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Quite a few of those hours were wasted and contributed to Nokia's demise. They should have switched away from Symbian waaay sooner. I think clinging to it is a

by atleta 4y ago

Quite a few of those hours were wasted and contributed to Nokia's demise. They should have switched away from Symbian waaay sooner. I think clinging to it is a classic case of the sunken cost fallacy. By ~2005-2006 it was obvious, at least for some of us, developers, that continuing to invest in Symbian is a huge mistake. By then, Nokia had been working on a Linux based OS for years. (That would become Meego.) But, if I'm not mistaken, at least a thousand people were working on Symbian and Symbian based products. So switching away from it was simply out of question. It would have been too bold a move. (Especially, since Nokia was dominating the market and these products brought in a very nice profit.)

kjellsbells 4y ago
wasnt this pain the premise of the infamous "burning platform" memo [1] and the eventual switch to Windows Phone as an OS? [1] https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops-burning-platform/ https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops...
- atleta 4y ago
  Maybe. But by then (2011 IIRC) it was way too late, sales had been going South, so one wouldn't need too much of a genius to figure out that Symbian was dead. The problem was that in the mid 2000s things were going just too good and management didn't want to see how it could become problematic, or at least take the risk. We were selling smart phones, that weren't really phones anymore (heck, we called them mobile terminals!) but it was pretty hard and painful to develop software for these. This made hard to convince external, indie/hobbist developers (they ended up creating most of the apps for ios and android) and, of course made internal development pretty expensive. Worse, it must have made experimenting and thus innovation slow. Hence the UI was stuck. Not as if Nokia ever put too much effort into innovating the UI. Touch screens were somewhat frowned upon. Though that may in part have related to the existing UI, the effort needed to try out something new and the fact that those touch screens were still resistive back then. Which is really not a great UX. Though I remember once trying a prototype phone at an internal conference with a touch screen providing haptic feedback (through some piezo efect). So you could kind of feel the on-screen buttons.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  That memo made many people angry, I was at Espoo location the week after and not many happy faces around. The Symbian teams had finally managed to bring app developers along with platform improvements on Carbide, Qt integration, better POSIX support via PIPS, Symbian was finally looking more modern and then management dropped the bomb. Naturally it was the last drop for many of those small app developers that had enough of the Symbian SDK changes from the last set of years, now being asked to drop C++ and Java, and rewrite everything into Silverlight/XNA for WP7. Instead of adopting WP7, most decided it was time to go elsewhere.
girvo 4y ago
Its such a shame too, because Meego and the UI they built for the Nokia N9 was still ahead of it's time, and absolutely excellent to use. But it was dead on arrival, aside from us geeks who loved the idea of Debian on a phone :)

by atleta 4y ago

kjellsbells 4y ago

wasnt this pain the premise of the infamous "burning platform" memo [1] and the eventual switch to Windows Phone as an OS? [1] https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops-burning-platform/ https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/memo-nokia-ceo-stephen-elops...

atleta 4y ago
Maybe. But by then (2011 IIRC) it was way too late, sales had been going South, so one wouldn't need too much of a genius to figure out that Symbian was dead. The problem was that in the mid 2000s things were going just too good and management didn't want to see how it could become problematic, or at least take the risk. We were selling smart phones, that weren't really phones anymore (heck, we called them mobile terminals!) but it was pretty hard and painful to develop software for these. This made hard to convince external, indie/hobbist developers (they ended up creating most of the apps for ios and android) and, of course made internal development pretty expensive. Worse, it must have made experimenting and thus innovation slow. Hence the UI was stuck. Not as if Nokia ever put too much effort into innovating the UI. Touch screens were somewhat frowned upon. Though that may in part have related to the existing UI, the effort needed to try out something new and the fact that those touch screens were still resistive back then. Which is really not a great UX. Though I remember once trying a prototype phone at an internal conference with a touch screen providing haptic feedback (through some piezo efect). So you could kind of feel the on-screen buttons.
pjmlp 4y ago
That memo made many people angry, I was at Espoo location the week after and not many happy faces around. The Symbian teams had finally managed to bring app developers along with platform improvements on Carbide, Qt integration, better POSIX support via PIPS, Symbian was finally looking more modern and then management dropped the bomb. Naturally it was the last drop for many of those small app developers that had enough of the Symbian SDK changes from the last set of years, now being asked to drop C++ and Java, and rewrite everything into Silverlight/XNA for WP7. Instead of adopting WP7, most decided it was time to go elsewhere.

girvo 4y ago

Its such a shame too, because Meego and the UI they built for the Nokia N9 was still ahead of it's time, and absolutely excellent to use. But it was dead on arrival, aside from us geeks who loved the idea of Debian on a phone :)