Is the current maemo.org community council hitting a sophomore slump?

In a tremendous show of trust and good faith, Nokia’s Maemo team has invited certain maemo.org community members to test pre-release Maemo firmware designed for the Nokia N900.

Currently being without an N900 means I have to sadly decline the invitation to participate, and I’m only mentioning this to the world at large to demonstrate proof of the slow-but-steady progress of Maemo toward increased openness.

Prospective participants are largely being culled from community members exhibiting a strong history of bug reporting, analysis and feedback.  Like the 300-or-so recipients of N900s at Maemo Summit 2009 in Amsterdam, they are not being asked to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) but instead are being trusted by the Maemo team to employ discretion while testing the firmware.

This is profound, folks.

As a former employee who lobbied over a year ago for this very thing, I’m excited to see it come to be even as I’m disappointed that I can’t play along.  Still, the gesture itself is what’s truly important here, and I hope participants oblige the responsibility placed upon them.  This move could portend more to come if it turns out right.

There will likely still be those critics who think Nokia will never go fast and far enough, but in my opinion they would be missing the important picture here.  Increased openness in testing and broadening the tester base potentially means a better operating system and applications for everyone.  Here’s hoping this is just the start of a ramped-up “release early, release often” philosophy from Maemo.

Posted in Delivering Quality, Inviting Change, Mentioning Maemo, The Write Stuff, Views and Reviews, Ways of Rocking Tagged: community, feedback, firmware, LinkedIn, Maemo, N900, Nokia, testing

As a longtime devoted user of amazon.com I have just grumbled occasionally about its Rube Goldberg-ian website but online holiday shopping has me irritated enough to blog.

I had just got to being really comfortable with my pre-production Nokia N900, odd little UI quirks and all.  But thanks to a bit of carelessness, I lost use of it and found a potential problem for every user.

Just as Nokia does some perplexing housecleaning by shuttering Flagship stores (more on that later perhaps), Apple engages in a bit of store flushing of its own.

Turns out a Chinese software publisher was gaming the iTunes App Store with a little insider trading of sorts.  “Give me 5 stars for my app, I give you promotional codes”.

The payoff of course was a meteoric rise in rankings for what turned out to be crudely-constructed code fluffed up by equally low-grade user reviews.

The cool part of the story for me is how they were tripped up.  Metrics that didn’t make sense tipped off writers who reported the suspicious behavior to Apple’s Phil Schiller.  The end result: 1000 apps (around 1% of the store’s total) purged and the developer locked out of iPhone paradise.

This couldn’t come at a more fortuitous time for Maemo developers, some of whom have expressed concern over similar scenarios– which gets even more complicated in that Linux ecosystem’s slowly-growing mix of open source and commercial software.  What’s to stop some unscrupulous thug, one asked, from taking community-developed freeware, repackaging it for the Ovi Store and pulling similar stunts as the troublemakers here?

I think the answer again lies in metrics, combined with some robust information management and sincere policing on Ovi’s part.  The fact that Apple responded as quickly and strongly as they did sets the tone for others in this space.  Surely Nokia is paying attention.

Just in case, I’ll email and tweet this story to the appropriate Maemo people. 

Posted in Gamespace, Mentioning Maemo, The Write Stuff Tagged: Apple, apps, developers, iPhone, Maemo, Nokia, open source, Ovi

In my previous article I alluded to Maemo community outreach as a “chicken and egg scenario”.  The exact point is that it can be hard for a corporation to justify outreach expenditures if there’s no proof of significant interest.  Easy to swallow as reality but still tough for a community evangelist to fully digest.

In this case that outreach translates to developers, particularly those attracted to Linux, Qt and especially the mobile computing ecosystem.

But the dilemma doesn’t stop there.  Keep in mind that like most of the world, Nokia defaults to English, both in device software and internal communications.  Thus the developer citizens of this virtual ecosystem tend to be best served by first focusing on that language.  It’s not done with willful maliciousness but this situation can marginalize developers for whom English is a secondary or even nonexistent option.

Thus it’s reasonable to expect that a great deal of Maemo development will favor English speakers.  Ironically, the United States holds one of the largest populations of English speakers, yet Nokia’s presence here has been dwindling to an embarrassing bar-chart blip over the past few years.

This creates an interesting and perhaps troubling dichotomy.  Some success of Maemo devices going forward may well largely depend on North American developer engagement.  This may or may not be an issue so much for Canada, but getting US open source developers on board IF the N900 and its successors don’t gain traction here may get sticky.  Will they be as likely to code freely for the world at large if the platform doesn’t make it here?

Note that I’m not being xenophobic or leaping to conclusions– just wondering.  And to be honest I would rather see statistics on all of this than speculate.

One can easily lay blame at our stupidly-siloed, frequency-fragmented and virtually-monopolistic phone service model for potentially hindering the success of Maemo devices but in the end a blame game does not solve the root problem.  Nokia can easily thrive with the same platform in regions that aren’t so restrictive.

PC Magazine pundit Sascha Segan is already predicting Maemo to fail.  I hope he’s proven wrong… and I hope the US is part of the proof.  I’m sure we’ll know by next year, when rumors of T-Mobile US taking on the N900 will either swing true or false.  If true, such a thing can’t come too soon for Maemo.

Posted in Inviting Change, Mentioning Maemo, The Write Stuff Tagged: community outreach, LinkedIn, Linux, Maemo, N900, Nokia, open source, Sascha Segan, T-Mobile

It’s funny the turns Life takes.

…and in my opinion it then becomes the iPhone killer.

See if you can spot it, and figure out why.

What's right with this picture?

Enter guesses or arguments in the Comments section!

Posted in Delivering Quality, Mentioning Maemo, Ways of Rocking Tagged: call button, iPhone, LinkedIn, N900, Nokia