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That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian a

That's not completely fair. Nokia was clearly well aware of the pains of Symbian development, and they bought Qt to improve that. Qt was used both for Symbian and Maemo/MeeGo in the last years. Especially QML for the UI parts was well ahead of the competition, giving declarative and hardware accelerated UIs with great dev convenience.

toyg 2y ago
At managerial level, only half of Nokia was onboard with Qt. The other half wanted to chuck everything and just adopt something developed elsewhere; I reckon most of these folks simply resented the size the company had reached, and wanted to streamline. The latter half won the political battle and brought Elop in to do the dirty work.
pjmlp 2y ago
The problem was that right after the Symbian developer community decided to embrace Qt, the Burning Platform memo came out, telling them to dump C++, learn C# and target Windows Phone 7, with either Silverligh or XNA. In a community that was largety anti-Microsoft, joking how bad Windows CE and Pocket PC used to be, versus Symbian handsets. The majority of the Symbian community felt betrayed and went elsewhere, to Apple and Google.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  It's always amuses me how people blame Elop, completely ignoring everything what was done before him. >> No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph. >> In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android. >> Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    There is a difference from random people around the Internet, and people that were actually Nokia employees at the time. And yes, the board as well had its own share to blame, including hiring Elop in first place, with a big bonus payment clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobile business unit, which naturally he ended up doing as well, and created a huge scandal in Finland's press at the time.
    - justsomehnguy 2y ago
      > people that were actually Nokia employees at the time. >> I was on the Networks unit By the time the board hired Elop Nokia-tanic was already with a giant hull breach. Sure, you can claim what your personal experience of an unrelated unit in Nokia gives you a proper visibility to the circumstances, but what Nokia actually did before the memo is telling what were happening there way better than your experience. And... HP-UX? In 2010? Sigh.
      - pjmlp 2y ago
        See, by 2010, we were already focusing on Red-Hat Linux.... You have no idea of what visibility I actually had, how Networks worked with Mobile, which buildings we shared, common lunch talks, nor I am going to disclose most of the NDA stuff. So think whatever you want out of it.
        justsomehnguy 2y ago
        > ou have no idea of what visibility I actually had Yes. But I have a very good idea of what products Nokia shipped before the memo and they were quite shit, compared to the other options on the market. Just re-read the memo itself and explain with a honest heart how exactly Apple got to 61% in 2010? Was that the evil Elop doing things? Or that was Nokia and Nokia employees doing shit for years before 2010? You are perfectly aware what to lose the market in 2010 you need to make shit products in 2007-2009, because you can't be totally fine all this time and at Dec 31 2010 BAM all the base belong to Apple. > which buildings we shared, common lunch talks Puhlease, lunch talks don't push a shitty products to the market. It's the internal bureaucracy, lack of the ability to take the responsibility and overall the bloated and entrenched corporate culture of Nokia what does that.
mjg59 2y ago
...and in the process forced the Maemo team to revamp everything again, delaying the shipping of an OS that didn't carry all of Symbian's terrible legacy, and ensuring that Nokia had nothing that was going to be competitive with the rest of the ecosystem (the follow-up to the N9 was heavily delayed because people got pulled back to get the N9 to ship on schedule, meaning there was going to be at least a two year window for everyone else to make progress while the new Nokia smartphone ecosystem stagnated)
joezydeco 2y ago
QML just needed a decade of hardware advancements to make it usable.

toyg 2y ago

At managerial level, only half of Nokia was onboard with Qt. The other half wanted to chuck everything and just adopt something developed elsewhere; I reckon most of these folks simply resented the size the company had reached, and wanted to streamline. The latter half won the political battle and brought Elop in to do the dirty work.

pjmlp 2y ago

The problem was that right after the Symbian developer community decided to embrace Qt, the Burning Platform memo came out, telling them to dump C++, learn C# and target Windows Phone 7, with either Silverligh or XNA. In a community that was largety anti-Microsoft, joking how bad Windows CE and Pocket PC used to be, versus Symbian handsets. The majority of the Symbian community felt betrayed and went elsewhere, to Apple and Google.

justsomehnguy 2y ago
It's always amuses me how people blame Elop, completely ignoring everything what was done before him. >> No. You should re-read that memo, specifically starting at "In 2008, Apple's market share in the $300+ price range was 25 percent; by 2010 it escalated to 61 percent." paragraph. >> In 2010 nobody was interested in Symbian, no one else made phones on Symbian, no one would do apps for Symbian[0] - who would bother with all the Symbian shenanigans when even Nokia itself said what it would move to MeeGo 'soon', along with ~10% of smartphone market? Money was in Apple and Android. >> Should I remind you what Elop's memo was a month later, in February 2011? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35038979
- pjmlp 2y ago
  There is a difference from random people around the Internet, and people that were actually Nokia employees at the time. And yes, the board as well had its own share to blame, including hiring Elop in first place, with a big bonus payment clause if he managed to sell Nokia Mobile business unit, which naturally he ended up doing as well, and created a huge scandal in Finland's press at the time.
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    > people that were actually Nokia employees at the time. >> I was on the Networks unit By the time the board hired Elop Nokia-tanic was already with a giant hull breach. Sure, you can claim what your personal experience of an unrelated unit in Nokia gives you a proper visibility to the circumstances, but what Nokia actually did before the memo is telling what were happening there way better than your experience. And... HP-UX? In 2010? Sigh.
    - pjmlp 2y ago
      See, by 2010, we were already focusing on Red-Hat Linux.... You have no idea of what visibility I actually had, how Networks worked with Mobile, which buildings we shared, common lunch talks, nor I am going to disclose most of the NDA stuff. So think whatever you want out of it.
      - justsomehnguy 2y ago
        > ou have no idea of what visibility I actually had Yes. But I have a very good idea of what products Nokia shipped before the memo and they were quite shit, compared to the other options on the market. Just re-read the memo itself and explain with a honest heart how exactly Apple got to 61% in 2010? Was that the evil Elop doing things? Or that was Nokia and Nokia employees doing shit for years before 2010? You are perfectly aware what to lose the market in 2010 you need to make shit products in 2007-2009, because you can't be totally fine all this time and at Dec 31 2010 BAM all the base belong to Apple. > which buildings we shared, common lunch talks Puhlease, lunch talks don't push a shitty products to the market. It's the internal bureaucracy, lack of the ability to take the responsibility and overall the bloated and entrenched corporate culture of Nokia what does that.

mjg59 2y ago

...and in the process forced the Maemo team to revamp everything again, delaying the shipping of an OS that didn't carry all of Symbian's terrible legacy, and ensuring that Nokia had nothing that was going to be competitive with the rest of the ecosystem (the follow-up to the N9 was heavily delayed because people got pulled back to get the N9 to ship on schedule, meaning there was going to be at least a two year window for everyone else to make progress while the new Nokia smartphone ecosystem stagnated)

joezydeco 2y ago

QML just needed a decade of hardware advancements to make it usable.