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Comment by forgottenpaswrd | Hacker News Reader

Bye bye maemo ,meego and qt.

You could see that coming from a CEO that comes from MS, Nokia is desperate to not lose their phone position and MS desperate to losing the new desktop as all paradigms sift, losing OS control and people using Office(there was a time everybody used Wordperfect, people started using word as it was ready for windows before Wordperfect).

MS could design phones this way to compete with Apple, and Nokia could use the MS experience in OS.

I don't think is a good idea to partner with MS, companies that do tend to be screwed sooner or later, MS always winning.

Nokia reminds me more and more of SGI,I remember when MS windows NT was their salvation, I wish I'm wrong.

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I don't think is a good idea to partner with MS, companies that do tend to be screwed sooner or later, MS always winning.

You do realize that MS stopped "always winning" almost a decade ago?

SGI sank because they couldn't or wouldn't follow the market, which didn't need to pay $30,000 for hardware-accelerated 3D anymore once anyone could just drop in a 3D card into their commodity PCs. Lots of people (Mark Kilgard, for example) left SGI directly for Nvidia and other companies.

Hindsight is 20/20, but the one thing they could have done to save themselves would have been to ship an awesome 3D card for commodity PCs around the time 3dfx was influential (1997). They could have done hardware geometry acceleration two or three years before Nvidia did it with the first GeForce.

Carmack wrote this about SGI's NT workstation in 1999: http://www.team5150.com/~andrew/carmack/johnc_plan_1999.html...

"I placed an order for a loaded system ($11k) from their web site two months ago. It still hasn't arrived (bad impression), but SGI did bring a loaner system by for us to work with.

The system tower is better than standard pc fare, but I still think Apple's new G3 has the best designed computer case.

...

For single pass, top quality rendering (32 bit framebuffer, 32 bit depth buffer, 32 bit trilinear textures, high res screen), the SGI has a higher fill rate than any other card we have ever tested on a pc, but not by too wide of a margin.

If your application can take advantage of multitexture, a TNT or rage128 will deliver slightly greater fill performance. It is likely that the next speed bump of both chips will be just plain faster than the SGI on all fill modes." (emphasis mine)

Too little, too late.

Edit: It's sad, really. Although I haven't booted it in years, I still have a purple Indigo2 in my closet, so I know exactly what it is that died.

SGI could have done the smart thing in 1993 and targeted consumers/small business. In 1993 they released the indy which was a low end workstation. It had everything your imac has today, video camera, chat file sharing, etc. Indigo magic was pretty usable even for today. All the desktop was vector based (vector icons, etc).

In effect, they had everything OSX has today. But instead they focused on the high end niche market and got eaten from below.

Do I think this is a good move for nokia? History sides very much with NO! Which is a shame, nokia always made good hardware, but perhaps far too much of it with too little support.

RAM prices were the major reason that SGI couldn't make IRIX run decently on a machine targeted at consumers or small businesses.

In 1993, 32mb of RAM was damn expensive (I know because I had a 32mb 486/66 machine in 1993. The thing cost $10,000!) And there were delays in IRIX releases because the cheapest Indy configuration didn't have enough RAM.

In fact, RAM prices were also a major factor in Windows NT not going mainstream until about 2000. People just couldn't afford machines that would run modern operating systems well until around 1995, and it took a few more years to sort out the software issues (drivers, backward compatibility with existing software) surrounding the compromises people used until then.

I remember when windows 95 came out, all everyone talked about was affording more ram. Even the normal people. Still with a little bit of effort they could have made it usable in 8-12meg. I think.

Then they had a second chance at the market with the SGI O2. Can you imagine walking into a best buy and seeing that next to windows95? Built in webcam, video recording, etc. It ran fine on 32-64 megs ram which in '96 was the norm.

I should mention, that NeXT also had the technology to make things happen. And they made it happen, a few years later....

Sure, IRIX could run in 8-12 mb if you turn off X. But that means no graphics and no browser. I don't mean to be rude, but have you ever actually used an SGI?

In 1996, the O2 started at about $6000, and listed for more: http://cgi.amazing.com/internet/faq-6.0.html

As for the Indy, see http://www.siliconbunny.com/mirrors/www.tc.umn.edu/dols0011/...

"At the beginning of its life, the Indy came standard with 16MB of RAM. IRIX 5.1, the first OS for the Indy, was the Windows NT 4.0 of Unices, magically able to, performance-wise, transform an R4000PC Indy with 16MB of RAM (the standard configuration) into a 386SX with a weird blue box.

SGI realized this and quickly upped the box to 32MB, at considerable cost. (As you may recall, 16MB of parity 70ns RAM was hardly cheap in 1993-1995.) Subsequent IRIX releases made huge improvements in memory usage."

But not enough improvements in time to beat back the PC, of course.

"The Indy packs a decent amount of power into a very small (16"x14"x3"), simple, and elegant package. The chassis is just three parts: The "tray," which is sheet metal; the power supply; and the skin, which is a one-piece plastic cover with a thin sheet of metal covering the bottom of it to meet FCC compliance. The steel tray occupies the entire depth of the Indy, but not the entire width; four inches or so of the left side belong to the power supply, which occupies the entire depth of the tray and is a separate box. The whole unit is, although well-built, very economical and, dare I say, cheap. Speaking as someone who has had an opened-up broken Indy sitting on his basement floor, this is not a machine that screams "I cost $10,000." It's obvious SGI made a darn nice profit off these buggers."

A good chunk of my career was based on SGI's until 2002ish. I started on an iris professional if that helps. I still smile when I think of SGI's c++ compiler - it had real error messages unlike gcc up until a few years ago.

SGi hardware was priced high for two reasons 1) The market (government, industry) would bear the price and 2) small market size. Fix market size and the price can come down - leaving your indigo/indigo2/crimsons' for the govt/oil/entreatment industry.

With proper application of brain juice, switching to IDE drives, etc you could have shaved and optimized enough to get an indy or O2 usable for the mass market. Add back the memory intensive things as time goes on. Then add in some small business file/email/etc server (challenge s) and you're ready to take on the business market.

At work in roughly 1990 I had a maxed-out Sun 4/330 with 96MB of RAM - that was quite an expensive box for one user. Someone actually flew up from London to Edinburgh to install the RAM. :-)

Wow!

What happened to MeeGo? Can anyone tell me why Nokia couldn't ship MeeGo phones sooner?

It was in a seemingly-near-finished state a year ago. I thought it was really promising - I even ran the netbook release full-time on my netbook for a while. It was recognisably a linux distro, with a beautifully shiny UI and some convenient social features. Nokia had already shipped several linux devices such as the N900, yet suddenly they become unable to get something out of the door. Does anyone know what really held them up?

Yes, this is confirmation of the demise of meego and qt (in the phone space at least), which is sad and disappointing.

But Nokia is in a very different position to SGi and is doing this deal for different reasons. Nokia urgently needs a decent OS - Symbian is the main reason Nokia has such a weak market position in smartphones. You can debate the merits of WP7 but its better than Symbian.

The next issue is apps and ecosystem. This might not work out, but a Nokia-supported WP7 market place has some chance of reaching critical mass and fighting it out with RIM and HP for third position after itunes and android.

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