Nokia trimming the "fat"...?

I think people are interpreting it as glass half-full or half-empty, because Elop's and Nokia corporate's comments are lacking any real substance, purposely, I think. It's total corporate-speak.

I guarantee that there's a LOT of stuff going on behind the scenes that we don't know about.

They just announced a cryptic move or two about their platform, but it leads to a ton of other questions. For me the biggest 'tell' signs are: the push-back of a Meego device into some undetermined date in 2011, the de-emphasis of Symbian variations and the term 'Qt' over 'Symbian' , as far as corporate public relations go, and the 1,800 layoffs. It smacks of corporate upheaval and HUGE internal changes.
 
That may be, but "corporate upheaval" and "huge internal changes" (to the roadmap or company) can only lead to delays or cancelations, no two ways about it.
 
But AFAIK Symbian Foundation never really worked on the guts (if by that you meant coding) - they did not have many if any actual coders. Or am I wrong/understand you wrong?

In any event, Nokia still has thousands of people (even after the layoffs) working on Symbian so IF they want to, they should have plenty coders in house to keep working on it. IF.
 
I've read a few places that the jobs were cut from Ovi (about time) and Symbian. I'm guessing that's why Lee Williams quit... he wanted off the sinking ship.
 
That is totally wrong.

The SF is where the guts of symbian were developed. Nokia pumped money into the foundation (as did Samsung and SE, before they dropped out) and the foundation worked on their roadmap. Everything that was done at Nokia was mostly either user applications or UI work.
 
I suppose, but it usually comes out one way or another.

I'm thinking he quit because he's not running the show anymore. Seems like Nokia is taking a renewed interest in Symbian's direction.

With everyone saying we should have a MeeGo device already, which lets face it that is impossible with the merger (maybe if we stuck with Maemo 6), the fact is if Symbian^4 was going to happen it should have been out THIS year, not Symbian^3.

I doubt we could get a Symbian^4 device with the current road-map.

Let's see what Qt has to offer with the current platform.
 
I hate to disagree with such a longstanding and respected poster but you are 100% wrong. I used to work at Symbian and am currently at Nokia.

SF does not and was never supposed to have any engineers working on code. What they do is packaging, governance and managing contributions. They are also responsible for open source build tools etc. A truly necessary task for an open source OS which is still evolving, and one level above actually developing stuff and fixing bugs. Any development contributed by SF staff is generally either done as volunteer effort or as part of some integration activity. The bug bash events we've seen recently are organised by the SF, with heavy involvement from the package owners. Almost all the package owners are Nokia staff, mostly because they lead the teams doing 99.99% of the development in that area.

The split was very clear - SF looks after the open source asset and organising contributions to that, others develop the SW. In most cases, that was engineers inside Nokia. When Symbian LTD was bought, the development staff became part of Nokia. When SF was set up, they stayed part of Nokia. Mostly it was the Symbian development relations people and the Symbian build and integration people who went into SF. You will have seen that the meetings to agree roadmaps are chaired by the SF, but those roadmaps are proposed by the contributors and agreed by the relevant stakeholders. The SF doesn't have it's own vote.

I have no comment to make about anything which is happening right now, but I felt I had to pop up and clarify the relative responsibilities of the parties here.

I'm of course duty bound to say that anything I write is my own personal opinion and not that of Nokia.
 
Sigh.

I don't think LW quit for any one reason. The layoffs were, probably, the last straw for him.

The SF was created for various reasons, but mostly because competitors were paying money to license Symbian which was owned by Nokia (originally it was independent, then bought by Nokia, then they spun it off... round and round this goes). They wondered, rightfully so, why they were sending money to a competitor who seemingly kept the good bits of the OS in house.

Spinning SF out *seemed* to solve that problem, but Nokia hobbled it from the start. The SF were prevented from creating services that might have competed with Nokia's services (the SF app store was laughably targeted at other developers, and not end users). Nokia hobbled the crap out of the SF, and they never had any intention of it succeeding. They just needed to buy some time until Maemo was ready.

Symbian is being put to pasture. It took me a long time to come to grips with that, but there it is. Nokia's going to squeeze every last drop of blood out of it, wring it dry, and move on.
 
Then why am I seeing and hearing comments from people who have been laid off that they were responsible for code within the OS itself?

Additionally, the layoffs are also happening within Nokia, not just within the SF.

Specifically, one poster posted that:



It's hard to disagree with any of that, because from what's being presented to the public, it's all true.
 
Oh, and by the way... since you work at Nokia, allow me to say the folowing:

WTF have you guys been doing? Is management there utterly incompetent, clueless, or just trying to short the stock? Who's responsible for making the utterly clueless decisions that have been made over the years?

OVI... I mean, come on, who's responsible for that train wreck? Poor attempts to compete with flickr, picasa, iTunes, BBM, that were all poorly done and never stood a chance.

Symbian signed... man, you guys really screwed the developer community with that. I mean, it was bad enough that you broke binary compatibility between V1/2 and V3, but then you had to go and charge a fortune for signing and testing. WTF?

And let's not talk about the train wreck that was V5. You've had 3 years since the iPhone launched to come up with a response, and the N8 is what we get? I mean, come on... this is beyond pathetic. Android launched a year and a half (the G1) later and is leaving you in the dust.

I don't mean to rant at you for all of the poor decisions that Nokia has made... but man, they've made a shedload. I honestly hope you look upon upper management with utter contempt, as they deserve nothing less.

I loved Symbian. I got my first S60 phone almost 7 years ago (the 3650) and it really opened my eyes to the possibilities of smartphones. Nokia has taken Symbian and both neglected and beaten it.

I hope Elop's axe continues to swing amongst upper management. Those morons deserve it. My only regret is that elop can't shut down the aastards over at aas.
 
Well, I don't think SF have announced anything about the future direction of SF. The only announced change in SF is the exit of Lee Williams. Whatever the foundation is up to is a matter for the foundation and private to them and their board members until they announce something. Anything being said about SF at the moment is all speculation as far as I know.

Nokia have made their announcements and they are what they are. The people who are being laid off are Nokia staff.



You are welcome to rant, but I'm afraid I can't answer you. However you are not the only person to hold your opinion :)

[edit] You will probably also be pleased to note that almost all the people ultimately responsible for what we can see in the N8 have already left the company. Things are significantly different than they were even 6 months ago.

I happen to think that the new strategy is pretty good. I hope it'll pay off - we just have to see what happens...
 
Well, it's all about the chop. Too little of a chop and nothing changes. Too big of a chop and the corporation will go in shock and not produce anything meaningful for a long while.

We will have to wait and see how good of an ax handler Elop is. But one thing is certain, it's going to get worse before it gets better.

The good part is that he is doing something, and we can all hope this is a constructive destruction. Specially for those losing their jobs.
 
I think everyone was HOPING for a Meego phone in Q4, but realistically was expected in Q1 or Q2 of 2011....
I don't think Samsung, SE, and other manufactures cared about the majority of the services Ovi offers, but Ovi Maps was probably the killer...
if Nokia had allowed all newer symbian phones to use the Ovi maps I think everyone else wouldn't have felt slighted....
it doesn't sound like symbian has been left to die, it'll still be on the mid to low end phones as planned..
the only puzzling thing to me is the lack of release identification...
every OS has some numeral or name to identify major releases...
this whole mess sounds like the new chief got to looking at the structure and was like "do we need this, cut it..."
at least most of the rumored cuts seem to be in services (leave that to other companies who already have it established i.e.: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo)
so they can focus on better integration with already established services...
another major portion of cuts are in symbian development...
there is the SF, let them handle it....
 
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