
Nokia's MeeGo is doomed - A summary of Dublin's MeeGo Summit - davidw
http://www.techeye.net/software/nokias-meego-is-doomed
======
metageek
I've had Maemo in my pocket nearly four years now--first the 770, then the
N810. I _love_ my N810. The browser's only so-so, but the xterm is fantastic.
I can do development on it, running gcc, python, python3, clisp, guile, hugs,
mosml, emacs, and I forget what else. git and svn, of course.

When I got a new phone a year ago, I considered the N900, but held back
because its 3G was only for T-Mobile. (Yes, I actually travel in areas where
T-Mobile doesn't have 3G. I spend one week a year in a spot where they don't
even have GSM coverage.) But I figured I'd get its successor in 2012 or so.

Then Nokia and Intel announced MeeGo. I still haven't seen a good explanation
for this--merge two OSes, only one of which has shipping products, instead of
dumping the one that doesn't? Cue sinking feeling.

Nowadays I don't think I'll ever run MeeGo. Even when I get an Android phone,
I'll have to carry my N810 until it dies. When it does, I'll have to try
building a decent dev environment on Android. People have xterm running on it,
but it doesn't have most of the tools that make Unix useful.

Sigh.

~~~
adambyrtek
Just being curious, are you comfortable doing serious coding on a machine with
such a little keyboard? I can't even imagine using Emacs efficiently on a
device like that. Don't you think a small netbook would increase your comfort
and productivity without a considerable loss of portability?

~~~
metageek
> _Just being curious, are you comfortable doing serious coding on a machine
> with such a little keyboard?_

It's certainly slower than with a larger screen. The keyboard doesn't actually
slow me down much. Hacking with one of the crappy 3-row keyboards common on
phones (e.g., the N900, mrphl) would be a lot worse; but the N810 has most of
the symbols I need right on the keys. For the others ({}, [], |), the xterm
has a customizable palette; I just tap the right button on the screen.

> _I can't even imagine using Emacs efficiently on a device like that._

Shrug. It's emacs. I've been using it for 20 years now; the control keys are
burned into my brain. The main impediment is the screen size; I can't see much
of my code at once.

> _Don't you think a small netbook would increase your comfort and
> productivity without a considerable loss of portability?_

No. With the N810, I can hack while walking down the street. Can't do that
with a netbook.

~~~
colkassad
I am impressed that you can hack while walking down the street! When I'm
coding my wife has to call my name 3 or 4 times before I notice she is
speaking to me. I would be doomed on a busy street.

~~~
metageek
Long years of practice reading while walking through crowds. Mind you, I do
have to look up to _cross_ a street. :-)

------
jimbokun
"You will have a browsing capable machine in your car, kitchen, living room,
pocket and probably bathroom. For optimal convenience, each of these devices
needs to communicate."

iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch.

"Doug played us a charming little video that showed cartoon MeeGo-people
pausing movies on their televisions, stepping out into the car and playing the
movie immediately from its last pause."

Netflix streaming, more or less. Wii, XBox, PS3, iOS, Windows, Mac, some Blue
Ray players, I think. All of which know what's in your queue and even where
you left off watching on your other device.

The future happened while this guy wasn't looking.

------
brown
Well, that's a downer. I had such high hopes for Maemo/MeeGo. It just wasn't
meant to be.

I do love my N900. Coincidentally, I just started getting into app development
the past few weeks. No SDK for Windows or OSX? Seriously? The SDK only works
on specific versions of Ubuntu? Really? It all makes sense now why the
platform has been a failure.

~~~
stuaxo
It's early days... it's a bit early to say that it's a failure, Maemo was
never really pushed and Meego is not finished. Of course this is an ominous
start. The SDK will come to Windows, thats pretty much a given, KDE works in
Windows. If it doesn't, then virtual machines are not too painful, this has a
chance of working after all the stack is pretty much the standard Linux stack.

This one should be the easiest for developers, your not stuck with a language
or framework that is foreign, getting started should be easy.

As it is now, we haven't even got any phones running it, so of course it
doesn't all work and hasn't been polished yet. Whether Nokia can survive long
enough to see it through, we'll have to wait and see, I hope so.

~~~
enjo
I really don't trust Nokia. They have a systemic internal culture that thrusts
engineering into the lowest possible role. The number of engineers within
Nokia who would fail at the FizzBuzz problem is staggering, often in key
roles. The problem is that upper management doesn't understand why that's a
problem.

Their hoping that Open Source will save them from themselves I suppose, but
that rarely works. As long as Nokia is largely fronting this project, I don't
have a lot of faith in it's long-term viability.

I just don't.

~~~
harshaw
I concur. I once spent a couple of days in Tampere "attempting" to fix a
couple of serious bugs between our app and the telephony layer on a S60
device. Never once did Nokia pair us up with a hard core device engineer - I
honestly don't know if they exist. I can tell you all about the fluffy product
manager types and the great times we had eating Reindeer!

~~~
enjo
Or the Finnish Sauna?:)

------
billswift
There was a pretty good discussion of the alternatives available to Nokia on
ESR's blog yesterday - <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2772> \- all the real
alternatives: Windows Phone 7, MeeGo, and Android were discussed.

------
roel_v
How does one get an invite to an event like that? Are they common? All I ever
heard of are the 'MS Tech Days' for which you have to pony several thousands
and you don't even get cool stuff, afaik.

~~~
villiros
It was totally open and free. One needed to just sign up on the website and
turn up.

Which is probably the most damning thing about the platform: when such effort
is spent at luring developers in, one wonders.

~~~
blub
Pretty much everyone is trying to lure developers with cash/devices. Except
Apple, which don't need to do that.

~~~
pieter
I'm not so sure. I tried to get a free Android device to see if Android is an
interesting platform to develop for, but couldn't find anyone that could get
one for me (and I'm not ready to sign a 2-year contract just for an experiment
:)).

------
moondowner
I strongly disagree with the blog's author opinion.

Before basing your opinion on MeeGo on a biased article, read Arstechnica's
article too: ( [http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/meego-
confer...](http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/11/meego-conference-
momentum-intact-despite-lack-of-hardware.ars) )

P.S. "At one point, after a long explanation that failed to answer the
question of why MeeGo didn't yet have a framework for developers to sell their
apps, a developer from Norway shouted out: "We don't care about openness, we
need to be able to make a living.""

What is Qt then? <http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/meego/> Come on...

~~~
sdfghjkjhg
Qt is a very nice cross platform gui framework - it's not an app store

~~~
moondowner
Well an app store isn't a framework either :) The author's sentence then
doesn't make sense. Either-ways, my point was MeeGo has a great platform for
developing applications, Qt is great, and QtCreator is an excellent IDE.

~~~
sdfghjkjhg
I think in this context 'framework' means "a way is provided to" not in it's
technical sense.

The developer was complaining that there was no system in place to sell apps
to users - not that there was no gui toolkit to write them.

~~~
blub
How can you sell apps for phones that don't exist yet? Ovi store and Intel
AppUp will allow sales for MeeGo when the time comes.

------
jodrellblank
_MeeGo is doomed, and Nokia with it if the suits holding the purse-strings
aren't careful._

Nokia are the 120th biggest company in the world (
[http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_l...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_list/101_200.html)
) (falling from 85th in 2009); they have leeway to do a lot of things wrong
before they are "doomed".

~~~
nl
General Motors is the 38th biggest company in the world
([http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_l...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/full_list/index.html))
and they went into bankruptcy protection in 2009.

Assets value and size doesn't protect you from a fall in demand. Their revenue
fell 23% in 2009, and their profits fell _78.8%_
([http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/snapsh...](http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/global500/2010/snapshots/6652.html)).

Their biggest concern has to be their share price. In December 2008 it peaked
around $40. It's now around $9. If it keeps falling like that people will
start talking about takeovers and/or private equity buyouts.

------
bergie
I think the complained availability of applications will improve pretty
quickly when this stuff is done: <http://www.qaiku.com/go/a25h/>

Currently maemo.org is serving some 1.5 million open source apps for the N900
per week.

------
bryanwb
wow, pretty damning report. initially it sounded like a cool platform to me.

Nokia should just drop Meego and throw in with android while they are still
profitable.

~~~
danieldk
Using Android would put them in direct competition with (very) low-margin
Chinese manufacturers. This is what Apple got right: if you have your own
operating system and ecosystem nailed down correctly, people do not mind
paying larger margins, and you are in a different game.

I guess this is what Nokia is aiming for with Meego. But, despite the
excellent work of the Qt trolls, it doesn't really seem to get off the
ground...

~~~
metageek
Yeah, but it worked for Apple only because they were first (more or less).
Nokia can't go that way. Their only hope is to adopt a successful OS and
produce top-notch phones.

~~~
fhars
Nokia has always produced top notch phones. Their only problem is that it
looks like they couldn't write decent software for phones if their life
depended on it (randomly shuffling browser bookmarks every time I open the
IMAP-client? Come /on/...)

Sent from my Nokia E sixtysomething or other.

~~~
metageek
Right, that's my point--I've been using Nokias since 2001. If they built an
Android phone, its phone bits could be dramatically more usable than stock
Android.

------
lazylland
Fact 1 : Nokia bashing is fashionable

Implication : Posts bashing Nokia are bound to get lots of views

Example : HN item id:195100

~~~
jodrellblank
For your example you pick a comment about lisp datastructures?

~~~
lazylland
oops ! typo .. should have been 1954100 :D

