How Not to Develop an OS (or, The Tragical and Comical Romance of Nokia and Symbian)

[Lemur]

Must-read geek material for the morning, courtesy of El Reg. A summary can't do it justice, but let it be known that Nokia blew its chance to be a player in the mobile OS field, and it did it through "incredible software mismanagement," according to insiders.

From the outside it seems there was no proper requirement spec for this new framework and the engineers were incompetent. Now by that I don't mean that they're incompetent engineers – far from it. They were incompetent at designing APIs for 3rd party developers (a very specialist engineering skill) and they were incompetent at designing UIs (which most engineers are, myself included). Unfortunately they were doing both, as evidenced by the code, and the comment of one Nokia designer at a Symbian Foundation meeting who was publicly cornered into revealing that the S^4 UI design patterns had been reverse engineered from the code.

[Furunculus]

it is a crying shame they couldn't get MeeGo to develop at a fast enough pace to demonstrate to management that it was a viable high-end platform for the future, but at least they are still intending to release MeeGo phones and invest seriously in its future.

it will just be a niche platform rather than a mainstream ecosystem like IOS and android.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well Nokia is in a bit of a state, to put not too fine a point on it. Now they've ditched basically everything they have to bet the whole farm on WP7 (and $1bn in cash from Redmond, but hush) shareholders are none too pleased and morale could probably be rather better too. Qt support business (which is actually making money) was even sold off to another Finnish company.

So I'm not so sure about Meego. It really looks as though management is shedding as much Nokia as possible. I just don't see where supporting a marginal business side line fits in when its original niche is being devoured by Android on one hand so it can be dumped on the relatively mature SOC market instead?