Why do people assume that MeeGo would have been a big success?

fineIllregister 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It wouldn't have been. I had an N9, it was amazing, but even before the "burning platform", it was clearly too late to the market share and app races. Consider that it didn't really have much of a head start over the Windows phone, which MS poured so much money into, and even they couldn't get their foot in the door.

	▲	toast0 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Nokia had active developer relations; at WhatsApp we were planning to build for the N9, but ended up not doing it, because the platform was cancelled before the retail release and the retail release was limited. I'm sure some of the gushing praise it got was because it was a last hurrah, but if Nokia had actually supported it, I'm sure it would have sold tens of millions of units. Nokia sold ~100 million smart phones in 2010 and ~ 77 million smart phones in 2011 [1], Apple sold ~ 72 million iPhones in 2011 [2]. While the trend was going the wrong way, tens of millions of mobile users would be hard to ignore. [1] https://www.nokia.com/system/files/files/request-nokia-in-20... (page 8) [2] https://gadgetadvisor.com/apple/the-iphone-decades-iphone-sa...
	▲	garaetjjte 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Windows Phone 7 was artificially limited crap, any amount of head start wouldn't help it.

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simonh 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because they cannot comprehend the factors that meant it took the Android team 3 to 5 years working flat out to even vaguely approximate technical parity with the iPhone OS of the time.

Even given that the Android team actually did understand what they needed to do to achieve that. Nobody else in the industry did. They thought that if you just ported an OS the job was done. That’s barely even the start.

	▲	wmf 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		IIRC the N9 did have approximate technical parity (not business parity) with the iPhone and it did take Nokia 3-4 years (2007-2011). As other commenters have said, they lost out due to timing and lack of platform strategy.

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mempko 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I think it would have been because it was a technically impressive OS with a beautiful UI created by at-the-time biggest smartphone maker in the world. iOS was first but that doesn't show it would win. Android now has marketshare and Android wasn't as good as MeeGo when it came out.

I believe if Nokia continued to invest, MeeGo would have even gotten better and they would have survived (note I worked at Nokia's subsidiary HERE maps at the time and saw early version of MeeGo. Also the hardware of the N9 was beautiful. It would have been a hit and in fact outsold the Lumia in the few countries it was delivered before they axed it).