Ecosystem, or Curated Manure?

Okay, I’ve officially had it with this year’s buzzwords.  You know which ones.

Ecosystem

Curated.

At first ecosystem was kind of cute.  It sounded so green and organized.  Who could argue against anything prefixed with eco? 

Seeding MeeGo

Propagating a novel operating system (OS) can often be a frustrating chicken-vs-egg scenario, as many abandoned platforms and even current ones like Linux can demonstrate.  An OS won’t gain many converts without a reasonable stream of ready-made applications as well as the necessary ecosystem support (especially device drivers).  In open source contexts, this is compounded by Digital Rights Management (DRM) and similar sticky, usually legal, bogeys.

Maintaining a compelling closed ecosystem, such as Apple has chosen with its various OS offerings, certainly goes a long way toward solving those hurdles.  On the other hand, Google’s breadth of services, brand recognition and sheer size have quickly carved out secure toeholds for the more open Android and undoubtedly Chrome OS.  And there are already several well-established (although shrinking) platforms occupying the rest of the market slots… so where’s the space for upstart MeeGo?

The recent article here rhetorically asked Why MeeGo and that’s not the point today.  Rather, I want to cover what’s going on in porting and packaging, and what that might mean for MeeGo’s possibilities.  

Why MeeGo?

There was a time when cell phone operating system Symbian was on a roll. Utilized by numerous device providers and championed by global giant Nokia, it provided the basis for a smartphone revolution.  And appeared unstoppable.

But Symbian had its roots in traditional user experience, and its proponents seemed surprisingly blindsided by the explosive growth of touch devices in the late 2000s.  With its laser focus on the trend-setting demographic, Apple managed to quickly lay waste to the cell phone status quo with its now-iconic touchscreen iPhone.  A victim of its own success, Symbian has since struggled to find its way and shows signs of having peaked in global share.  

OPK on the way O-U-T?

Twitter buddy Jonathan (@atmasphere) Greene alerted me to a Wall Street Journal post today that claims Nokia is actively shopping for a new chief executive officer.  If true, this shouldn’t come to anyone as a surprising development.  The current CEO, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo (OPK), has been under fire for over a year now while Nokia has struggled against stiff competition, largely from Apple, RIM and various devices running Google’s Android.

OPK had been groomed by previous CEO Jorma Ollila for just that position, assuming the helm of the world’s largest cell phone manufacturer on 1 June, 2006.  It seemed the right decision at the time: from there until 2008 Nokia’s stock value rose as innovative devices were released even while the company reinvented itself with extreme reorganizations.

But the first two years of a new regime typically benefit from residuals of the one prior.  2008 to 2010 can’t be credited or blamed back to Ollila’s term.  Rather they provide the measurements for OPK’s performance, and the numbers aren’t good.  To get an idea, check this chart comparing Nokia’s stock to Apple’s over the past 5 years.  Or Nokia versus RIM.  The divergence at 2008 is remarkable… and humbling for Nokia.  And even though RIM hasn’t been exactly stellar, it’s still in the positive for the period.

America Offline: fall of a walled gardener

This is a Tale of Two Internets, with a vivid beginning but no clear ending yet.

Technophiles of my ancient generation fondly ruminate over the early glory days of wide network communications, when there were basically two modes:  ARPANET, and Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).  As many know the former was a US government-sponsored networking project that was originally closed to the general public, while the latter was a collective prototype Internet rooted in normal telephony infrastructure and was easily accessible by anyone with the right equipment.

But something curious happened over time.

Qt | Podcasting + conferencing + Twitter

A handful of people with ties to the maemo.org community have been kicking around the idea of a new podcast.  I’m not going to go too deeply into the proposed format at this time but rather will present the technical wishes discussed so far and solicit input from the readers on how to address them.

Interested?  Read on!

Nokia rediscovers America

http://maps.ovi.com/

In December 2009 a New York times opinion editorial asked if Nokia could recapture its glory days (my own assessment is here).  That describes the time, not really that long ago, when the company’s offerings dominated customer desire.  As we surely all recognize by now, Nokia appears to have hit its general market penetration peak in 2008.  Much of its sales decline since then can certainly be attributed to the global economic decline, but that can’t explain why Apple, Google and Research in Motion have been able to grow and even create share in the same period.  I won’t get too deep into the successes of the latter but instead will focus on challenges and recent moves by Nokia.

Cloudy days for data, Part 3 (conclusion)

After a bit of a delay I’m going to wrap up this series tonight.  In the last segment, I finished up describing the struggle between file independence and data management, ending with the usefulness of metadata and touching on Cory Doctorow’s dissension on that topic.

I’d rather that readers take some time to read Doctorow’s interesting thesis than for me to repeat too much of the content here, but suffice to say he pokes seven disturbing holes into what he terms “meta-utopia” and as I said previously it isn’t easy to disregard his points.  The most troublesome to me concerns the problem of crafting agnostic, universal schemas, which tend to be two-dimensional and thus create difficulties for diverse parties trying to arrive at design consensus.  Doctorow correctly points out that data sets and needs tend to be richer than that, extending easily into three dimensions (my extrapolation) in order to properly define any object.  Just as databases are better than flat files, data cubes are better still– and there has been work along those lines with XML.

Doctorow ends on a somewhat promising note by admitting that, flaws and all, metadata is still useful.  It’s just that those choosing to rely on it as part of any information management or publishing solution need to be aware of the pitfalls going in (his article should be part of the solution design requirements in my opinion).

Why I love Nokia’s internet tablets

The wild bunch at maemo talk know well by now that I’ve been a hardcore advocate of Nokia’s internet tablets ever since a fellow engineer quietly placed a preproduction 770 on my desk a few years ago.  I have been on a rabid one-man mission to promote the touchscreen tablets ever since.

At least, it felt that way in the halls of Nokia, where as a quality engineer I found myself the sole evangelist for getting the tablet technology into corporate and industrial uses.  This was a consumer experiment, I was told, and the product agenda was very limited.  The same applied, I soon found, to the size and scope of the hard-working Nokia developer team involved.