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Here's a contemporaneous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 I'm surprised how positive HN

Here's a contemporaneous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195520 I'm surprised how positive HN was about this. I don't remember reading any positive coverage at the time. I personally thought the guy was an idiot. He wound up performing worse than my expectations.

majormajor 4y ago
Looks like that discussion was before Windows Phone was announced as the replacement. E.g. " The idea of a Nokia device running Android is pretty appealing. They've always had good hardware, but Symbian has become a develpment dead-end, and Meego isn't yet here. " Symbian definitely wasn't the way forward. MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. Elop was right about needing to change horses. Terribly wrong about which one to pick, in retrospect. One could argue that MS fucked that up as much as Nokia, though - this was before MS continually screwed up their WP strategy for several subsequent years, like with the WP8 hard reset. Even best case, though, it was a high-risk/high-reward gamble to try to be "the" WP7 phone instead of one of many Android contenders. Would've been interesting to see them take on Samsung instead of just HTC and zombie Motorola, though.
- varajelle 4y ago
  > Elop was right about needing to change horses. What was wrong with MeeGo? The memo just states: > at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. But that's not soo bad considering that they started the platform in 2010. It's not like changing to a different platformbat this point would make things faster anyway.
  - oriolid 4y ago
    > What was wrong with MeeGo? The way I remember it was that at the time the management-forced merge of Maemo and Moblin to Meego and the sudden switch from Gtk to Qt were thought to be risky moves and it was well known that Symbian supporters are doing anything they can to sabotage other platforms. Later I was told that N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued (which isn't that different from stories about early iOS).
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      > N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued That was probably because N9 didn't really use MeeGo - technically it was still a Maemo based system that was only disguised under MeeGo brand.
      - oriolid 4y ago
        The version of the story I was told that the Maemo/Moblin mashup was just as bad as the idea of combining two different frameworks that do essentially the same thing sounds like, nowhere near production ready, and the Harmattan aka MeeGo-branded Maemo with Qt was the only way it could be made to work at all. I haven't heard anyone say that genuine MeeGo would make things better.
        seba_dos1 4y ago
        That was the sentiment of my comment as well, I guess I weren't clear enough - Nokia N9 was made to work great on what technically was still Maemo, but since they were supposed to go with MeeGo afterwards it would still require a lot of work to actually do that.
        oriolid 4y ago
        Ok, I misunderstood. I thought it was clear at that point that Meego was a dead end, but Harmattan was missing things like app sandboxing and some app store and payment related features, the package management was a mess, etc.
        panick21_ 4y ago
        Its funny that things like running videos while sliding window out of screen and live task switch all worked. But somehow package management was the problem. When I developed for iOS I was shocked how non of that existed. Seems to me they had something really nice to go forward with.
- prox 4y ago
  Couldn’t they have gone for both? Say an Android line and a Win line?
- asveikau 4y ago
  > MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. I had an n900 in 2009. I think they theoretically had a winner there. But they never prioritized it above Symbian. Then between the n900 and the n9, they totally rewrote the UI on a new toolkit, wasting resources and making it clear that if you write an app for it they may completely discard 95% of the app platform from release to release. If they had iterated on Maemo 5 in that time and put all hands on deck behind it they could have used those ~3 years more productively and been more competitive. Maemo 5 was actually pretty close to what they needed. Blackberry had a similar situation. Like meego, in bb10 they had a qt based platform in the early 2010s. But it was too late. The biggest blunder is not doing it sooner, before Android solidified.
  - panick21_ 4y ago
    Didn't Blackberry go with WebOS?
    - asveikau 4y ago
      They bought QNX and they had a qt based development platform.
      - panick21_ 4y ago
        I think I mixed up Palm and RIM.
bambax 4y ago
Yeah. In that thread at the time [0] I remarked that the "burning platform" theme/metaphor was highly unoriginal, and therefore, not a good sign. I was afraid disaster would ensue... Maybe it was impossible to do better, but it seems it would have been difficult to do worse. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2196311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2196311
speeder 4y ago
Heh, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195785 seemly that post and Sahaj response to it unfortunately were the ones that were correct.

majormajor 4y ago

Looks like that discussion was before Windows Phone was announced as the replacement. E.g. " The idea of a Nokia device running Android is pretty appealing. They've always had good hardware, but Symbian has become a develpment dead-end, and Meego isn't yet here. " Symbian definitely wasn't the way forward. MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. Elop was right about needing to change horses. Terribly wrong about which one to pick, in retrospect. One could argue that MS fucked that up as much as Nokia, though - this was before MS continually screwed up their WP strategy for several subsequent years, like with the WP8 hard reset. Even best case, though, it was a high-risk/high-reward gamble to try to be "the" WP7 phone instead of one of many Android contenders. Would've been interesting to see them take on Samsung instead of just HTC and zombie Motorola, though.

varajelle 4y ago
> Elop was right about needing to change horses. What was wrong with MeeGo? The memo just states: > at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market. But that's not soo bad considering that they started the platform in 2010. It's not like changing to a different platformbat this point would make things faster anyway.
- oriolid 4y ago
  > What was wrong with MeeGo? The way I remember it was that at the time the management-forced merge of Maemo and Moblin to Meego and the sudden switch from Gtk to Qt were thought to be risky moves and it was well known that Symbian supporters are doing anything they can to sabotage other platforms. Later I was told that N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued (which isn't that different from stories about early iOS).
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    > N9 was incredibly polished but Meego wasn't that great behind the scenes and would have required massive rewrites if development had continued That was probably because N9 didn't really use MeeGo - technically it was still a Maemo based system that was only disguised under MeeGo brand.
    - oriolid 4y ago
      The version of the story I was told that the Maemo/Moblin mashup was just as bad as the idea of combining two different frameworks that do essentially the same thing sounds like, nowhere near production ready, and the Harmattan aka MeeGo-branded Maemo with Qt was the only way it could be made to work at all. I haven't heard anyone say that genuine MeeGo would make things better.
      - seba_dos1 4y ago
        That was the sentiment of my comment as well, I guess I weren't clear enough - Nokia N9 was made to work great on what technically was still Maemo, but since they were supposed to go with MeeGo afterwards it would still require a lot of work to actually do that.
        oriolid 4y ago
        Ok, I misunderstood. I thought it was clear at that point that Meego was a dead end, but Harmattan was missing things like app sandboxing and some app store and payment related features, the package management was a mess, etc.
        panick21_ 4y ago
        Its funny that things like running videos while sliding window out of screen and live task switch all worked. But somehow package management was the problem. When I developed for iOS I was shocked how non of that existed. Seems to me they had something really nice to go forward with.
prox 4y ago
Couldn’t they have gone for both? Say an Android line and a Win line?
asveikau 4y ago
> MeeGo wasn't looking like it was gonna be an iOS or Android killer. I had an n900 in 2009. I think they theoretically had a winner there. But they never prioritized it above Symbian. Then between the n900 and the n9, they totally rewrote the UI on a new toolkit, wasting resources and making it clear that if you write an app for it they may completely discard 95% of the app platform from release to release. If they had iterated on Maemo 5 in that time and put all hands on deck behind it they could have used those ~3 years more productively and been more competitive. Maemo 5 was actually pretty close to what they needed. Blackberry had a similar situation. Like meego, in bb10 they had a qt based platform in the early 2010s. But it was too late. The biggest blunder is not doing it sooner, before Android solidified.
- panick21_ 4y ago
  Didn't Blackberry go with WebOS?
  - asveikau 4y ago
    They bought QNX and they had a qt based development platform.
    - panick21_ 4y ago
      I think I mixed up Palm and RIM.

bambax 4y ago

Yeah. In that thread at the time [0] I remarked that the "burning platform" theme/metaphor was highly unoriginal, and therefore, not a good sign. I was afraid disaster would ensue... Maybe it was impossible to do better, but it seems it would have been difficult to do worse. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2196311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2196311

speeder 4y ago

Heh, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2195785 seemly that post and Sahaj response to it unfortunately were the ones that were correct.