Ever since the advent of Android, Nokia has been in a fight for survival. It has gone through the most traumatic times in its effort to cope with a considerable loss of market share. Many of its projects have come and gone leaving the Nokia customer quite confused. Nokia itself has gone through many rounds of layoffs and seen a steep decline in its stock price, leaving everyone to wonder if Nokia is capable of building any new and innovative products that can capture the hearts and minds (and wallets) of consumers.
MeeGo – Adored yet shelved
Possibly the first ever developer friendly Nokia venture was MeeGo, a Linux distribution based on Intel’s Fedora-based Moblin and Nokia’s Debian-based Maemo. MeeGo was designed to be a robust mobile operating system. Though adored by a niche audience, MeeGo never saw much mainstream success. The last phone to come out of Nokia's factories to run on MeeGo was the N9. After Nokia pledged alligence to the Windows Phone platform, Nokia has backed off from efforts to revitalize MeeGo, focussing most of its resources instead on its new partnership with Microsoft.
A Rescue boat for MeeGo
However, a group of ex-Nokia employees have started a new venture called Jolla, which is Finnish for "rescue boat". This new startup is being led by Chief Operating Officer Marc Dillon. In an official statement he says:
Jolla Ltd. is a Finland based smartphone company which continues the great work that Nokia started with MeeGo. The Jolla team is formed by directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities.” He went on to add, “Nokia created something wonderful - the world's best smartphone product. It deserves to be continued, and we will do that together with all the bright and gifted people contributing to the MeeGo success story.
Together with international investors and partners, Jolla Ltd. will design, develop and sell new MeeGo based smartphones. The Jolla team consists of a substantial number of MeeGo's core engineers and directors, and is aggressively hiring the top MeeGo talent to contribute to the next generation smartphone production.
Looking Forward
The open source formula may not have paid rich dividends in the desktop and consumer space but going by Google’s success, it seems to be the only way forward in the mobile OS development space. This Linux based distribution is very popular amongst developers and if the right user experience can be provided by the OS, the apps will come.
Definitely a startup to watch out for in the future!
- Raghu Mohan
