[What is behind the announcement of Meego operating system by Nokia and Intel? Guest blogger Thucydides Sigs deconstructs what Meego means and its importance to the mobile industry]
How much substance is behind the noise of Nokia’s and Intel’s announcement of Meego? A few points to consider.
Nokia, who feels threatened by Google’s Android and Chrome OS efforts, is putting significant efforts in order to expand into other device categories and bring its Ovi services to more consumers in more places. So a move that brings Maemo – together with Ovi (and the underlying Web-runtime apps and Qt cross-platform) to Intel chipsets is a straightforward strategic win. It will allow OVI services – such as Maps – to get into non mobile devices, especially Automotive (which has been a strategic focus for Intel) and other connected (but wired – after all power consumption is Intel’s Achilles heel) devices such as home phones.
So is Nokia going to bet it’s future Linux devices on a group of Intel engineers? Nokia is smarter than that: Intel software engineering has never been something to write home about. And Nokia has always been careful in maintaining and winning control over strategic areas. So Nokia will either maintain a parallel internal effort or maintain tight control over the ARM port and the overall MeeGo architecture.
Is MeeGo going to really bring Ovi services & Maemo into the hands of tens of millions more consumers? Well, MeeGo open’s a door, but success will depend on the quality of Maemo and Ovi experience. Maemo v6, due late this year, will be catch-up to where Android and WebOS were half a year ago, and were Apple was a year ago. So it is still one or two years behind the rest of the industry. That said, Maemo does not need to be the best – it needs to be good *enough* for ‘mass market’ consumers, so that combined with Nokia industrial design expertise and marketing power, an “object of desire” can still be delivered.
It’s this consumer “Desire” that brings us to the Ovi Services angle – and the question of how good will Nokia Services offering will be. Studying the NexusOne, it is impressive to see how Google seamlessly connected it’s many service offering – creating a compelling integrated experience. From a photo gallery that is both local and web (Picassa), through Google Voice (low cost calls, transcribed voice messages) and an almost perfect navigation and mapping experience (including turn-by-turn voice instructions and maps). Contacts, Email, Calendaring are the basics that are a must have. And Google is quickly expanding into other services (note the recent Aardvark acquisition and Buzz launch). Yes, MeeGo gives Nokia a vehicle to bring Ovi to some other device segments, but can Ovi compete effectively with Google’s breadth of services?
What about Intel? It has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a software strategy which does not seem to show a clear path to recouping the investment. Moblin, has not been able to ship in any significant volumes, is inferior to either ChromeOS or Android from a software platform perspective, and lacks any kind of services offering (which is why they needed Ovi). If Intel thinks that software is another part of it’s vertically integrated stack that will differentiate the chipsets, then it does not make sense to open it up and make it an open industry initiative. If Intel truly believe that Moblin should be open and used by competing ARM chipset vendors, then what does it gain from spending those hundreds of millions of dollars on the effort?
Open Source: ChromeOS, Android and Maemo are creating a very different software ecosystem then the one Intel got used to with Microsoft in the 90s. None of the software players is going to generate significant revenues on the device side. Intel exec’s might want to re-read Andy Grove book, step outside the box and ask themselves if their software effort still makes sense in the 2010 industry context.
And while Intel is spending time on building this software strategy, the chipset market is experiencing a disruptive change, shifting from computing power (where good enough performance is delivered by both Intel and ARM), to battery power and mobility where ARM is clearly superior. It might be better for Intel to focus it’s efforts back on it’s chipset technology and fix its power consumption problems, because when it comes to wireless devices (either within the home or outside, anything that is not tethered to a power cord), their offering is inferior to ARM, and no amount of software will be able to cover this gaping hole.
What about the rest of the chipset industry? Would the other ARM chipset vendors, such as TI, Qualcomm, Broadcom and nVidia follow path and join MeeGo? It’s hard to imagine that any of those companies will want to entrust their software strategy in the hands of Intel: not only is Intel a direct competitor, it software skills leave a lot to be desired, and it’s long term commitment to the space (as outlined above) is not clear. Is Nokia’s involvement enough of a carrot to entice those vendors into MeeGo? Having Maemo running on top of MeeGo will make insertion into Nokia easier, but Maemo is open source and there is nothing holding the chipset vendors from porting Maemo to their chips on their own or with the help of other independent 3rd parties. So we suspect Nokia will give it a modest try, but when it comes to purchasing chips, power, performance and cost will still be the over-riding criteria for Nokia.
So, lots of noise that those two monkeys are making, but little impact. MeeGo seems to be cute (qt) and (h)armless, but not a big industry changer.
– Thucydides
[Thucydides Sigs – a pseudonym – has many years of experience juggling computing constraints, mobile software and consumers needs. With that said, imagine listening to a violin sonata not know who the artist is or who composed it. You end up having to listen more carefully in order to make a judgment. He can be reached at thucydides /dot/ sigs [at] gmail [dot] com]
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