that back from 2008 onward. If you look at what they had with the 770 a year and half before the iPhone, and the N800 5 months before, Nokia could have been huge. Instead they stuck with Symbian without really putting the correct work into it. And now they're stuck with Windows Mobile it seems. I'm not sure what it all really means, besides a reminder it really doesn't make sense to attach yourself too much for companies. What they do can change on a dime.

ansy 15y ago
Completely disagree about needing devices. Apple only makes one [phone] device per year, but Apple is losing market share to Android every month. Having a single device might be a good formula for profitability or user experience, but it's not the road to an empire. Compare to Android. It's not just about form factors. It's about hardware freshness. Android has had dual core, LTE, and double the ram for months. There are Android phones with 3D screens and 3D cameras. The iPhone 4 is looking long in the tooth. And the iPhone 4S will just be catching up to the Galaxy S 2. If I had to point to one reason why Apple is trading at such a low multiple it's because Apple is making too few devices to maintain leadership. Apple's market share has peaked unless it starts acting very un-Apple.
- bpeebles 15y ago
  I mean, it's not that Nokia was only going to be releasing three devices before 2014, it was three MeeGo devices. I guess you could argue one/year is too slow to keep up, but they were going to continue to release Symbian phones. And I'm not sure if much of that "hardware freshness" is really what's getting Android market share. Are there (sizable numbers of) people buying a phone because it has a 3D camera? It may have made sense for Nokia to ditch MeeGo, but I think I was actually intending to mostly complain about how they got themselves into the corner.

shalinmangar 15y ago

What I often wonder is why didn't Nokia decide to try its hand on both Android and Windows Phone 7? Samsung has managed to do this while keeping its in house platform intact. Experiment and see what finds uptake rather than bet a huge corporation on a single platform.