Tizen - Where did that come from?

By Sriram V IyerDevelopers, especially the good and crazy ones (in a good way) are very strange beings. It is difficult to find an industry where something free is celebrated as here. (Free Software Foundation, Open Source Community etc). Also, there are people who code for the sake of fun, work on their pet projects, work on larger projects with many other people around the world for free.

And, to get developer attention and respect is simple and straightforward stuff, but VERY hard. Apple / Android eco-systems were single handedly built by these developers. (How many apps can Google or Apple write?)

Apple gets it. Google gets it. Samsung gets it. Microsoft is on right track.

However, many companies don’t pay sufficient attention to developers, and as a direct result of this bad karma, are bound to suffer. Just as elephants, developers’ memory run deep.

Take the case of Nokia. They held hundreds of Nokia Forum meetings to spread the message of ‘Developer is Important’ – They said Symbian is the next big thing, and asked all the developers to learn Qt. They even released Python on S60 platforms for hackers. (It was a hoot! Loved it!). Then all of a sudden, they said no more Symbian, it is all WinMo. And Qt? It is a thing of the past. Now they are scrambling again for developers for S40 platform. Irony.

Now, take the case of Meego. I traced the history of Meego in “Finding the right partner for Qt”. When Nokia ditched Meego, I expected Intel to put their muscle behind it. It is very difficult to sell your hardware platform, if it doesn’t have great software to go along. But even bigger problem is developer apathy, or even worse developer antagonism. Intel spent a considerable amount of time convincing developers to work on their platform, and now says it is no longer valid and move to new platform – Tizen (Where did that come from?) Tizen is supposed be a platform that is basically:

1. Linux based
2. HTML5 Based
3. May support Native
4. Qt / QML – Whoa! What’s that??

There are a few companies that have terrible Karma with developers of the future:

1. HP for launching a campaign for WebOS and then pulling the plug
2. Intel for Moblin / Maemo / Meego / Tizen Fiasco

I look forward to Intel having to pay people to develop for their platforms. Even if they do, they’ll not get the kind of developers who volunteer to develop for iOS / Android. Bad move Intel!

To get the feeling of developers, check out the comments at the official Meego announcement

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His twitter handle – @sviyer Do follow Sriram’s column regularly at YourStory: Expert Talk