Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeswin | Hacker News Reader

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When he took over, Elop stated that it is 'a battle of ecosystems'. Having spent significant time with Nokia devices (including Maemo/Meego), I completely agree with him. A few years back Android itself was second choice for most mobile developers, and it was almost impossible for Nokia to get them to write apps. Also, Android picked up because of Google; if Samsung made Android it would have gone the Bada way.

WP8 is the first OS that gives Nokia a fighting chance against iOS/Android devices.

- I have only seen positive reviews of this OS.

- It is do or die for MS as well, expect massive ad spend this season.

- Shared kernel with Windows. Attractive to millions of Windows developers. (Windows isn't cool anymore; but there are way, way more developers on Windows than any other platform.)

- If resource constrained WP7 is anything to go by, WP8 will be smoother than any android phone in the market.

This is Elop's first, last and only chance. I'd rather give the man a fair chance.

Edit: formatting.

Maemo was indeed a tiny ecosystem, but I still believe they would've had a chance with the Qt strategy of providing a single development environment for their smartphones, Symbian, MeeGo, and even Android. Even just for the tiny Maemo 5 ecosystem we've served more than 120 million app downloads: http://maemo.org/downloads/Maemo5/ (this is just for the open source apps in Downloads. I have no idea of the numbers Ovi Store had)

Developing MeeGo took a lot of time and money, but the results were quite good. Same that management had lost faith by then. http://www.domusweb.it/en/design/portable-cathedrals

I think the burning platform analogy he provided was perfect. Nokia has now jumped from the platform and are floating in the ice cold North Sea water with a life jacket on, and the big question is whether the rescue boats will make it there in time.

There are way too few apps for WP7, which means they (either MS or Nokia) seriously need to step up their game in attracting developers. My brother loves his Lumia 900 except for the fact that there are no games for it. If he didn't have an iPad for gaming, he would have switched phones by now because of the tiny "ecosystem".

"If resource constrained WP7 is anything to go by, WP8 will be smoother than any android phone in the market."

What do you mean resource constrained? If anything, I think WP7 should be a leaner OS than WP8 which shares the core of the desktop Windows. Also so far I've only seen WP8 phones use Qualcomm's last-gen architecture, Krait, so of course it's supposed to be fast. As for smoothness, I think a lot of people are getting impressed by the animations. Like "look how cool the animation is...so nice", and they think that's what "smoothness" is. I remember when WP7 had terribly long transition animations, but WP7.5 cut down on those.

I think what jeswin meant was that WP7 phones are all pretty low spec, but still look buttery smooth.

> I think a lot of people are getting impressed by the animations... and they think that's what "smoothness" is.

That IS what smoothness is to the end user. A frozen screen for 0.5 seconds feels much less smooth than a well done 0.7 second animation.

> Windows isn't cool anymore;

windows has never been cool; ubiquitous is the word you're probably thinking of.

I haven't praised Windows for a long time but even I have to admit Windows for Workgroups made small office networks useful, that Windows on 386 was a nice (not OS/2 nice, but nice still) way to multitask MS-DOS programs and that Windows NT was a very decent desktop OS if you had the hardware it required. My first multi-processor computer ran Windows and, at the time, I wouldn't be able to install Linux on it. Solaris would be an option, but it was expensive, difficult to install and required careful selection of compatible hardware.

Of course, other OSs have surpassed it and Windows now looks like an evolutionary dead-end, crushed by layers of legacy compatibility and unable to evolve in significant new directions.

In the 90's, having a Windows gaming machine was cool.

Especially considering consoles didn't have multiplayer beyond the living room. Having access to B.NET, Kali, MPlayer, and other gaming networks of the day was very cool.

I still think my dual boot Windows/Linux machine is cool, but I seem to be in a minority around here. Haters gonna hate.

Between 95 and XP there was a period of "What's next?" similar to Apple in the 2007-2012 time frame and Google in the 2002-2007 time frame. What made them cool was the ability to change the way we work and play.

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