[maemo-developers] No more 770 bug activity?

[From: Acadia Secure Networks]

Dave,

that is a good point and please understand that I am not here to defend 
Nokia's product support policies. Having said that, I don't think that 
Nokia even attempted to market the 770 to the enterprise market segment 
because in their marketing "heart of hearts" they, no doubt, understood 
that this initial product would not "cut it" in that segment. In my 
opinion, and as I have expressed elsewhere, even the N800 is not quite 
there because of the lack of certain Nokia supported capabilities  in 
the software (e.g. a rock solid email client).

The real problem as I see it is that Nokia is attempting to develop 
three things at once with the Internet Tablet:

    1) A new hardware platform

    2) A new software platform

    3) A way, as a for-profit corporation, to leverage the power of the
    opensource community in the development of software for the Internet
    Tablet while still making profit on their products.

Doing only one of these can be a challenge, and I know from my own 
experience that doing 1) and 2) at the same time is extremely difficult 
to do while not upsetting at least some customers. When you throw in 3) 
it becomes even harder.

It occurs to me that in order to address the concern you raise with 
respect to the demand from enterprise CIO's for ongoing software support 
for the Nokia Internet Tablet, Nokia might do what IBM eventually did 
with the OS2 software baseline given the fact that is was (and still is) 
in use in some corporate/embedded applications, including financial 
apps. IBM moved the support of OS2 to China to be able to achieve a 
lower cost structure for the support of the software.

More realistically however would be for Nokia to announce and stick to a 
published policy for software support, including maintenance releases,  
for each release of the OS. that way, at least, customers would be able 
to know in advance what they were getting themselves into when they 
purchase/commit to the product.

Best Regards,

 

John Holmblad

 

Acadia Secure Networks


 



Dave Neuer wrote:
> On 4/3/07, Acadia Secure Networks <acadiasecurenets at aol.com> wrote:
>>
>> In comparison, what Nokia has done is a step forward in my opinion,
>> although Microsoft, of course  is no paragon of perfection when it comes
>> to product support.  I do think Nokia could mitigate this hw
>> obsolescence problem for some customers, by having a very generous
>> trade-in price to go from the 770 to the N800. In fact, from a marketing
>> perspective this could make a lot of sense for a new product category
>> like the Internet Tablet. That way Nokia would not have to leave its
>> pioneering customers for dead on the "great plains" of product 
>> innovation.
>> !
>
> This answer is extremely interesting to me coming from someone who has
> expressed interest in the "Enterprise Tablet" idea in the SoC
> proposal.
>
> What enterprise wants to use a device that may be abandoned by the
> vendor for even fixes for known bugs after 1 and 1/2 years??
>
> Dave
>