Would you be willing to entertain that maybe they died because most people who used phones found those platforms to be weaker product offerings with the things they cared about and that your value system may have fundamentally differences?
Would you further entertain that the inability to perceive such realities and differences and manufacturers inability to navigate these preferences is a major determinant of success? (Microsoft failed here for instance and Amazon's fire is on life support. If piles of money were the primary cause we'd all be using Sharps, Psions, IBM Simons and AT&T Eo, there's something else to say, the failure of At&t hobbit, they had a solid monopoly position)
Capturing the consumer is tricky business and maemo simply wasn't the right it. Nor was Windows Mobile or FirefoxOS or WebOS or, ultimately, Palm or BlackBerry
That it were weaker offerings is not always true. Google is the Gorilla in the room who simply squeezed out any competition by offering Android “for free”
Microsoft Explorer did the same earlier with Netscape. Simply bundle your own software with the OS and watch the competition flutter.
Your average consumer really doesn’t know the difference.
Yet they failed to gain a foothold in Windows Mobile after literally decades trying and they had to take 4 swings at Netscape before they really gained inroads.
I question that common folklore and claim it uses anecdotal cherry picked non rigorous evidence. It's just a bad theory.
Of course monopolies try to leverage their position as IBM tried with their failed MCA bus and failed XGA standard and failed OS/2 product. As it turns out, monopoly thuggery can't seem to reliably zombie walk terrible products that nobody wants.
Instead, people have dramatically different concerns and if you read into each one of these cases you'll find that out. That's the real reliable truth here
Stop fighting realities you don't like. All of humanity isn't going to bend the ways you want it.
That last point you make is crucial. Your average user just wants to go “on the web”, but doesn’t really know any difference between one browser or the next. This is why IE6 thrived, plus companies adopting it as their default install.
Exactly. Talk all the shit you want, and we can do it all day with IE6 but it did what people needed and it hit numbers north of 90% and had staying power unlike any other browser/version pair since.
If you want to understand how humans relate to technology, writing such things off as irrelevant, simply because IE6 was technical swiss cheese, is foolish.
Most people probably never got around to try them. The list of smart phones released with Maemo is near non existent. However the cause of that might have been less Android and more Elop preparing Nokia for acquisition by Microsoft.
I take it you didn't use webOS. webOS had multitasking before iOS or Android did, and Android's multitasking implementation was taken directly from webOS' card-based multitasking. The interfaces are identical. It took Android something like 6-8 years to finally implement true multitasking that webOS had from the get-go.
webOS in 2009-2010 was unironically better than Android's been over the last decade.
> Would you be willing to entertain that maybe they died because most people who used phones found those platforms to be weaker product offerings with the things they cared about
That is true to a large extent, but it doesn't preclude Google from creating a situation where new contenders are effectively locked out. No matter how good Android is, they're not entitled to that.
That would be a possibility if people acted rationnally and chose to spend their money after a thorough evaluation of the market, their players and perspectives for the future. This just never happens for a majority of phone consumers.
humans have never worked that way. it's why advertising exists.
if we want different products to succeed we can't just close our eyes, cross our fingers, and hope that humanity acts the way we fantasize it ought to.
This is exactly what I'm saying: you're saying first that those devices failed because they were weaker, which is the premise behind free market. That is wrong, they failed because they didn't have the marketing machine pushing them to the top. Buyers don't buy based on whether the product is better or not, they buy based on more emotional values. That's the whole Information Asymetry thing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry)
It's like the vintage synth people. Those are really popular products but most are not popular enough. The popular ones get reissues but most of the time the financials simply don't support a production run.
This response in the thread reminds me of what happened in the 1936 landon/fdr election. A magazine asked people to volunteer who they wanted to vote for. The landon voters were super passionate so they outnumbered the fdr voters who wrote in causing the magazine to falsely believe landon would win in a landslide. A guy named Gallop was watching this unfold, thought something was up, used statistical random sampling to guess what the magazine and general election would yield, got both right and changed polling forever. http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/
The handful of people downvoting and passionately responding to me are the Landon voters here. HN is exactly where this small group congregates.
There's simply not enough to keep the platform afloat. That's why the reboots have all eventually failed
"Would you be willing to entertain that maybe they died because most people found those platforms to be simply weaker product offerings?"
No.
I mean hahahahahah HELL NO not even close.
WebOS was great.
The only thing that made Android win was the brute force of Google, and the fact that Android was open source and WebOS was not (somehow, despite being Linux), and mismanagement by Palm.
"Weaker product offerings" isn't really an applicable idea for new entire ecosystems. He who can put up the most cash and marketing and special deals can create a new ecosystem from scratch that is by definition and necessity far weaker than others that have already existed for years, and still win by plain force.
When the iPhone came out, it had no 3rd party apps at all, while Palm and Windows devices existed for years. Particularly PalmOS had a massive rich diverse mature ecosystem of 3rd party apps.
I had a full screen, color, touch, grid icon home screen of 3rd party apps, internet connected, smartphone... In 2000, SEVEN YEARS before the first iPhone came out. I had a web browser, an ssh client, even a vnc client, Audible.com audio book player app, .. And every random app for every big and little purpose I coukdbthink of, from db apps to odd little things like a netmask calculator and resistor color code decoder, irc client, book reader, integrated contacts db phone dialer... Just like today, except better, no app store, and so no app store saying I can't have an app I want but Google or Apple doesn't. All this in 2000. 7 years before the "revolutionary" iPhone.
And even after the iPhone came out, not only were it's offerings weaker, they didn't exist at all. No 3rd party apps allowed at first.
Apple won because they are Apple. The phone hardware was a technical and design marvel, and Apple could afford to create a whole new world from scratch to displace an existing mature rich one thanks to plain money and size from years of iPod sales.
Google didn't have a stunning new device that blew away anything that came before, but they did have the money and the ability to make deals with carriers, and the open source angle. (I don't mean that consumers cared about that, I mean that letting everyone and their dog make a phone for free was an effective way to match Apple's deep with a Google wide.)
Android frankly sucked balls compared to WebOS for quite a while, both the os itself and the "offerings". But, Google. Palm. Come on.
I would agree that in the contest between Windows phone and either Android or IOS, MS had the size and resources to compete, and failed because they failed, not because there was no possible contest once someone that big decides to get in your game.
I bought the HP Touchpad w/ WebOS. It was laughably bad. Maybe PalmOS had apps, but WebOS came with pretty much nothing, meaning that for entertainment you went to the web browser. And that was very slow and laggy. You could only load one tab at a time.
A few months later, an unofficial Android ROM was created, and it was a huge upgrade, even though it was only Android 2.2.
Had Palm's management not had a series of stroke-like horrible decisions, I can imagine a present where the PalmOS 5.0 clusterfuck and just-barely-good-enough Treos gave way to WebOS devices that could have recovered the company, and the iPhone would have had to compete against _that_ potentially much more solid platform.
All these years later, I still wish I could have sat in on those meetings and told Palm management just how badly they were screwing themselves.
