Sadden by the unavailability of the Sony CLIE and seeing how badly Palm squandered the potential of PDAs, I jumped on the occasion to buy the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. While on paper it should have been an amazing next-generation PDA, sadly it wasn't.
While Android uses Linux for its kernel, the rest of the software stack is completely different than the typical "GNU/Linux" desktop distributions. On the other hand, Maemo, the system of the N810, was incredibly close to a typical Debian distribution. So much so, in fact, that it created severe performance issues with the N810's limited hardware. Still, with all its potential, what happened to Linux-based development at Nokia?
In the past week there has been a pretty detailed "post-mortem" on the matter in an article from Taskumuro, placed in context with another article by The Register. While the inside information presented is only scratching the surface, especially considering the hundreds of developers that worked on the Linux-based initiative for over five years, the insight provided is amazing. The team that lead (and mostly outsourced) the N810 and N900 were largely understaffed, while the teams working on the next generation of Maemo, MeeGo, or whatever happened with Intel and Trolltech was over-staffed and mismanaged.
See, software developers can easily fall in the comfort of bureaucracy and long-term projects. A few others might want to foster that kind of environment to foster their own career and ambitions. Yet, a few can be doers, and would rather code a concrete product with a small team that know what they're doing rather than a large development team of bored developers that prefer meetings. The early developments of the OSSO team were early compared to the market, yet management still bet everything on Symbian. When it was almost too late, they threw money at it, and what you ended up with was moving requirements and internally competing projects (GTK or QT? Merging Maemo with Moblin? Two incompatible UI engines?).
And what happened with Nokia when they dropped MeeGo? Well, it was catastrophic, thousands of employees were fired, and so on. All you need is to trust Microsoft, and you're on the way to collapse.
Published on October 14, 2012 at 20:27 EDT
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