Really really wish the "Elop killed non-Android Linux in the phone market" meme would go away given how every single other attempt to ship non-Android Linux in the phone market has failed with the exception of cases where the Chinese government has actively required it

@mjg59 it also assumes that Nokia wasn't actively preventing adoption of non-Android Linux in order to keep Symbian on life support long before Elop got hired

You're the new CEO of Nokia and the company has bet its entire future on a platform that hasn't shipped yet and has no compelling third party developer support and you're going to ship one high end phone running it this year and nothing else and it's not even clear when you're going to be able to ship any others and Microsoft is willing to throw a bunch of engineering support at you to ship Windows quickly, what do you do

@mjg59 EPOC64, obviously.

People should actually re-read the burning platform memo, this is not the voice of a man who turned up to kill Nokia, this is the voice of a man who turned up to find Nokia was already fucked and took what seemed like the only available option

Maybe things would have been different if S60 hadn't done everything they could to delay Maemo, including a forced replacement of the entire UI toolkit so the (non-existant in comparison to Apple or Android) Symbian developer community had a porting strategy

@mjg59 even every non-linux non-android entry has defacto failed ...

@mjg59

Get Microsoft to use as much resources as possible then release with Murena's /e/OS.

https://murena.com/america/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairphone-6/

@mjg59 I have pretty much one of every Linux phone that folks tried to ship; the best was Trolltech's Greenphone and that was only ever intended to be a developer prototype...

@mjg59 I'm an actual eager customer in the "non-Android Linux phone" market, and then I look at the overpriced half-arsed efforts and decide to just keep running my antique iPhone into the ground.

@mjg59 I think that this is the crux of it. The inside-Nokia stories I’ve heard from that era were those of longstanding internal political feuds, leadership paralysis and a near total blindness to the threats the company was facing.

A bunch of their late-era phones that were supposed to ship with Meego shipped with S60 instead, they were obsolete in the box and the updates that shipped later were buggy as hell.

@mjg59 I had one of those phones, assuming you're talking about the N900. Amazing bit of kit but a bit chonky

@benofbrown N9 - N900 had come out a couple of years before but wasn't really intended as a mass market device (and oof shipping without multitouch two years after the iPhone came out)

@mjg59 Both can be true: Nokia linux was never going to work, and Elop was a trojan horse from microsoft.

@shac what was the viable alternative?

@mjg59 I was one of the fools who buyed two meego tablets and the Maemo phone (n9), it was nice even if it had free software only (I used pidgin a lot on it!)

@mjg59

He did kill the only company selling decent hardware though. I said at the time the only chance for Nokia was to make a really polished Android phone with their usual great build quality and clean default apps. HMD kind of tried to do that when they acquired the trademark but it was far too late. It was obvious that the market would not accept Windows phones any more than it would accept Meego phones.

@mjg59 Honestly I think that headline summed it up pretty well: https://www.zdnet.com/article/nokia-jumps-from-one-burning-platform-to-another-with-windows-phone-7/

@mjg59 Many Linux people far underestimate the effort it would (did) take to drag desktop Linux UI into a mobile-friendly world. Then there's the non-Android kernel to consider...

You need millions to fund the software *and* hardware effort, and you won't get that from Internet tip jars or engineers on nights and weekends. Pretty risky considering the small percentage of consumers making up the Linux desktop market. It has to be a mission, not a business.

@kyle @mjg59 We're on it every single day @ev

@agx @mjg59 @ev I'm so pleased to see the continual progress!

@mjg59 Maemo was leaps ahead of iPhone at at least even with android with the n900. They could have shipped a s60 emulation shim as well if it weren't for political stupid.

@AMS leaps ahead in a number of ways that just didn't matter to most people

@mhoye @mjg59 yes, the N770, 800 and 810 didn't have phone capabilities because the head of the phone division and the head of the internet communicator division hated each other and were afraid of losing their respective fiefdoms if they collaborated.

They were warned about this and more (the necessity of a 3d chip and capacitive touchscreen etc) by the people building the devices and they could have been the iphone 2 years before the iphone, but it was all ignored by upper management who thought all anyone needed was a 2" wide display.

Nokia's extreme waterfall engineering practices did not help them either when they were up against much more agile tech giants.

@mjg59 Having this followed closely at the time it happened and also having owned an N9, I still believe that "Elop killed non-Android LInux phone" is more than a meme. That Android or iPhone were not beatable is a retroactive description that declares today's winners unbeatable, but is not how things unfolded at this time.

@uecker the precarious internal state of Nokia was largely unknown to the outside world at the time, even given the burning platform memo

@mjg59 This does not mean that without Elop it was clear that Nokia would have been successful, but it was entirely clear the moment Elop publicly declared their existing phones obsolete, had killed the N9 line, and all this at a time they did not have Windows phone ready to ship, that this is a really terrible management error.

@uecker why? Nokia shipped a Windows mobile phone significantly earlier than it could have shipped another Meego device

@mjg59 The internal state was what made Elop possible.

@uecker I mean yes, and?

@mjg59 This is not clear to me. But even then, the N9 shipped before any Windows phone and the N9 was considered a competitor the iPhone while the early Windows phones were clearly not. I liked my N9 much better than the Android I replaced it with years later.

@uecker the fact that the N9 was wonderful is irrelevant - Nokia couldn't ship another for two years and would be irrelevant by then. Nokia *had* to change strategy, and the realistic choices were Windows or Android. Windows let them distinguish themselves and came with significant engineering contribution from Microsoft.

@mjg59 Why was it the only realistic strategy? This is not an argument, it is begging the question.

@uecker what were the alternatives? Continuing with Meego wasn't an option.

@mjg59 Why not? The software on the N9 was good. I think cooperating with Intel was a mistake, but not a mistake which was unfixable.

@uecker because they couldn't have shipped another phone for 2 years, by which time Nokia would be irrelevant. The N9 shipped when it did because the engineering team from the N9+1 had been pulled back to support it, which meant the successor was woefully behind schedule

@mjg59 This does not seem plausible to me. All the resources which were spent on Windows phones could also be moved to Meego, or not? On why would N9+1 need entirely new software, not just hardware adaptation?

@uecker (and that's ignoring that they wouldn't have had a midrange phone to launch in that time either, making things even worse)

@uecker given the resources came from Microsoft, no

@mjg59 Then I guess they could have just continued with N9 when all resources for Windows Phones came from Microsoft anyway.

@uecker that's not what I said?

@mjg59 You seem to make the argument that Nokia did not have enough engineering resources (and could not bring in people) to adapt Meego to a new hardware platform so that this would take two years. But Microsoft could do this for windows phones quickly. This does not seem plausible to me from my understanding how technology works.

@uecker Microsoft *and* Nokia, working together, shipped two phones just over 6 months after the announcement they'd be working together. The N9 successor was going to take much longer.

@mjg59 If your argument is that Nokia was somehow incapable to execute such things for some internal reasons, this is plausible. But this would be the responsibility of management to fix. And maybe this needed drastic action.

@mjg59 But the limitations of Nokia in execution or resources at that time are also not so interesting. Your original point was that no Linux phone would have had chance against Android or iPhone at this point in time. I think this is wrong.

@uecker had Meego been launched with a clear plan for a range of devices filling different market niches over the next few months, it would have stood a chance. It was a compelling OS. But the political infighting and mismanagement at Nokia meant that didn't happen, so it stood no chance. Nokia wasn't Apple.

@mjg59 And then, the team leaves Nokia, founds their own company, using crowd funding to have their hardware manufactured and releases a phone two years later. But Nokia would not be able to do this quicker due to lack of resources?

@uecker the Jolla team was a small subset of the entire team focused on N9 and Meego development, and building niche hardware is an incredibly different problem to building something mass market - you have extremely different supply chain considerations, for instance

@mjg59 If you say the infighting and mismanagement made it impossible, I can believe this. If you say it did not stood a change because it was already too late in 2011 or technologically inferior, I would say this is wrong.

@mjg59 True, it is something else, but you seem to say software engineering resources were the problem, not setting up the supply chain for a new phone (which I assume Nokia was really good at).

@uecker if it had shipped two years earlier when S40 and S60 still had enough market share that Nokia could have sustained itself through the transition, or if it had shipped in 2011 but with a full product line, it could have worked. It would have been hard. Palm/HP started earlier and had a wider range and compelling software and still failed. But the state Nokia was in at the time doomed it even before Elop showed up.

@mjg59 I think it could have worked. We may never know. What we know for sure though is that Elops killed it completely and that Windows Phone strategy also failed.

@mjg59 What is also relatively obvious is that a CEO openly declaring the existing products obsolete before having a replacement on the market is really a bad idea. Even when Symbian was declining that certainly accelerated the downwards spiral.

@uecker the announcement came before N9 shipped, and Windows devices landed about a month after the N9 did. It certainly hurt N9 sales, but unclear whether it hurt Nokia overall - the alternative was for N9 and Windows to be in the market simultaneously with no clear indication was the future

@mjg59 The announcement was a severe management error in any case. The problem was that the declining sales left Nokia much less time. Without this error, a N9 strategy would also had a better chance. The problem with Windows phones were also that they were simply not competitive, and also still had plenty of software issues IIRC, so also prematurely put on the market.

@wouter @mjg59 This is very far off. At that time Nokia released many phones per year, including many Symbian smartphones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nokia_products

@wouter @mjg59 Note also that Nokia owned Qt at that time and you could develop software with it for Symbian, so there was even an upgrade path for developers to Meego.

@wouter @mjg59 This Symbian ecosystem was killed in 2011 by Elop too. But the developers that were ready to move to Meego with development based on C++/Qt did not move on to Windows Phone. So from an ecosystem point of view, this was also a severe mistake.

@wouter @mjg59 Also something people who promote the "Nokia was already doomed" meme miss, is that smartphone market was just emerging. Nokias smartphone sales were increasing, they just lost market shared before iPhone and Android were growing faster.

@wouter @mjg59 And finally, Nokia had project to bring Linux phones to lower end phones, where Nokia still was king and Windows Phone was not even realistic. So ecosystem was, the strategy it had before Elop was really good.

@wouter @mjg59 Maybe they were too slow in implementing all this, this is what a good CEO would have fixed.