
The 'oh sh_t' moment that Nokia decided to abandon MeeGo - lakshmikandh
http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/02/the-oh-sh_t-moment-that-nokia-decided-to-abandon-meego/
======
cubicle67
Here's the original article
[http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...](http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b4232056703101.htm)

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krschultz
Engadget does an amazingly bad job of linking the original article. You would
think that the sentence 'Bloomberg Businessweek just published an amazingly
thorough piece on Nokia' would have a link in it, but it doesn't.

No where on the page do they link to the start of the original story. The
'source' button links to the page/paragraph that the quote is from, but that
isn't exactly the same as linking to the front of the other article.

The only links in the content go back to other Engadget stories. I'd say its
bad etiquette.

~~~
ugh
Engadget always has a source link at the bottom of the article. They don’t
link to anything but themselves in the article text for SEO reasons. Also note
that the word “Source” at the bottom of the article is not text but an image –
also for SEO reasons. (I don’t, however, know what that’s supposed to help.)

This is a truly disgusting practice. The good thing about it is that once you
know what’s going on, it’s relatively unproblematic. Whenever someone directs
me to Engadget I know where I have to click. (In a funny twist, once you know
where it is, finding the source is actually easier than when it is hiding in
the article text.)

~~~
paraschopra
I will tell you how that practice might help for SEO purpose. A page has a
limited link juice which gets distributed more or less equally to all links on
the page. So if the article links to external page, some of that link juice
flows to it. Why not rather limit it to your own internal pages?

~~~
damncabbage
If that's the case, why not just use rel="nofollow"?

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bpeebles
I honestly don't know why they feel like need to release a huge number of
devices to compete against Apple and Android. Apple releases _one_ every,
what, 15 months? And for Android, it seems you really only need ~3 devices
(one with a keyboard, and two without at different prince points) to make a
dent into the target market for Android.

It maybe that MeeGo was going even slower than that, but that's also their
fault for deciding to more or less completely ditch Maemo instead of investing
resources into that back from 2008 onward. If you look at what they had with
the 770 a year and half before the iPhone, and the N800 5 months before, Nokia
could have been huge. Instead they stuck with Symbian without really putting
the correct work into it. And now they're stuck with Windows Mobile it seems.

I'm not sure what it all really means, besides a reminder it really doesn't
make sense to attach yourself too much for companies. What they do can change
on a dime.

~~~
ansy
Completely disagree about needing devices. Apple only makes one [phone] device
per year, but Apple is losing market share to Android every month. Having a
single device might be a good formula for profitability or user experience,
but it's not the road to an empire.

Compare to Android. It's not just about form factors. It's about hardware
freshness. Android has had dual core, LTE, and double the ram for months.
There are Android phones with 3D screens and 3D cameras. The iPhone 4 is
looking long in the tooth. And the iPhone 4S will just be catching up to the
Galaxy S 2.

If I had to point to one reason why Apple is trading at such a low multiple
it's because Apple is making too few devices to maintain leadership. Apple's
market share has peaked unless it starts acting very un-Apple.

~~~
bpeebles
I mean, it's not that Nokia was only going to be releasing three devices
before 2014, it was three MeeGo devices. I guess you could argue one/year is
too slow to keep up, but they were going to continue to release Symbian
phones.

And I'm not sure if much of that "hardware freshness" is really what's getting
Android market share. Are there (sizable numbers of) people buying a phone
because it has a 3D camera?

It may have made sense for Nokia to ditch MeeGo, but I think I was actually
intending to mostly complain about how they got themselves into the corner.

~~~
ansy
Are people buying Android over iPhone because of a 3D camera? Probably not.
Because Android is the only way to get LTE? Definitely, this is a big one.
Because Android is the only way to get a dual core CPU? Definitely.

Not to mention the form factors which are also pretty important. Some people
demand a keyboard. Other people want a huge screen. That's just not an option
with iOS. There's also brand momentum. Everyone that isn't Apple has loaned
Google its brand by putting Android inside.

As for MeeGo's viability I think it's a moot point. Even if MeeGo was perfect
Nokia would be in an uphill battle. Look at webOS, critically regarded as the
best competitor to iOS. HP has a near zero market share. You either need to be
the very best by far, i.e. Apple, or you need to have the rest of the industry
behind you, i.e. Android.

The fact Nokia looked at Windows Phone 7 and Android considered them equals
makes me question Elop's decision making. The article also has a telling quote
when Elop says he couldn't reach someone because the other guy was "probably
testing an Android device that day."

Elop might as well have decided to build personal computers with OS/2 Warp in
the 1990's because IBM gave him a big check and Windows is humorously
unreliable. I'm sure that would have been a great business decision.

------
rrrazdan
This, is a classic management lesson. Take stock. Confer with key stakeholders
and the engineers. Draw a composite picture of the state of the system. And
take a painful decision to abandon your approach, hopefully in time. Much as I
liked 'Meego' as an idea, and much as I like Nokia as a phone company( Symbian
phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always top
class.), this was a correct decision. I hope Nokia can find its feet again and
dazzle us with some amazing phones again.

~~~
stcredzero
_Symbian phones were incredibly useful. And the hardware and design is always
top class._

What's keeping Nokia from playing the same game that HTC is? Is it entirely
manufacturing/labor costs?

From the article: _"MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company," he
says, "and we'd come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It's
not a nice thing."_

Maybe the culture and social organization of a company is analogous to its
autonomic nervous system? A shock to that is very risky and not to be
undertaken lightly.

~~~
rrrazdan
Because Nokia R&D spend is 8 times that of HTC, and 5 times of Apple for that
matter.[1] Nokia needs the flexibility with the OS. In an ideal world, Nokia
most certainly should make an OS by themselves, but clearly that didn't
happen, so they choose the one that gives them the most flexibility to do what
they want, much more than just putting a custom UI on top. And yes, the shock
is risky. But the way things were going, very necessary.

[1][http://www.itpro.co.uk/630721/nokia-r-d-spend-outweighs-
appl...](http://www.itpro.co.uk/630721/nokia-r-d-spend-outweighs-apple-and-
htc)

~~~
bad_user
What flexibility? According to Microsoft, WinMo7 is allowing less flexibility
than Android, that being one of its selling points (less fragmentation).

~~~
rrrazdan
From the article, "To that point, Microsoft had forced handset makers to obey
strict rules about how they could customize Windows Phone 7, and they wanted
the same from Nokia. Not only did Nokia respond that it wanted the right to
innovate freely, it asked Microsoft to commit to using Nokia technology as a
foundation of the Windows Phone platform, particularly its detailed Navteq
maps database."

------
windsurfer
I've never heard a Linux distro, especially one based on an existing distro,
and made by people who have already made one before, only working on 3 pieces
of hardware in 4 years. Could anyone explain this?

~~~
sethg
I suspect the answer is some combination of (a) getting device drivers to work
on highly specialized hardware in spite of extreme memory/CPU constraints; (b)
developing a user interface (and the widget toolkit for developers to use,
etc.) that doesn’t suck.

When my company was acquired by Nokia we had a choice of company-issued
phones, and of course most of the geeks picked N900s (which ran Maemo, a Meego
predecessor). After a few weeks using the N900 I was like “well, as a handheld
Linux computer, it’s OK, but as a _phone_... meh.”

~~~
windsurfer
I have been using an N900 for almost a year, and I think it's a great "phone".
Excellent voice quality, great microphone, easy to call people, and the best
reception I've had with any device. It works well with all my hands-free
stuff, and it works very well as a "phone".

What complaints do you have?

~~~
Gravityloss
Posting this on an n900... Very low battery life, bad touch screen, sluggish
ui. Why on earth did they cripple the default shell? The keyboard is pretty
nice. When someone is calling you, the answer and decline button jump around
in the screen, and I always hit the wrong one. This is because of the
orientation sensor and the slow ui rearrange. Most browsing frustrations go
away when you start using Opera as the browser. Most of the bugs in the
builtin apps could have been fixed relatively easily, but I guess they
restarted with a different ui paradigm after N900. Never used android or
iphone so don't know how bad they are.

~~~
windsurfer
The battery life is certainly an issue, but I find the UI just as fast as the
equivalent Android. I also love the touchscreen because of the stylus.

You can prevent the orientation sensor from making things jump by forcing
either portrait or landscape mode in the phone-ui application.

Most of those bugs in the apps have been fixed in the Community SSU:
<http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU>

------
patrickgzill
Shades of SGI getting killed off due to the actions of Rick Belluzzo; this was
after he scotched the development of PA-RISC because of his view that
Microsoft was going to take over the world... the difference being that
Belluzzo joined MSFT after proving his ability to destroy MSFT's competition.

<http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/13/sgi_belluzzo/>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo>

A cynical view would be that MSFT is happy to see their management jump to
their competitors...

~~~
yuhong
>A cynical view would be that MSFT is happy to see their management jump to
their competitors...

Yea, I know: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2209064>

------
nl
The only surprise there is that it took a whole day and a meeting with the new
CEO to work this out.

It was common knowledge amongst anyone who tried it that MeeGo was no where
near ready for consumers, and it was reasonably clear that the hardware
platform they were aiming at wasn't 100% sure either.

~~~
hvs
It's often surprising in a large organization how much goes on that upper
management is unaware of, either through incompetence or malice. I don't know
enough about the specifics of this situation, but sometimes "everyone" knows
that a product isn't going to ship in time, but maybe the product manager
doesn't want to broadcast this fact for fear of his job. If his manager is
asleep at the wheel, this kind of thing can happen. I'm guessing that the new
CEO simply did something the previous CEO didn't do: ask the right questions.

~~~
kabdib
We having a saying here that once you make Director or VP, they force-feed you
"stupid pills" that cause you to lose your mind.

I'm sure everyone has stories.

------
ChrisLTD
_"Nokia is now on track to release at least one Windows Phone handset in 2011
with a dozen more in 2012."_

A dozen!

With a dozen models on the market how are customers supposed to choose?

Nokia should slow down and put as much TLC as possible into 1 or 2 products
next year. Make each immaculate instead of figuring you can fix your mistakes
in next month's model.

~~~
WrkInProgress
Has having numerous models from a variety of manufacturers really hurt Android
in terms of sales ?

~~~
Angostura
Are you suggesting that the number of models of an item that a company
produces should in some way be comparable to the total number of models on the
market?

~~~
WrkInProgress
I'm not sure what you mean, sorry.

What I was trying to say was that I don't think having 12 models is going to
make things confusing for consumers or be detrimental to sales.

HTC/Samsung/Motorola releases a lot of Android phones in a given year and it
hasn't hurt their sales.

Edit: It must be noted that it isn't likely that any single market will have a
dozen Nokia models available to the public.

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kleiba
I don't understand this article. It's claimed that the company realized they
cannot meet their scheduled goals with MeeGo, so instead they switch to
Windows Phone. Yet the article call the latter "an OS still struggling to find
traction in the heated smartphone market."

If that is true why would they think it could solve their problem?

~~~
nl
Because WinPhone is a finished operating system, unlike MeeGo.

Nokia's problem was they couldn't get a competitive product out _quickly_
enough. WinPhone gives them a chance, MeeGo wouldn't have shipped in decent
numbers until _2014_.

------
shalinmangar
What I often wonder is why didn't Nokia decide to try its hand on both Android
and Windows Phone 7? Samsung has managed to do this while keeping its in house
platform intact. Experiment and see what finds uptake rather than bet a huge
corporation on a single platform.

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DrCatbox
Lies and deceit.

Elop is a former employee of Microsoft and has huge share in that company. His
reason to be at Nokia was to bring it to Microsofts lap and so destroy MeeGo
and Qt.

~~~
emwa
He sold all of his Microsoft shares and bought 150,000 of Nokia.
[http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-ceo-elop-sells-all-
micr...](http://www.businessinsider.com/nokia-ceo-elop-sells-all-microsoft-
shares-buys-nokia-2011-2)

