Nokia Outsources Symbian OS Work 179
angry tapir writes "Nokia will outsource its Symbian software activities to Accenture, transferring 3,000 employees to the company in the process, as it moves its focus to making phones running on Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. The Finnish phone manufacturer will also close some of its research and development sites and eliminate a further 4,000 jobs by the end of next year. Last week Nokia announced the signing of a definitive agreement regarding their global mobile ecosystem partnership."
We're sorry (Score:5, Insightful)
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We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.
Sybase and Citrix are the only ones that spring to mind. I'd say this one is going to play out more like Sendo, though.
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Man, I loved my Sendo X. Lovely phone.
Unusable broken radio, of course, and the delay of getting the OS updates through the carrier meant Microsoft had bankrupted them before they fixed it, but still...
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Sybase got screwed hard on that deal. Sure they survived but they lost huge future markets for their server.
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Sybase lost a lot of business when they were duped by Microsoft to sharing the code after they didn't get any revenue sharing from Microsoft and Microsoft later undercut them for the EXACT SAME PRODUCT. They were actually going down the crapper until recently when they expanded their business into the mobile space.
Citrix is one of the few that survived because they held their ground and held true to their products and customers. Microsoft was never able to make inroads into Citrix's business because they bu
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Apple [wikipedia.org] comes to mind, although that deal ended pretty quickly, since it was meant as a psychological statement, not as a real business agreement.
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We're sorry Nokia, we don't know of anyone surviving Microsoft deals.
You mean like Ford and Toyota? Microsoft and Toyota form new telematics company [consumerreports.org]
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When a company starts shedding employees (Our Most Valuable Resource (TM)) like a Labrador Retriever sheds hair, it's pretty well the start of the end.
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So having worked for Nokia previously (actually Symbian and then we got bought) I think the basic problem that they are trying to resolve is the sheer amount of dead weight the have in the organisaiton. There is a reason they have the most expensive and least productive R&D operation on the planet and that is because they get so little out of each employee. Most employees are jobsworths simply doing the minimum they can get away with without being fired.
Think about it, all those employees, and they coul
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Nokia may really not survive this caliber of a corporate psychopath [boingboing.net]
But it'll be good for him! As always.
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I think Nokia is Finnished.
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The "they" you speak of does not include the majority of employees and their families that are having their lives changed for the worse. That's the real tragedy and the people we are saying "we're sorry" to. Those with golden parachutes who helped to make it all happen will, of course benefit from all of this and will be celebrated as brilliant business men by their peers.
It's just a huge shame that in order for those few to benefit, so many others have to suffer. It must be quite a burden on those few t
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The flip side of that is that it's been sadly obvious for a long time that Symbian was going to be the next casualty in the marketplace. At some point people are contributing to these life issues themselves by choosing to place their hopes on the future of Symbian. Not a good bet.
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Mostly, you are referring to Finland, or at least a huge chunk of the Finnish economy.
Re:We're sorry (Score:5, Interesting)
I still cannot understand the deal. What Nokia gains?
The benefit is clear for Microsoft: they get exclusivity with one of the biggest phone makers of the world.
But... what is the real benefit for Nokia?
The CEO argues that they didn't want to be a "me too" Android developer. But, guess what? Microsoft doesn't allow companies to customize their user interface. That means that Nokia's Win7 phones will be exactly the same as HTC's and Motorola's Win7 phones. With Android, at least, Nokia could customize it.
Or perhaps I missed the part where Microsoft would also offer exclusivity to Nokia?
Though damn good hardware, Nokia had the by far most expensive and least successful software R&D. They get to rid themselves an extremely costly and at the same time dying (even if big, the trend was extremely negative) platform and ecosystem.
As reported Google did try hard to win this deal too, all up to the end, the reasons Nokia have given for their choice was that they saw greater opportunity to differentiate with the Microsoft partnership, and saw a greater value and role for Nokia than in the Android ecosystem. Only time will tell what that means, nobody here knows. But we do know it has been said that allthough not exclusivity, Nokia will get very special privileges on customizing Phone7, contributing their own services to be included in the platform, and influence on future development of the OS.
Some people make a big deal of the billion dollar figure. That is not very insightful, it is not really a significant figure for any of these companies in this context. Microsoft spent half of that on their Phone7 launch campaign for crying. This is decided by how they see the long term value, and though we do have a lot of armchair analyst here at Slashdots with deep insights and modelling of that, I would say it's impossible to say if this is a smart move by Nokia or not before we see the results.
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Thank-you... Somebody actually has some business understanding!
Look at the fine details of the deal. Nokia gets to customize the OS. It's THEIR'S! Nobody got such a sweet deal with Window Phones. Microsoft in this deal forced vendors to manufacture to certain specs, Nokia has a "got out of jail card".
What people also fail to realize is that Nokia software SUCKS! Not just a little bit, but a whole lot! They had oodles of good software and what did they do with it? Nothing, nada, zip! Of course many argue it
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not so, Nokia software was very, very good indeed. But you're obviously comparing everything to a single bar when you need to differentiate between what an OS that requires a very fast CPU and lots of RAM and an OS that requires a slow CPU and tiny amount of RAM can do.
So Nokia had good software, they also had good hardware. The trouble is that they became to big and reliant on their old ways - the incredibly successful Symbian software and phones and simply failed to transition to the newer opportunities -
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I think its plain that if Nokia gets to customise the OS for their needs (either by themselves or by setting requirements to Microsoft devs) then the other manufacturers will be at a huge competitive disadvantage. I think they'll look at their current sales figures for WP7 and just get out of it. Microsoft has said that they will share the internal details with Nokia so they can develop better features than they'd otherwise be allowed to have.
Nokia undoubtedly had some very good coders - they make Symbian b
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From Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]
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I still cannot understand the deal. What Nokia gains?
First, they gain a billion dollars. Then they get to concentrate on what they're good at (hardware development) and outsource the software to a company with a proven track record of developing software that people buy. Remember that Nokia has never been very strong on the software side[1]. They bought Symbian and Qt, they didn't create either in house, and both projects ended up with a mess due to poor management.
[1] Actually, that's not quite fair. They're very good on the embedded software side, whe
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with a proven track record of developing software that people buy
How many people do you know with a WinCE (or whatever their last name was) phone? If they wanted proven track record, they would have gone with Android, which is the only option with a significant market share atm (I doubt Apple's going to licence them iOS). Windows mobile platform is essentially non-existent at the moment.
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Not just WinCE but the prior Windows Phone systems were just dire.
WP7 is years late and several dollars short at imitating Apple.
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But not out of choice. The only times when it wasn't difficult to buy a PC without it preinstalled were when it was impossible.
Also, their record on low power devices.like phones & PDAs is patchy to say the least.
I'm not sure what problem they're trying to fix, but made-up-word-with-a-greater-than-sign-on-top aren't the solution.
If you have one doubt do the needful and revert.
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Nokia gains nothing. But Nokia started to lose a few years ago when they simply refused to realize how the iPhone was going to change everything. They should in fact have been the one developing the iPhone- they have been distributing phones capable of running apps since .. I dunno, 2004-2005? Somewhere in the S60-series. Of course, they were too inept to realize how apps must be distributed: Easily installable.
It is not accidental that Nokia created something great but failed to capitalize upon what they c
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"The CEO argues that they didn't want to be a "me too" Android developer."
So the "EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!" mantra of Microsoft is a better choice? That is a load of BS.
The CEO wants Microsoft because of the large amount of money he will be getting out of making sure the deal happens. Anything else he claims is simply hogwash.
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Nokia can't sell phones in the United States anymore because they don't have a mobile OS that anyone wants. Selling their soul to Ballmer gets them back into the US market. They'll be in the major carriers' stores, and sell phones because of it. Not that hard to fathom...
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iPhone will wither way on its own. The iPhone has lost its shiny-newness already. When the white phones came out, I saw no lines outside of the Apple store where I live. Many iPhone users I know have given up their iPhone in favor of android.... admittedly, some because of AT&T and their tactics, but they didn't move to Verizon so they could keep using iPhone either. The iPhone "surge" is over. People know what it is, what it can do, and more importantly, what it can't or "won't be allowed" to do.
N
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I've seen things go the other way for the iPhone.
My tech friends who can't do what they did before on their android phones jailbroke. My nontech friends just don't care. Plus they have the excuse of wasting more time with Angry Birds.
The reality is, they're doing rather well for themselves. [daringfireball.net]
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Windows Phone is never going to eclipse iOS in the mobile space.
Sorry to have to put on my Captain Obvious cape.
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I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Windows Phone is never going to eclipse iOS in the mobile space.
Sorry to have to put on my Captain Obvious cape.
My family, that is wife and two sons all have iPhones while I have the HTC Desire HD which suits me file since it is just like working on a Linux system. Copying and setting up Music is a snap since I just mount the phone as a USB device and copy files from my PC which is Linux however MS Windows or a Mac would work just as easily as well. As for the iPhone you really need the iTunes program which does not run under Linux (surprise, surprise.) to transfer and maintain files (unless you unlock it) and it ann
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No doubt they'll spin that as having exclusivity.
"We're not surrounded, we're operating on interior lines."
--
GW Custer.
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I think it's all in how you play your cards. I know of one company that came out extremely well by innovating on MS platforms. It's all in the value you provide. Namely Beckhoff Automation [beckhoffautomation.com]. I have nothing to do with them, just a happy user. It's perhaps an unknown name in the software development world, but they are nevertheless top-notch innovators in the automation business. Their main claim to fame is in deciding about 2 decades ago that industrial controllers and PLCs must be built on the PC platform to
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Um, Beckhoff is a gold microsoft partner, and they are completely dependent on Microsoft technology: with leverage comes dependence and even vulnerability.
Again, it's all in how you play your cards. Beckhoff has bet big time on the PC platform and the Microsoft OS technology as a key component to that, and they came out on the top. Nokia is making pretty much an identical bet. If they come out on the bottom, I'd tend to think it's their own doing. Of course Elop at the helm makes things somewhat shaky: Beck
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Um, Beckhoff is a gold microsoft partner,
Looking at this company and then looking at Nokia and saying they're relationships map 1:1 vis a vis Microsoft because they're both "partners" is laughable.
tl;dr
"gold microsoft partner" = pure marketing spiel.
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Sigh. IPCs themselves are a big part of Beckhoff's business, and with few and between exceptions every single one they sell has a copy of Windows installed on it. MS could terminate OEM licensing agreements if they wanted to cut ties.
Pretty much their entire PLC business hinges on TwinCAT, and that's 100% dependent on Windows. If MS wanted to cut the ties or somehow curtail their access to the Windows platform, Beckhoff would be bankrupt in short order. Of course Beckhoff is no Nokia size wise -- with a USD
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Until MS wants into that market. There is no reason to use windows for such a thing. Sure standard PC hardware was a good idea, and maybe fi they started out in the 3.1 days it was a good idea. Today that is just foolishness.
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It's not foolishness. Everybody who does it otherwise (using linux, other realtime OSes, custom hardware) shows over and over that Beckhoff did the right thing. They are leveraging the virtually infinite OS R&D budget of Microsoft, and similarly huge R&D budgets of PC platform designers (CPU and chipset makers).
If you buy almost any other PLC platform, you're constrained by the hardware offered by the vendor. It used to be 8051 derivatives, and some still are offered like that, others went the DSP o
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The deal is that for Beckhoff, like for many other PC vendors, Windows is a way to sell their hardware (IPCs, I/O, drives, etc). I don't see MS taking over PC manufacturers, yet that's precisely what you imply here. It'd make just as much sense for MS to take over Beckhoff.
Now it's true that Beckhoff does sell their TwinCAT software, but if you get it with their IPC you get it for a 90% discount over a license for a "random" PC that you happen to have. So I don't think that for Beckhoff their own software s
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and I can point you at many Chinese, Taiwanese and Japanese manufacturers that have built businesses around SoCs running Linux. I was just explaining media streaming boxes to my friend yesterday - I think they *all* run linux, even my TV runs Linux (as it has a big GPL notice in the menu).
So 1 manufacturer standardised on Windows PCs, they could so easily have gone with mass-produced ARM or MiPS based solutions and produced the same quality of product, but without any per-item licencing fees to worry about.
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Nobody cares that a streaming box or a Sony TV in my living room runs linux. It's a closed-box system. The end users and OEMs don't touch it and don't develop for it. At most they have access to a factory setup menu to tweak things. With PLCs, either your end user or the OEM needs to develop on your platform. And, due to legacy requirements, you need to support way more hardware than just a network card. There are various bus interface cards (for sercos II, profibus, canopen, etc), various HMI elements on t
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you're wrong there - they may be closed-box systems for the end user, but they are supplied to the 3rd party with the OS and toolchain ready to be customised.
These base manufacturers provide the base platform which is taken by these companies (eg Western Digital, Raidsonic, Asus, Syabas etc) who add their own interfaces and customisations to differentiate themselves in the market. Once you look under the hood of these things, you find they all have the same video processor and chipset. (well, there's about
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Microsoft has had versions of Windows running on ARM now for 15 years
Yeah, I know! I love running Windows on my phone. I was just about to edit some photos with Photoshop on my HTC HD2 running Windows Mobi... wait
Fear of commoditization ruined Nokia (Score:3)
Really sad to see that Nokia didn't have the confidence in their hardware design and manufacture skill to give Android a chance. They never were in a position to build a proper platform for the current generation of smartphones, so instead they sold their soul to MicroSoft for scraps.
Seriously, if you dismiss the future due to low margin of commodity platforms you better have something amazing to sell, like Apple does.
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a lot of the problem is that a large number of the work force had nothing good to do, symbian surviving or not, so if you looked at the past 3 years and then what software product the huge machine produced, you'd be transferring the so called workforce to accenture too.
like, they've been holding yearly coop(layoff) talks for a decade. but still churning profit.
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Really sad to see that Nokia didn't have the confidence in their hardware design and manufacture skill to give Android a chance.
You know, lack of confidence can be a realistic assesment.
Nokia's has been notorious for their lack of precision in gap dimensions (i'm not sure if that is the correct term as english is not my first language, and I'm not a mechanical engineer). As a result, stuff can get in front of your display and ambient humidity can get to the electronics.
It's been this way for ages.
That was maybe acceptable 10 years ago. But today, as you can buy superbly assembled phones from chinese and korean manufacturers,
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If you make your phone easy to disassemble for repair you have gap problems. if you seal the damn thing up tight so it's throwaway, you can do what apple, motorola and HTC are doing now. NONE of them are making a proper sealed phone that should be able to handle use in the rain.
And yes I love my otterbox case on my phone.. I can use my phone in the rain without tripping moisture sensors.
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If you make your phone easy to disassemble for repair you have gap problems.
I am no phone designer, but it seems we could use the tech many other industries use to solve this. That tech is of course the rubber gasket and screws.
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Perhaps that will change. I guess we don't know all the details of the deal.
Having said that, if Nokia fiddle around with it they'll probably make it worse.
An idea (Score:2)
What if they would for once slightly innovate and put one or two Kinects in a smartphone? Could this save Nokia of a sure oblivion?
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Don't know about kinects, but I say 'kin 'ell pretty much every time I pick up my E71.
The fine print: (Score:5, Insightful)
Nokia outsources the elimination of 3000 jobs and the killing of Symbian.
Re:The fine print: (Score:5, Interesting)
Tadah!!! You nailed it.
I have seen this scenario play out more than once. The first time, I got a job with this agency who put me to work at Texas Instruments. Then I found out what happened and that I was "a scab." They promised T.I. that they could do the same job for less money using their same people. T.I. bought it, things did not go well for T.I. or the company or the people whose lives they screwed over. In time, I couldn't stomach it and simply left. It really disgusted me that much and disgusts me every time I see it happen.
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Accenture? Could they have chosen anyone worse?
They're messing up the dumb phones now? (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought they still dominated this sector?
How can the shareholders think this is profitable? While is good for the short term without Symbian continuing they will potentially faid to being irrelevant killing the share price.
Re:They're messing up the dumb phones now? (Score:5, Funny)
they had unprotected relations with ms and contracted a ceo
Afraid for Qt (Score:3)
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Qt needs to be forked asap.
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Indeed. Many C++ Windows devs have managed to avoid MFC by using Qt. Without Qt, cross-platform Windows apps are nearly impossible.
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There are many cross-platform widget toolkits out there - wxWidgets is another well-known one. Qt is much better than all of them, and it'd be a pity to lose it, but it won't kill cross-platform development.
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I have actually tried extremely simple progr
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And you also do not address the caching issue in the JIT compiler, because that's the real problem with anything approaching realtime in Java.
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Re:Afraid for Qt (Score:5, Informative)
The GP's correct. There's a poison pill [nokia.com] clause from Nokia's purchase of Trolltech. Basically it says that if Qt ever stops getting released as open source, the KDE Free Qt Foundation gets to release the last version of Qt under the BSD license. I don't think we need to be worried about Qt if such a contingency exists.
Re:Afraid for Qt (Score:4, Interesting)
I disagree. The fear for Qt isn't if Nokia will release it under a closed source license. Even without the Self Destruct, from what we have seen, I doubt Nokia wants to develop software closed or open.
The problem mainly lies in keeping the project under the Nokia banner and slowly downsizing the number of developers, making it not so easy for outside/new developers to participate etc... Think OpenOffice style before the fork. OpenOffice was a pretty difficult project to work on and was rather stagnant, initiatives like Go-OO tried to solve that without forking and succeeded a little, but no one wanted to fork because the project was on the line between people wanting to fork and people just trying to tough it out. The Oracle deal was good in a way as it forced a proper fork and a real opening up of the project.
There are currently not many outside developers working on Qt, if the number of developers in Nokia working on Qt were halved (or quartered (sp?) ) projects like Kde will most definitely feel it. And you might not know about the downsizing for quite a while (how many Nokia employees are working now on Qt? Really hard to say)
Re:projects like Kde will most definitely feel it (Score:2)
Hmm, some good comments by AC's among the trolls.
Someone help me connect some dots.
If "projects like Kde will most definitely feel it", is that at all related to why Ubuntu wanted a third UI being thrashed out, even if this iteration isn't so good? Does anyone think this will tip the scales and lead to a KDE decline across the regular linux distros?
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Well, for what reason would they downsize Qt development? There are quite a lot important commercial customers left for Qt (e.g. Autodesk using Qt in 2 of it's products, a large one ported over only recently) and there's a commercial user community as well, so I fail to see how shutting down Qt development would make any sense economically. My current assumption is that Qt development is actually profitable for Nokia.
Thus, even if Nokia would want to rid itself of the Qt developers they wouldn't shut them d
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you don't understand how a corporate psycopath can take a profitable part of a business, decide that it is 'not key' or that it doesn't provide enough profits and that the money spent keeping it running could be better invested elsewhere ("maximising profitability", IIRC, a business bullshit approach to scrapping useful stuff in favour of a bigger personal bonus).
So Elop could easily stop Qt development group entirely, regardless of how good, profitable, or socially useful it is. I would hope they'd sell it
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Well, for what reason would they downsize Qt development? There are quite a lot important commercial customers left for Qt (e.g. Autodesk using Qt in 2 of it's products, a large one ported over only recently) and there's a commercial user community as well, so I fail to see how shutting down Qt development would make any sense economically. My current assumption is that Qt development is actually profitable for Nokia.
I can't find the link to that post, but I do recall reading a statement from one of Qt devs, shortly after the original Nokia announcement, that they were actually in the red as far as commercial Qt licenses go by the time they were acquired by Nokia, and that it is unlikely that situation had improved much.
The problem with frameworks is that they're not cheap to develop, but profits with this licensing model depend directly on the number of paying users - and there aren't all that many paying users, unfort
Nokia releases Symbian code, 3 or 4 overjoyed (Score:2)
Nokia, through Accenture, has made the code for the Symbian smartphone OS a "community project", putting several aging geeks in raptures of delight [newstechnica.com].
"The Symbian OS will delight those of us who fondly remember EPOC on the Psion NetBook," said Larry Berkin, Symbian's head of global alliances. "God, that was an OS. Best PDA ever. Finest of British engineering. Sixteen whole kilobytes! You could run a truck over them. I bet an open source Symbian OS will let you run a truck over your phone."
The Foundation hopes
Ass-Enter (Score:2)
Ass-Enter a.k.a. Andersen Consulting.
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Transferring employees (Score:3)
"Hi Mike, yeah.. remeber that TPS report? Yeah.. that one I asked you to yeah.. fill out before the end of April? Yeah, we won't be needing that here anymore, yeah... so if you would just put all your stuff in this box and yeah... head over to Accenture that would be great."
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I work for Accenture, yes.
The company is large and far reaching. That said with any statistical group of people you will have many different skill sets. I assure you that there are very highly qualified and knowledgeable people here. There are also different cultures and the ability to develop new cultures. Each operating group is for the most part independently managed and could fail, yes. However with any business there are failures and successes. From my experience by and large most projects are successe
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That model you describe explains why Microsoft & Accenture's work on the London Stock Exchange resulted in its BILLION dollar collapse over two years ago.
Trasnslation: Nokia is now ... (Score:2)
a wholly controlled subsidiary of Microsoft.
It's board and officers are now redundant rubber stamps.
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I agree that things look dim, but in addition to Intel — LG maybe able to throw its hat into the Meego ring [meegoexperts.com].
My N900 is great and I'd hate to move off that platform.
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My N900 is great and I'd hate to move off that platform.
Wait, Meego was a "platform"? You mean there was more than just the N900? :-)
But seriously, try Android or iOS, both are great, anything else is utter crap in 2011.
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I personally enjoy my Maemo thoroughly and I see both Android and iOS as inferior. Sooner or later I will have to get a newer phone but that won't be for a long time still, and it'll likely be Android because I really dislike anything Apple and I don't think Win7 Phone will ever truly catch on.
I'm almost with you, but I don't want to go Android either. The N900, with all its flaws (and yes, there are several) is still a wonderful phone. I mean, what other phone allows you to ssh to your Linux desktop, with X forwarding, and run applications from your desktop on your phone? Or the general "do whatever you wish with it"-attitude, no jailbreaking, no custom firmwares, root access a mere package away? Programming in virtually any language you desire? As of yet, it's unique.
And that's the problem, rea
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Had they spend the past 18 months further developing the system they would judging by the N900 (from Q4-2009) have had a winner.
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.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent. One where you wouldn't need to wonder about "what else" the app you were using was doing. One where you could freely decide for yourself which OS to run. One where you were free to recompile any app for performance or security reasons. One that gave anybody the freedom to code an app in any language they saw fit.
The Free Software Foundation (NASDAQ: RMS) has announced the Free Software alternative to the evil, DRM-infested, locked-down, defective-by-design iPhone: the GNUPhone [newstechnica.com].
The key technical innovation of the GNUPhone is that it is completely operated from the command line. "What could be more intuitive than a bash prompt?" said seventeen-year-old Debian developer Hiram Nerdboy. "The ultimate one-dimensional desktop! Just type dial voice +1-555-1212 --ntwk verizon --prot cdma2000 --ssh-version 2 -a -l -q -9 -b
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.. for a truly free and open smartphone. One where no personal data was collected and sent to the maker or third party without explicit consent.
So what's wrong with running CyanogenMod Android without any of the Google apps if that's your definition of a smart phone? Why would Nokia's phone (be it based on Symbian or Meego) be any less likely to engage in the kinds of other things smart phones do?
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Wasn't that the mobile phone company that used to develop great cell phone operating systems before it was bought by Microsoft? Are they still around?
Maybe the issue is that phone companies should not try to develop operating systems and leave that to software companies with expertise in operating systems.
Do not know how great Symbian was (some people here disagrees with you), but what I know from the news was that Nokia did not end in a great position using this strategy...
Smug wanker much? (Score:3)
Well aren't you the business guru! Because that's pretty much how it happened. Symbian was developed by a separate organization of which Nokia were just one partner. And it was based on EPOC, a very fine OS developed by Psion for their PDAs. You won't have heard of them, but they were a bloody good software company in their day.
The problem wasn't th
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Yep. Nokia sat on what was a cutting-edge mobile OS at the time of its introduction, and just murdered it through neglect. Remember, EPOC ran a full web browser on a mobile device in 2000. Opera for EOPC did everything my desktop browser did within 16mb of RAM and multitasked properly besides. Symbian did multitasking from the beginning, something that iOS took years to get together. All of those developers, and that huge head start, and they couldn't clean up the OS after nearly a decade? Seriously? A
Re:Nokia? (Score:5, Insightful)
It has a good kernel and a very comprehensive API and Qt made the "bitch to program" thing considerably less of a problem but it was still a bitch to progam for the people working on the middleware and non-Qt user code. and consumer electronics companies tend not to see why they need to make their engineers more productive and how it requires that they produce different types of products (e.g. ones with enough RAM).
It was all the fault of Symbian Ltd for determinedly ignoring the programming problems years ago and of Nokia for being a bad customer and trying to push all the things that lead to the disaster and to both of them for ignoring the fact that higher performance hardware was coming and tha tpeople actualy would pay for it. Their entire focus was on trying to move down ro cheaper hardware and they dug themselves deeply into a hole before admitting the need for a 180 degree turn.
It's just a classic case of people "optimizing" something and of time making their optimisations first irrelevant and then a terrible burden.
Nokia could have fixed their problems at many points and didn't because the short term pain would have been high. Now it's much higher.
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It was all the fault of Symbian Ltd for determinedly ignoring the programming problems years ago
Years ago, they weren't problems. When phones had 4MB of RAM or less, they were useful features. Being able to save a few bytes in common data structures by increasing the programmer's workload was the correct thing to do, because it was the only way to squeeze complex programs into that small a space. When RAM was expensive, being able to get a similar user experience from a machine with 2MB of RAM as your competitors got from a machine with 8MB was a huge competitive advantage for hardware makers. It'
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That's like saying that its failure was inevitable because you couldn't be a working OS in the past and a powerful one in the present. I agree that their choices were not wrong for everything but they did not prepare for a different future - where's the equivalent for Symbian of Android's Dalvik or Windows mobile's Silverlight? I'm not really so familiar with iOS but at least Objective-C is "all virtual" afaik and there is quite a powerful and mature framework for desktop-sized applications..
The only clea
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Last few years? My Windows Mobile phone from 2003 has got 64 megabytes of RAM (actually 128, but half of it is used by the operating system and as a RAM drive)
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What I thought was best anecdote was when I was working on a Nokia's engineers computer. He was showing me his N97 and his simple picture slideshow app. He showed it off to some other engineers and they convinced him to go to mangement to see about using it as the default picture viewer. They said no because it was to flashy and they didn't want to support two picture managers for their high end line and cheap phone line. It never made it out of the building. With no app store and it being "Nokia IP" t
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REally? then why are there far more Symbian apps out there than the Android apps and iphone apps combined?
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they had to change their name due to legal issues like fraud accounting
Not entirely accurate. What is now Accenture was not part of the fraudulent practices that sank Arthur Anderson, but it shared the name. Distancing them selves from the people in blue suits that made a living out of stealing was a good thing. Why is it, btw, that that one business sector, the blue suits always steal, get caught and get away with it?
Death by a thousand prongs. (Score:3)
People seem to forget that nokia has a multi-pronged strategy going on.
Not just multi... Thousand pronged!
4 software platforms, 130 different phones. You can just SMELL the success!
Poor Apple on the other hand have, just 1 phone, 1 tablet. The losers!