The Story of Nokia MeeGo

An anonymous reader writes "TaskuMuro, a Finnish tech news site, has anonymously interviewed various Nokia employees and pieced together an interesting timeline of the events which led to the abandonment of the Nokia MeeGo platform and to Nokia's current affiliation with Microsoft and Windows Phone. It appears the MeeGo project was rather disorganized from the get-go and fell victim to the company's internal tug-of-war, aimless management causing several UI redesigns and a none-too-wise reliance on Intel components which lacked some key features – namely, LTE support."

Re:Wow

[Darinbob]

They used to have a normal organizational structure. Phones division, network division, research division, etc. Then in early 2000's it decided to go with a "grid" style structure. Business phones vs personal phones vs whatever going horizontally, and CMDA vs GSM etc going vertically, things like that. The traditional organization style is what got Nokia from a smallish company to a major world power; the new grid style ended up with 50+ different phones doing essentially the same thing and a shrinking of the market share.

Re:Wow

[CockMonster]

The Symbian Ltd employees who were bought by Nokia could not believe how fucked up Nokia was at software. To be honest, I'm wasn't aware of any competition between teams but I wasn't in Finland.

Re:subcontracting

[CockMonster]

The 'bad code written in India' mainly came from the SoC manufacturers who'd write the baseports and drivers, in my time they were Broadcom and ST-Ericsson. (The Raspberry Pi uses the same graphics hardware as the N8). They were so flaky you couldn't believe. And on top of that Nokia management expected the entire stack to be developed in parallel. It was unworkable, they'd release new Symbian environments a few times a day and if it worked you got lucky, if it didn't you just wasted 4 hours downloading Gigs of rubbish only to have to delete it and see if anyone else had a working env. There were other Nokia-proper teams in India but the code they wrote shouldn't have brought down a board and if it did there was usually a workaround. However due to the *appalling communication* within Nokia it was nigh-on impossible to find out what the workaround was, or even who to ask. We'd have to do test runs everyday yet the phones in development crashed constantly and unpredictably so you couldn't tell if it was your code causing the problem or something else. Managers demanded answers and ignored the truth. To be fair the whole system was so fucked there really was nothing that could have been done. The subcontractors that I knew of were Sasken and another I can't think of right now.

Please stop repeating that nonsense.

[Tharald]

Seriously, I agree with all but the Android part. Back in 2010 Nokia was the biggest phone maker in the world, both in smart and dumbphones. They had the distribution network, the manufacturing capabilities and the brand name to keep that position. With Android they could have stayed in this position, possibly losing a bit of it or gained a bit more depending on their implementation and quality, but they would still have had a fighting chance to be the top dog.

Why the hell has Samsung gone from a bit player to a giant with Android while we should think that Nokia couldn't even keep their dominating position with the same system? It just doesn't compute. Of course Nokia should have seen the lights 5-6 years ago and either dedicated themselves to Meego/maemo or they should have jumped ship and gone with Android. But they would still have a be in a position if they had gone with Android instead of Windows close to 2 years ago. Of course they could still have fucked up, but saying they couldn't have competed with Android just makes no sense at all.

Re:The real problem: in-fighting

[hydrofix]

... in nerd mythology. Nobody outside Nokia has seen the real sales figures, though.

Right on. Here [blogs.com] is the estimate (by Tomi Ahonen, a blogger and ex-employee).