Hacker News Reader

Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

Having been heavily into Qt before Nokia, I see this very differently. Nokia had no idea what they were doing with Qt and the Mobilin/Maemo/Meego and now Tizen projects were a farce from start to finish. I'm sure as strategies they looked good in Power Point, but they clearly had no clue how to turn them/it into a credible consumer OS. They very much remind me of the bumbling, bullet point oriented aimlesness of the failed OS projects of the 90s - Taligent, Pink, Cairo, etc.

However, now Qt is in the hands of a company that does seem to understand the technology and has a realistic and executable business plan. That's a good thing.

View on HN

This

You get a credible consumer OS by SHIPPING.

Nokia lacked focus. Just note the Maemo/Meego rewrite. This is like MS saying they're merging Windows with ReactOS and delaying Windows 7 for 3 years

Thanks for your last sentence, i will quote you in the future when describing the Maemo/Meego debacle.

Nokia reminds me of the last days of Sun - so much mismanagement.

Have you ever used a meego device? The N9 is a solid phone, and at time of release Harmattan was far better than the Android offering. What makes you say "they had no clue how to turn it into a credible consumer OS"? That seems to be exactly what they did.

It took them far too long to do it, though. They didn't focus on it, and they had at least three public hardware revisions before they even tried to tack a phone onto the platform. In order to make it credible, they needed to put a lot more weight behind it.

They could have beaten Android by 3 years, but didn't because they were organisationally incapable of doing so.

I'm not disagreeing it took them too long and they did it in a ridiculous way, having already made the MS deal, but I don't understand how you can still say it's "not credible". Go use it.

Credibility is affected by more than the OS itself. I say this as an N900 owner.

I think they were doing fine until they got joined up with Intel. Drove the nice Maemo stuff to the ditch with the failed attempt to merge it with Moblin (-> Meego).

Intel and Microsoft... good partners - but only with each other :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com