The Story of Nokia MeeGo 125
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Symbian was even worse. They had different branches of code for each phone and they were each run by middle managers who were always at loggerheads with each other and refused to merge code from their competing teams. Not to mention they always tried to scuttle any move away from Symbian.
subcontracting (Score:5, Interesting)
"...bad code written in India..."
"...communication problems..."
I'm shocked. How upper management types keep justifying this model with "lower costs" is completely beyond me.
Not really (Score:2, Interesting)
Nokia builds great hardware, great cameras, has assets for mapping and navigation and they had 3000 people working on Software. With Android and some hard furious work they could have done some amazing things, no doubt.
Slight re-evaluation of Elop (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd always assumed Meego had been canned because Elop is a Microsoft Trojan Horse who just wanted to get back into bed with Microsoft and kill anything new, open-source and great. But reading this story of events, I'm quite dismayed to read just how unguided and wasteful the development process apparently was. Even though the final end product (the N9) was terrific, it looks like they only got it properly together when they were told that the project would be canned after the release of the N9. It really does look like a lack of overriding vision and lack of staff working towards a common goal which resulted in the Meego project swimming in circles while the tide took them out.
Going with Microsoft was obviously a bad choice, though. What he needed to do was scrap Symbian, say that Meego would be scrapped after the N9. Pretend to sign a deal with Microsoft. Wait for the greatness that was the N9. Sell the N9. Profit. Develop the N9 to get it to work on LTE., upgrade the processor, memory etc & Profit more...
Re:Slight re-evaluation of Elop (Score:4, Interesting)
"too many cooks spoil the broth"
once it was announced dead platform, the shit cooks went away. up until then it was billed as "the next thing" withing nokia and finnish scene - ironically it was at that state since announcement in maemo form, it was always 2-3 years from being on every nokia phone, however symbian and s40 were always going to run on inferior hw so that's why it was for the whole time in that "future" bracket.