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Comment by jdright | Hacker News Reader

Maemo was simple genius. Way better than anything even today.

It's a pity Elop killed it, and then sabotaged Nokia with move to Windows Phone. They should have never hired him to begin with. But Nokia's problems started before him. They were torn by internal politics. Instead of pouring all resources into Maemo / Meego, teams were bickering about whether Symbian should get precedence and so on. That was the root of their problems.

It was classic "innovators dilemma".

The leadership knew Symbian was getting frazzled around the edges, and was Maemo was their experiment with an alternative (the first Maemo interface was effectively their S90 interface ported to GTK), but they didn't want to sink Symbian before they knew they could transition their revenue over.

Sadly the board grew impatient and brought in Elop.

Between that and how HP pretty much installed a revolving door on the CEO office, i wonder if boardroom meddling is a massive curse on tech companies. This because a board will focus on quarterly increases in profits, even if the company is solvent and likely to remain so for a decade or more. Consider Dell taking his namesake company private again so that he could enact long term goals without the board constantly interfering.

> Sadly the board grew impatient and brought in Elop.

With a mandate to sell the company, which many seem to be unaware of.

http://bgr.com/2013/09/24/nokia-ceo-elop-contract-details/

Likely because it emerged after people had washed their hands of the whole mess.

Maemo was nice, but setting up the SDK was a nightmare. That coupled with the breaking changes between each major version saw the app pool get smaller and smaller. I left the scene around the time the N810 was about 1 year old as the N900 was going to make all prior hardware obsolete- literally, as in the OS was not targeting it. I still have an N810 in storage somewhere. It was shockingly underpowered when I last used it.

This was a repeating theme in Nokia - get a good technology and fumble it. They did something similar with a cloud enabled RFID based application my company at the time was planning to use. They EOL'd it suddenly just as we'd had all the training and were doing initial R&D to bring it up in our product.

The Qt based stack they had working when I was developing for the N900 was actually pretty nice. The platform-specific documentation was generally horrible, and queries to Nokia tended to be answered with "it's on the wiki somewhere", but overall it was fairly developer-friendly.

As you say, of course, the fact that I was working on rewriting the original Gtk version of the app was a pretty big warning sign.

> Maemo was simple genius.

The soft spot in my heart for "simple genius" remains WebOS. Palm WebOS prefigured pretty much the last 5 years of "innovations" in both android and ios.

In a way, WebOS was reminiscent of Smalltalk or Lisp Machines, it was the future of software hampered by hardware.

Maemo lives on in https://neo900.org/

The Neo900 project posted two days ago that they would like peer review for their prototype #2.

http://neo900.org/news/2016-week-47

This link was apparently posted to HN two days ago when it was published but with the boring title "Neo900 2016 Week 47". I think there is probably someone on HN interested in looking over it, so I posted it to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13002613 with a better title hoping someone who should see it sees it, though the time of day might be bad and even though I tried to use a better title it might still be too vague to attract any attention. I looked over the schematics myself but I don't have any input for the Neo900 guys, being just a second year EE student (also, though I'm interested in electronics and microelectronics I'm still going to go the path of the power subdisipline as has been my plan since before I started).

Sadly not really the Maemo i came to love on my N800.

I heard about this way back in 2014, why hasn't neo900 progressed much? It seems like Xunlong is able to turn out new boards based on the A20, H3 and H5 in a matter of weeks at a price point of $7 to $35, with the Linux sunxi community building a fully free stack for them in rapid order.

Why has it taken so long, and additionally cost so much to produce a single board? I feel like a project like this needs to just partner with a Chinese business like Xunlong and specify what they want & with what chipset, like how the OrangePi Plus 2E was built.

Likely the Xunlong boards are made in quantities that are 100x that of Neo900, and are easier to offload and thus have better ROI.

If there is demand Xunlong will build a board (or if they think there is demand), the only sunk costs they seem to have are the minimal inventory they have on hand.

Board design is all in house, they're the original designer of quite a few non-Raspi SBCs on the market today, that being said they have just a handful of employees.

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