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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Priorities tend to shift when your whole team has already been laid off, the product line cancelled and you still have the ability to make something flashy to put on your CV (again, I wasn't there myself). And probably there were a few demosceners in the team. But to be honest, the smoothness of the UI was really impressive, and even more when you know how underpowered the CPU was compared to Android phones at the time.
Maemo was debian-based and built around GTK. Its device target was effectively the N900. Nokia then rebuilt the interface (at fantastic dev speed, it has to be said) in QT (which had been blessed as the UI framework in order to facilitate onboarding of Symbian developers, who had been told to use Qt for new Symbian apps) and shipped it in the N9.
By then, however, management had struck an agreement with Intel to join forces over a Linux OS for devices. Intel had its own Linux distro, Moblin, which was based on RedHat. Moblin and Maemo were meant to merge into "MeeGo", a distro based on RedHat but with a QT interface. The project started fairly quickly but, by then, the N9 was basically ready, so Nokia effectively shipped what they had beforehand and just called it MeeGo.
Beyond the UI, iirc, the differences between Maemo and Moblin/MeeGo were the packaging system and some service daemons. The most annoying part, really, was that third-party apps built for Maemo would have had to be repackaged and retested for MeeGo, effectively throwing away all community efforts made over several years. Despite the best efforts by Nokia to placate folks, the community they had built around Maemo was completely pissed off and largely gave up, focusing on the actually-profitable systems. And then the burning platform memo happened.
This really reminds me of the Unix wars. Constantly companies announcing partnerships and then there developers spending time merging proprietary systems. And before they are ready another partnership bringing in some other thing that has to be merged. Not sure what exactly they gained with this Intel deal.
I guess they should have just continued with Maemo and attacked other software developers in general, rather then rewriting the whole stack just to attract Symbian developers.
A year after the N900 they should have been an N1000 by 2010. By the time late this memo happened the N1100 should have been ready to drop.
> 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.
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.