Jan 4th, The Day Stephen Elop Realized MeeGo Was Not Enough

June 2nd, 2011 • • 15 comments

Bloomberg has a nice lengthy article on Nokia CEO Stephen Elop’s Nokia Adventure that I suggest you go read right right now. One part I’d like to point out is when Nokia decided to put MeeGo in the backseat in favor of Windows Phone. It was when they realized MeeGo would not be able to keep Nokia in the game.

Elop meego

You can find this section on the 5th and 6th page of Bloomberg’s article.

On Jan. 3, Chief Development Officer Kai Oistämö walked over to his boss’s tiny cubicle to share his concerns about the MeeGo software that was supposed to be Nokia’s answer to Apple and Android. The pair decided to quietly interview two dozen influential employees about MeeGo, from executives to rank-and-file engineers.

Before the first interview, Elop drew out what he knew about the plans for MeeGo on a whiteboard, with a different color marker for the products being developed, their target date for introduction, and the current levels of bugs in each product. Soon the whiteboard was filled with color, and the news was not good: At its current pace, Nokia was on track to introduce only three MeeGo-driven models before 2014—far too slow to keep the company in the game. Elop tried to call Oistämö, but his phone battery was dead. “He must have been trying an Android phone that day,” says Elop. When they finally spoke late on Jan. 4, “It was truly an oh-s–t moment—and really, really painful to realize where we were,” says Oistämö. Months later, Oistämö still struggles to hold back tears. “MeeGo had been the collective hope of the company,” he says, “and we’d come to the conclusion that the emperor had no clothes. It’s not a nice thing.”

I know there are a lot of MeeGo fans on this blog, but I’m happy with Elop’s decision. I’ve been to the two previous MeeGo conferences and I haven’t seen any hints that it can compete with Android or iOS for the general consumers. I haven’t spent a lot of time with the current Windows Phones in the market, but videos of the upcoming Mango update give me an impression Nokia has a better chance with this platform instead of MeeGo. What’s your stance on this?

via Engadget

  • w4rr10r

    Nokia is dead; it’s obviously a sinking ship as Microsoft is. They’ve failed bringing another iOS.

    MeeGo’s not dead. It’s libre software supported by Intel and apparently other vendors such as LG. Even if it fails in the mass consumer (~ dumb lame users), it will make other upstream project (such as Qt, KDE, Linux etc.) stronger.

    • DKX-001

      they need not to create another iOS or Android. they should create their own…they should surpass others. or to impress customers.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1464613930 Enzro Greenidge

    thanks for the report. however, from a person that has used the N900, i know that maemo/meego can compete. The problem is that a half open system is not inviting to open source developers. Nokia wanted the community without the communities say.

  • davo

    Maemo Harmattan certainly has everything that MeeGo Open Source has not yet implemented

  • http://twitter.com/aegisdesign Shaun Murray

    The problem there is that what you’ve seen at MeeGo conferences is the base MeeGo OS with no customisation or applications. You’ll just get a ‘reference platform’ for developers.

    Nokia’s implementation is not really MeeGo. It’s a hybrid of what was going to be Maemo 6 ‘Harmattan’ and MeeGo. So, it was essentially an evolution of Maemo 5 on the N900 but with Qt rewrites instead of the Gtk stuff and package handling from MeeGo instead of the Maemo style repositories.

    Quite possibly they should have stuck with Maemo 6 instead of trying to shoehorn in Moblin and switch the toolkit.

    • http://nwerneck.sdf.org dividebyzero

      I agree there is a lot of confusion about whether Harmattan is MeeGo or not MeeGo, but I disagree with you about the toolkit change. Qt rocks big time, and the change is very welcome!

  • http://twitter.com/filiprino Filiprino

    The fact is that Nokia didn’t put enough interest on MeeGo. For no reason they where too much on Symbian instead of looking into the future.
    Tablets with MeeGo will arrive (ASUS has announced one on computex). Next step are smartphones, but that seems to need some time.

    • http://nwerneck.sdf.org dividebyzero

      What Nokia really needs is to create the next big thing. When Apple came up with the iPhone, that was it. The technology wasn’t really new, but they got ahead of everybody. Having easily downloadable applications too, not new, but they did it right. Like Elop said, they can  be just the 202nd tablet in the market. Or the 2nd PadPhone for that matter!

      Cameraphones is something Nokia did great. May not have invented, but “laded the way” (to quote Apple!). And that is still one of their strengths, along with stuff like HDMI output and USB on-th-go etc (to quote N8′s main qualities).

      Maybe the delays in Symbian and Maemo relate to actual problems in the technology, it’s hard to say how much is the company’s fault. Picking up WP7 is good because it throws the responsibility outside Nokia, and they can focus on the hardware.

  • El Marko

    Bloomberg’s article appears to confirm there’s “Nokia Time” and there’s the time the rest of the world operates in. Nokia’s being beaten up by its plodding pace.

    . . . anyone seen the long-overdue Symbian^3 PR2.0 “Anna” update yet? No, I’m not talking about YouTube videos; I mean, has your N8 been updated? No. And it won’t be, for a long, long time.

  • Salomons

    LOL yes lol again. If you don’t know that Microsoft hates everything about Meego being the next generation step for Nokia phone then you are some kind of naive or…patriot, enough said

  • http://texrat.net Randall Arnold

    I have to call BS on the Elop/Oistamo story.  Just doesn’t smell right.  Anyway, what Kai was crying about was Nokia’s failure to deliver HARDWARE, not MeeGo itself.  Nokia has long had a bad habit of pitting resources against each other as well as starving critical projects.  Just a bit difficult to beat more agile companies that way.

  • H__zouzou

    nokia should have gone for android!! nokia will always be the best hardware out there…. but with windows phone, definently not the best software! worse software is more likely (after symbian).

  • 1snapmusic

    It seems to me that Nokia had become top heavy and was suffering from horrible mismanagement as a result. I was an IT consultant for ~20 years and had seen this happen in many companies. These are not pleasant environments to work in.

    Had Nokia not been so badly mismanaged we’d be using a MeeGo phone from them today!

  • 1craigrobertson

    Whose job is it to market Windows Phone 7?

    I cannot remember the last advertisement I saw for Windows Phone 7.

    Seems to me that to be successful, you have to get the product visibility and name recognition up.

    How about teaming up with NOK and/or a carrier, and the USO or similar organization to give away WP7 phones to service members?

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