4 ms·

In Finland, I think tech people thought Symbian was bad too, and Maemo and Meego or web applications on mobile etc were the future. Finland has a very strong op

In Finland, I think tech people thought Symbian was bad too, and Maemo and Meego or web applications on mobile etc were the future. Finland has a very strong open source culture among the doers, most of the education at Aalto university uses open source software etc.. Unfortunately Nokia was not able to transform to a software platform company, from what I heard, management didn't really understand anything of that.

whereistimbo 6y ago
Was Aalto University where Linus graduated and Linux originated?
- Gravityloss 6y ago
  No, he's from University of Helsinki.
  - Gravityloss 6y ago
    It's kind of funny that nothing notable in the open source world came out of Aalto. Linus Torvalds and Tatu Ylönen (ssh) studied in University of Helsinki while University of Oulu's Jarkko Oikarinen created IRC.
    - nivenkos 6y ago
      That's an incredible output for such a small country really.
toyg 6y ago
Yes, sorry, last night I was a bit flippant and this issue remains a bit of a thorn in my geek heart. I was trying to convey how this guy, flown out by Nokia HQ, felt and sounded like coming from a parallel dimension where developers really wanted to use Symbian in 2008/2009. I apologize for any offense I might have caused to Torvalds' homeland.
- vesinisa 6y ago
  Symbian folks inside Nokia at the time lived in a reality distortion field. Your experience is not the only instance where the Symbian division inside the company railroaded the Maemo project, which they saw first and foremost as a threat to their jobs and political dominance. As TFA notes, N900 was preceded by N770, N800, and N810 "internet tablets". N810 in particular was basically the same device as N900, but despite having otherwise state of the art wireless communication tech all of them lacked one very crucial component: a mobile data modem. Internet connection was only possible over WiFi (or even RJ45-USB dongle) but not SIM. The reason for this was of course not technical - the Symbian folks inside Nokia simply managed to convince the executive level management that adding mobile data would turn these devices from PDAs to a smartphones, and it would be very ill-advisable to launch a competing smartphone platform to Symbian. When Maemo folks finally got a chance to "give us a try" (and I guess management saw with the competition that they needed something more modern), the result was N900. Considering it was meant as a "niche" device its sales exceeded all projections. However, in the grand scheme of things it was just an experiment designed to fail and further cement the dominance of Symbian. I think Nokia also developed a fully-working tablet around either Maemo or MeeGo. It was literally ready to ship, but was at last minute cancelled before the launch event due to backroom dealing again by the Symbian folks. It has all been documented in the book "Operation Elop", which paints a pretty good picture about everything that went on behind the scenes during the demise of the once great Nokia: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ The book is based around absolutely exclusive interviews of people who served in Nokia's board and top executive positions at the time.
  - fifilura 6y ago
    Maemo was the right platform at the right moment to compete with Android and iOS and I was very surprised they closed it down in the time of crisis instead of realising they had built exactly what was needed. It had a modern OS with memory overcommit instead of the endless drudgery of checking out-of-memory conditions as in Symbian. The N770 launched with a GUI based on Gtk and convincing OSS developers to move to Qt in later versions of the platform was bump in the road. (I think Gtk had problems with basing the inheritance model on matching strings instead of vtables as with C++, so performance on this type of devices was problematic. Or - someone please correct me. I know it feels a bit weird given the long history of Gtk.)

whereistimbo 6y ago

Was Aalto University where Linus graduated and Linux originated?

Gravityloss 6y ago
No, he's from University of Helsinki.
- Gravityloss 6y ago
  It's kind of funny that nothing notable in the open source world came out of Aalto. Linus Torvalds and Tatu Ylönen (ssh) studied in University of Helsinki while University of Oulu's Jarkko Oikarinen created IRC.
  - nivenkos 6y ago
    That's an incredible output for such a small country really.

toyg 6y ago

Yes, sorry, last night I was a bit flippant and this issue remains a bit of a thorn in my geek heart. I was trying to convey how this guy, flown out by Nokia HQ, felt and sounded like coming from a parallel dimension where developers really wanted to use Symbian in 2008/2009. I apologize for any offense I might have caused to Torvalds' homeland.

vesinisa 6y ago
Symbian folks inside Nokia at the time lived in a reality distortion field. Your experience is not the only instance where the Symbian division inside the company railroaded the Maemo project, which they saw first and foremost as a threat to their jobs and political dominance. As TFA notes, N900 was preceded by N770, N800, and N810 "internet tablets". N810 in particular was basically the same device as N900, but despite having otherwise state of the art wireless communication tech all of them lacked one very crucial component: a mobile data modem. Internet connection was only possible over WiFi (or even RJ45-USB dongle) but not SIM. The reason for this was of course not technical - the Symbian folks inside Nokia simply managed to convince the executive level management that adding mobile data would turn these devices from PDAs to a smartphones, and it would be very ill-advisable to launch a competing smartphone platform to Symbian. When Maemo folks finally got a chance to "give us a try" (and I guess management saw with the competition that they needed something more modern), the result was N900. Considering it was meant as a "niche" device its sales exceeded all projections. However, in the grand scheme of things it was just an experiment designed to fail and further cement the dominance of Symbian. I think Nokia also developed a fully-working tablet around either Maemo or MeeGo. It was literally ready to ship, but was at last minute cancelled before the launch event due to backroom dealing again by the Symbian folks. It has all been documented in the book "Operation Elop", which paints a pretty good picture about everything that went on behind the scenes during the demise of the once great Nokia: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ https://asokan.org/operation-elop/ The book is based around absolutely exclusive interviews of people who served in Nokia's board and top executive positions at the time.
- fifilura 6y ago
  Maemo was the right platform at the right moment to compete with Android and iOS and I was very surprised they closed it down in the time of crisis instead of realising they had built exactly what was needed. It had a modern OS with memory overcommit instead of the endless drudgery of checking out-of-memory conditions as in Symbian. The N770 launched with a GUI based on Gtk and convincing OSS developers to move to Qt in later versions of the platform was bump in the road. (I think Gtk had problems with basing the inheritance model on matching strings instead of vtables as with C++, so performance on this type of devices was problematic. Or - someone please correct me. I know it feels a bit weird given the long history of Gtk.)