Ex-Nokia staff to build MeeGo-based smartphones
A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for “dinghy"), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of “directors and core professionals …
Context & Ripple Effects
MeeGo had already lost institutional momentum: Nokia's MeeGo device chief departed in 2010, and 2011 coverage framed the platform as displaced by Tizen, another Linux-based open-source OS. Jolla gives former Nokia personnel and MeeGo supporters a separate vehicle to keep pursuing the platform.
The launch matters against Nokia's reported smartphone-sales decline: expertise associated with its abandoned software effort is being reorganized outside the company rather than disappearing with the product strategy.
First-order effects
- Jolla becomes an independent home for former Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts seeking to bring MeeGo-based handsets to market.
- Nokia no longer exclusively contains the personnel and product ambition associated with MeeGo, even as Jolla operates separately from the company.
Second-order effects
- Jolla must turn a platform widely treated as displaced into an actual handset proposition, putting it in direct comparison with the successor open-source Linux path represented by Tizen.
- MeeGo developers and enthusiasts gain a focal point outside Nokia, concentrating a scattered community around a startup's device plans.
Third-order effects
- The formation of Jolla points to a model in which discontinued mobile platforms can persist through founder-led spinouts, rather than only through the companies that originally sponsored them.
- If such spinouts can secure device execution and community support, open-source mobile software may outlive a sponsor's strategic retreat; if not, platform transitions consolidate around better-backed successors.
The trend: Mobile-platform talent and open-source communities are beginning to outlive their original corporate sponsors through independent startups.