Dillon’s visibility and personal passion for Sailfish has, at times, made him feel like the de facto face of the entire Sailfish project – eclipsing the other co-founders with his call-to-arms conviction and punkish demands for a more human technology, for software to have a heart, for developers to champion difference and care about consumers whose tastes are unlike the mainstream. Sailfish’s small pond certainly rippled with the energy of such a vivid personality.
So on one level it’s a huge surprise to hear he’s left Jolla, the company he quit former employer Nokia to help co-found all the way back in 2011.
So, not only did Jolla split into a separate software and a separate hardware company (never a good sign), now its co-founder and frontman has left the, uh, ship as well.
You don’t need a lot of brain cells to figure this one out.
So far they were on the course of fully opening Sailfish (i.e. parts which they now own at least). So I hope it doesn’t mean Jolla is becoming less open and more Nokia-like (and it was the reason for his leaving). That would be truly unfortunate.
Edited 2015-09-09 02:12 UTC
Isn’t that an empty promise from the start though?
Sailfish OS was always marketed as the true libre/open system, and people easily fell for it due to the GNU stack and them being a sexy underdog.
However since its incarnation, Sailfish OS was never even close to AOSP. The whole GUI was always proprietary.
Really, they were “on the course of”? Really, like for how long now?
Not sure how empty. They gradually opened a number of components (like the browser UI). So movement was positive until now, though too slow.
yes, it was an empty promise from the start. I don’t think they ever really meant it. Nokia never open sourced *all* of Meego, either. If its not open on day 1, I don’t expect it every to be opened.
I was supportive of their efforts, despite this, but they chose a really insanely difficult path to success and basically failed. Its not too late, but there has been a lot of wasted effort in unproductive areas ( see the other half initiate).
I was skeptical to a degree, because progress was so slow. But they did open [some] things, and not long ago they said they’ll open everything (they never said that before for the reference).
See http://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/jolla-pushes-brics-partnerships-to…
I just hope they didn’t decide to cancel that (and Marc Dillon didn’t leave for that very reason).
Edited 2015-09-10 01:38 UTC
I just don’t understand why you would focus efforts on developing novelty gimmicks like the other half, instead of focusing on building a community to support and add onto your operating system. I really think cyanogenmod’s model for business makes the most sense for new entrants to the market place:
Build an open source operating system, get it on as many handsets as possible, get contributes, once successful, start licensing it to oems to be pre-installed.
I think TOH never was prioritized much. They position themselves as a software, not hardware company.
And they had a similar idea, to make Sailfish installable on as many targets as possible. That’s the whole idea behind this:
http://releases.sailfishos.org/sfe/SailfishOS-HardwareAdaptationDev…
The other half required a non zero engineering effort, for a company like Jolla, it should have been zero. I can’t fault them enough for that.
They shifted away from hardware only recently (that’s the whole split which happened not long ago). I don’t necessarily agree that playing with hardware is a bad idea – if they have resources, then why not. But apparently they didn’t have enough resources to effectively focus on both.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so harsh. I’m not an entrepreneur. I wouldn’t have thought that half of the fortune 500 would have been able to succeed. I would have advised Jobs to not start selling computers, and told Woz to stay at HP. I’d probably have also told Gates to stay at Harvard.
The mobile space is a three horses race and the common man and woman on the street doesn’t care for GNU/Linux ideology freedom.
Anyone that tries to sell products to them based in such premises is doomed to fail.
Given that this is OS News, it is sad to see another OS close the curtains.
Beside the big two, there are a bunch of mobile OSes below 3% market share. Which one of these small players is still ‘in’ the race?
Windows Phone, of course.
In many countries where the people go for pre-paid phones and the average salaries cannot cover getting an iOS device, people take a Windows Phone as alternative to Android devices.
On my case, I see it a lot in my travels across southern and eastern Europe.
However, given the recent events with Windows Phone team layoffs and the OS/2 style support for iOS and Android apps in the Windows Store, even Windows Phone might fade away from those places.
A couple of OS’s under 3 percent is technically correct of course, but the OS distribution goes something like this:
5/6 of the entire market is Android (83%)
5/6 of the rest of the market is iOS (14%)
5/6 of the rest of that market is Windows Phone (2,5%)
5/6 of the rest of that market is BlackBerry (0,4%)
5/6 of the rest of that market is… the rest of the market (0,06%)
Now of course this is a very rough rule, things change all the time, and most importantly they vary incredibly by country.
But on a global scale there is basically
“giant” Android
“but we are where the money is” Apple
“we run on everything and should be big historically” Microsoft
“Not dead yet, not dead yet” BlackBerry
“look at us, look at us” ….the rest
Edited 2015-09-09 09:18 UTC
I assume you mean Android, iOS and Blackberry. Because you can’t possibly mean anybody else.
Blackberry OS is on life support.
All our customers are replacing them with iOS, Android and Windows Phone devices.
BlackBerry OS 10.3 is awesome. I like it much better than Android. I can’t stand iOS.
BlackBerry OS is BB7. It *is* on life support.
BB10 is BlackBerry 10. Its sales are stagnating partly because of the total lack of marketing efforts, partly because of the BB-going-Android rumors, and partly because the perceived “lack of apps” (TM). Many on the CB forums say it will continue being developed, even though at a slower pace (layoffs etc). I hope it’s not just wishful thinking.
People buy what works, and if you say they don’t care, they wouldn’t care whether it’s Sailfish running there and would buy it. It’s your words, not mine.
And all this monopoly doom and gloom is stupid. Monopolies come and go.
Edited 2015-09-09 12:56 UTC
Everything comes and goes eventually, that is true. But monopolies actually tend to stay a very very long time. That effect is called inertia and it means that, to put it very blunt, a flee like Jolla can’t move an elephant.
It is actually more likely for the elephant to start walking by itself or for people to just not like/need elephants anymore
They don’t need to move it. They just need to produce something that’s useful to enough people.
People already decided to give others their money, because Sailfish doesn’t work to their needs and apps all their friends use.
Such people care for services, not for applications. It’s a mistake to mix the two. And services today usually aren’t tied to any specific system.
Edited 2015-09-09 15:59 UTC
You are right, but it doesn’t change the fact that Sailfish lacks all known ones.
Not sure what it lacks exactly – I didn’t really research that. It has support for services which I use.
Sailfish dead in the water.
All the enthusiasm has always been just wishful thinking.
I wonder how much of their personal wealth those founders burned in the process.
And Qt Quick is another questionable adventure.
I wonder about the money too. I know they somehow got a lot of money from Nokia. That, plus some initial sales and some startup mentality might have been enough to keep them alive so far (that, and loan….uhm…investments)
http://www.finnbay.com/media/news/jollas-financial-loss-amounted-tw…
How exactly is it questionable? Care to elaborate on that?
Edited 2015-09-09 12:55 UTC
I think he means that it isn’t what a company like Jolla should be focussing on at the moment (like the other half)
It is not the technology that is questionable, it is the focus on that technology at this time that is questionable
I don’t think they specifically just focus only on Qt Quick. They simply use it, because it serves its purpose well. They do contribute to bug fixes and feature development in Qt as well, which is good.
As a Qt/QML fan I’m happy to be a Ubuntu phone user
Actually tonight Marc Dillon is going to speak at Hardware HEL (a meetup for Finnish hardware startups) about “The face of mobile in 5-10 years”.
We’ll get to know what are his thoughts on the subject.
Also during the event the guys from Puzzlephone will talk about the work on modular devices.
Marketing team of jolla has also
departed..
For those who can read finnish
http://www.tivi.fi/Uutiset/jollan-markkinointitiimi-lahti-latkimaan…
Edited 2015-09-09 09:56 UTC
everyone seems to forget Nucleus RTOS
I’m missing the connection between Nucleus RTOS and Jolla. Care to fill in the blanks?
Kinda actually wish I could forget nucleus. That project did not turn out well…
forget? You can only forget what you ever heard about. I have no idea if your comment is crazy good or crazy bad but I can tell you that you seem to be in a bubble if you think people are forgetting….tries to remember…Nucleus, right?
Nucleus RTOS was shipped in billions of devices … but always capsulated and invisible to the user, e.g. in baseband chipsets.
Did Jolla use it too?
What is the relevance here?
This is horrible news, the tablet is supposed to start shipping anytime, in theory.
Personally I always thought they should have just went with licensing the OS and not made their own hardware at all. Or just worked on developing it, and waited until Nokia was able to make mobile devices again (next year?) then merged back into Nokia. I always thought they were just on the brink of some major awesomeness if they hadn’t gone with WP and kept up with Intel. Now look, there are several somewhat successful devices with Tizen and it was also born out of the ashes of MeeGo. I’m wearing a Gear S right now (and the Gear S2 is looking fantastic).
We need a OS that is Not-iOS/Android/Windows. BB10 is interesting and great (I used a Q10 for a short time and liked it, if the Venice came out with BB10, I’d buy one..) Every time I go back to my N9, I think how awesome it is, but then I end up carrying around my Note 4 which still ends up having random app crashes (always when I’m trying to show the Apple fan I work with something that my phone will already do that Apple just announced…Ha!)