The Inside Story of Nokia MeeGo

Taskumuro interviewed former and present Nokia employees to uncover the inside story behind the development and subsequent abandonment of Nokia's MeeGo mobile operating system. A convoluted history reveals a lack of clear leadership at Nokia, and why turning to Windows Phone 8 was really Nokia's last and only hope at survival.

In retrospect the factors that led to MeeGo’s downfall are easy to point out. Nokia developed Harmattan and MeeGo alongside with Symbian. Resources went to a huge waste, when both platforms were developing their own Qt-based user interface design tools. Applications were being simultaneously developed on top of unfinished development tools. Furthermore, the communication within the Maemo team was lacking. Harmattan’s development begun alongside Fremantle, or Maemo 5, but no information was exchanged between the respective teams. The development mistakes made with Fremantle were repeated in the development of Harmattan.

There was no clear vision of Harmattan, about what kind of a product it was going to be. Different product managers had totally different opinions of what it should be. There was no single person making the product level decisions in the projects. Many subcontractors and whole teams were hired without even knowing what they could do.

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