@Janole back on the Developer Champions programme
After the little blogosphere Drama, it appears @janole is now back on the Developer Champions programme.
Good job who ever sorted this out.
Got a very nice phone call this afternoon. I’m back in the Nokia Developer Champions program. Glad this issue has been resolved quickly.
For context, see previous two posts:
- http://mynokiablog.com/2012/07/24/full-text-of-nokias-symbian-champion-layoff-no-more-qt-for-nokias-future/
- http://mynokiablog.com/2012/07/21/what-the-hell-nokia-kicking-out-symbian-developers/
About the Author (Author Profile)
Hey, thanks for reading my post. My name is Jay and I'm a medical student at the University of Manchester. When I can, I blog here at mynokiablog.com and tweet now and again @jaymontano. We also have a twitter and facebook accounts @mynokiablog and Facebook.com/mynokiablog. Check out the tips, guides and rules for commenting >>click<< Contact us at tips(@)mynokiablog.com or email me directly on jay[at]mynokiablog.comSubscribe
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sigh Nokia…
well at least they rectified it for Janole but what about the other developers…
AAS wrote that about 15 developers were affected by this. So likely things have been restored for all 15 as it probably costs Nokia almost nothing to do so.
It costs Nokia next to nothing to keep their statuses (it’s not as if Nokia is making large conferences and paying for their trips and accommodation anyway), but this idiocy have cost Nokia some bad publicity. Oh Nokia, will you ever learn…
Indeed.
I thought that was major stupidity on Nokia’s part.
Kudos to them for owning up and fixing it, though.
they all got a call from Nokia
Happy hear that.
The right deed, Nokia.
Well now this .. does it make sense ?
Huh. Nokia should have let him be. i absolutely want to see how the great symbian developer would do if Nokia really barred him from Nokia store.
Lets see if he really makes good apps, or its nothing more than a complete lack of competition.
theres lots of competition… like tweetian, nokia own twit client, nimbuzz etc i dont exactly use twitter though except to msg Jay a note or ask Damian Dinning a question so I dont use any apps nore know of their quality
That is neither fair nor accurate:
There are plenty of other Twitter & FB apps, but there are none – read that again N O N E that match Gravity’s unique, all-encompassing approach, flexibility and efficiency.
It’s a real shame Jan cannot be encouraged onto Windows Phone by Nokia to develop a Nokia-exclusive ‘Gravity for Windows Phone’.
I’m sure this would not only bring over quite a few of the remaining Symbian die-hards but also give Nokia some of the differentiation and exclusivity they say they they need.
Frankly, I have moved on from Symbian; not even the 808 is tempting me back there right now (not that I’m planning on selling my N8 anytime soon, though!), but my individual needs notwhithstanding, Gravity is still a joy to use when I take the N8 out and about.
For me, it is one of the last few Jewels in Symbian’s crown – right alongside Nokia Maps (Drive), USB Drive capability and Symbian multitasking.
Nokia, Nokia, Nokia…
I love your hardware, Windows Phone is getting better and better, but you have really ballsed things up here…
Whatever it costs – get Jan Ole Sur on board with Windows Phone and get Gravity onto Nokia Windows Phone devices.
My consultation fee will be in the post
The challenge here is Gravity filled a void in Symbian.
On WP, the void isnt so much there. Much of this is already baked into the OS (also with the added option of official apps available).
That’s a good point, but Maps were already available on WP before Nokia’s Lumia brought Nokia Drive over. Zune Music was available before Nokia Music; the same for Nokia Reading, TuneIn Radio, Creative Studio and more recently (although to a lesser extent) Play To.
Nokia adds value and distinction by offering exclusive app-based services on WP, although many of these services and features are already available elsewhere on WP. I’d ‘ve thought Gravity would be the perfect epitome of that philosophy.
One place to check your social feeds, RSS feeds, upload pictures, etc. in an environment familiar to millions of existing Symbian users who are surely the best prospects for Nokia’s Lumia range as they are already Nokia customers…
Whilst I value your counterpoint and agree to an extent, I still think bringing ‘Gravity the Brand’ over to Nokkia’s Lumia devices would spin off huge marketing benefits, reinforce the message to other developers and encourage existing Symbian users to consider Lumia as their next device.
As it stands, they’re probably now thinking about Android or iOS following Jan Ole Suhr’s words – and that can’t be a good situation.
Jan seems a very decent chap; always helpful to his customers (including me, incidentally) and he came across very well on the Phones Show Chat podcast, so I don’t think I’d be doing him an injustice to say that everybody has their price; what ever Jan Ole Suhr’s is, I am sure it would be money well spent by Nokia.
I’m happy with the official twitter client, and otherwise there’s Mehdoh. No way I’m paying one cent for Twitter on Windows Phone.
You may not, but many will.
There are free Twitter and FB options on Symbian as well as all the other platforms.
All Janole did was FINALLY followed the instructions on the e-mail that was sent to him. Perhaps if he had contacted Nokia (as indicated in the e-mail that was sent to him) in the first place, instead of tweeting petulant and unprofessional tweets, there wouldn’t have been all of the unnecessary posts and him showing his character.
If all he can develop is a Gravity type of app, he has zilch future with iOS, WP, or Android.
Needless to say, there is no way this developers app would have ever gotten $10 from me, before or after his hissy fit.
Thats the power of team jay montano !
Thank God, a sanity win.
No evil here, sigh, just incompetence.
So much for the evil Elop crap, though.
Ok Elop is saint. You happy now
I hit you on your face, and people around me get enraged. So I am forced to apologise.. That makes me a good guy right?
Had I seen Elop do this personally, and then withdraw, I’d agree with your analogy that no, it wouldn’t make him a good guy.
But then considering what happened, especially with this latest turn of events, it seems far more likely to me that this was never a decision from someone high up – although its reversal may have been by someone from higher up. And definitely not from someone like Elop, although the reversal order might have come from Elop if he’d seen the headlines and looked into it. (But I don’t think Elop was involved in either the ouster or the reversal, simply some lower-level developer support organization.)
This was just a PR f*****-up somewhere within Nokia. The assumption that it is evil Elop doing his deeds again is just not very likely, especially with this outcome. Had it been Elop’s doing, he would have soldiered on and Janole would have remained out. Far more likely it was done by someone on the lower echelons (maybe trying to eke out cost cuts from his budget, under generic stress to do so), who then after the news got a call from a boss higher up – concerned with the bigger picture – saying WTF.
And then it got reversed. Or maybe the lower echelon guy himself panicked and reversed course.
How likely is it, really, that Elop orchestrated Janole’s ouster and when someone blogged about it, he panicked and withdrew? Really? If he is the evil mastermind people make him out to be? The guy is running a multi-billion corporation, travelling all around the world, and he has the time and the inclination to plan the ouster of 15 Symbian developer champions?
No that is not very likely at all, far more likely that this was a lower-level cock-up and it got reversed because some bigger dude got involved after the bad press. If it was a high-level cock-up, they get reversed far more rarely in large corporations.
Yeah, there is no chance Elop would have personally been involved in such a big corporation. I’m just saying all this because it is YOU who drag Elop into this thing.
In any case, following your logic, he is no evil but only incompetent.
You just think I drag Elop into these conversations, but I don’t. Elop was brought up by many people, and his evil deeds, when this Janole case came to light.
I was too busy criticizing Nokia (whomever there did this) to bring up Elop. Others did – and there it started again…
This is the false logic I have a problem with: Whenever Nokia does something bad: It is Elop. Whenever they do something good: It is someone else, or Elop was under orders/pressure from someone else.
Elop may well have done many incompetent things, it is very hard to see February 11th as a competent way to start the transition.
Dude you doing the good work protecting Elop and all. Good luck you need it.
I doubt Elop will be at Nokia for much longer than the WP8 launch, no matter how it fares. You need to start looking at the bigger picture, which is Nokia. That is the topic of this blog too. All this dragging Elop into everything is nauseating – and simply mistaken.
I don’t remember the OPK days everyone blaming every little thing on OPK. Because, while OPK did his share of mistakes, he wasn’t the sole reason for the rot at Nokia. It is a big place, and in big places there are many reasons for things.
Elop is temporary. We hope Nokia is permanent, that is the team we are rooting for as Nokia fans. I don’t know if you are a Nokia fan anymore, but I am.
+1
It was very hard of me to give you that plus one. But I am rooting for Nokia too.
I wasn’t lazy so I went back to the both referenced threads in this article and counted how many times Elop was mentioned.
Out of 275 comments in the first thread, Elop was mentioned 32 times; out of which 13 times in negative context (5 completely unrelated to the matter at hand) by 9 people, and 4 times in positive (2 completely unrelated to the matter at hand) by two people (three of those comments made by you) rest were just mentioning him along with Nokia’s failure but in no way related with the very incident.
In the second thread out of 131 comments he was mentioned only 6 times; 4 in negative context all unrelated to the matter at hand, 1 in positive but also unrelated and one neutral.
In this thread you were the first to mention Elop, and you have a direct opposition after your comment. In all three threads, Elop was accused of being behind this exactly once.
So, no, Elop was not brought up by many people, and even less accusing him of this. You’re starting to develop a weird form of paranoia / social anxiety seeing everybody accusing Elop for all the bad things in Nokia which certainly ain’t the case; and then you go on defending him even without anybody mentioning him in the first place.
Yes, a plenty of people would say that Elop started this avalanche of Nokia failure, but it really isn’t the case that he’s accused of everything bad in Nokia – most of us will agree that there were many bad things within Nokia much prior to Elop’s arrival, his biggest fault, besides putting Nokia on an insane trajectory with his somnambule strategy, is not fixing those and in many cases even making the bad things worse. But, apart from a couple of specific beyond-help cases/trolls, it really isn’t the case of everybody accusing Elop for all things bad, and praising internal opposition working despite Elop’s agenda for all things good.
incognito:
Wrong.
I rest my case.
I was obviously commenting on the whole three-post thread on the subject, not merely this conclusion.
And incognito, you venture into intellectual dishonesty if you only count absolutely direct references to Elop being behind this personally. The totality and reality of the matter is quite different. I know because I’ve kept my distance in many of these threads (see how far it took me to actually comment on anything Elopey) and watched then disintegrate quite without my participation.
If someone starts a major rant against Elop in a thread like this, the only sane conclusion is that he must consider Elop being behind it, at least on certain level. Why otherwise rant against him? Why would this news invoke Elop in their head, unless they considered him the reason?
But if it makes you happy, I’d be just as glad if people stopped making crazy unrelated rants against anyone in any thread, and took a more serious approach to the matters at hand.
It is quite fair to rant againts Nokia for the Janole case. I know I did and I’m happy it got resolved, because Nokia was being stupid. Quite another to pinpoint some person at Nokia and direct it at them without a shred of evidence.
Sure, Elop is in the end responsible for everything, but that isn’t what those people were saying. Not really – and you know it just as well as I do.
Here are some comments from the threads involving the Janole case…
Yes, I must be imagining things, nobody is blamig Elop for kicking out Janole! incognito, come on…
+1
It’s evil dark lord sith Elop’s fault!
Maybe we should wait for the next episode. Then we get to see if QT survives the “phantom menace”.
Now Elop’s “Phantom Menace”?
That’s a new one. But I admit, a creative response.
Next up: Elop is Jar Jar Binks.
- Ooh mooey mooey I love you!
- You almost got us killed! Are you brainless?
- I spake!
- The ability to speak does not make you intelligent. Now get out of here.
Actually, that fits your story. You should use that.
(Actually it fits my story too. Jar Jar Binks wasn’t evil, nor was he on a mission to destroy, he was just… Jar Jar Binks.)
Exactly, now would you want jar jar binks to run your company? I just wish we’d see more competence with the ceo and the board.
I’d love to see Jar Jar Binks hold a keynote!
I don’t know why people hated Jar Jar Binks. People hated Ewoks too.
I loved both!
p.s. I don’t love Elop. But I do think that while the jury is still out on the comptence-for-this-job angle, and certainly many criticisms are warranted, I don’t see reason to believe in the evil/trojan angle. For example, Elop can be rightly criticised for the handling of February 11th.
MeeGo is Jar Jar’s operating system
just had to LOL at this. Carry on.
Let’s wait an see what Jar Jar Binks says when he decides to kill QT.
“You no “ecosystem”, but “live on” u can, me make a “bridge” for u, WP8 me ka friend.”
Or maybe Elop says
“I am your father” to Janne.
That makes no sense. It would make more sense in the analogy that Elop would tell that to you.
- Darth “Elop” Vader: “gordonH, I am your father.”
- gordonH: “NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!”
Then do I get to kill him?
It’s not stupidity to end this programs for Symbian devs! Nokia has to pressure them in some way to make them move their efforts to WP.
Even if they represent no direct costs for Nokia, they all have an opportunity cost, which means, it’s more usefull to have this devs making apps for an OS that still have chances to grow than having them creating apps for a dead OS.
Thing is, we all have free choices. Pressuring from above never works, especially not from Nokia haha
so this guy made all this drama over nothing,
he didn’t even tell the whole story of what happened,
what a loser
+1.
First u make app as good as he did (or better), then call him loser.
he didnt make the drama… someone asked him about a WP version of Gravity and he basically said “I got kicked out of the dev program so I wont bother now” and he was kicked out… the “drama” as you put it was made by the blogosphere and commentators alike
He knew what he was doing – he fully knows the power of tweets and retweets! And the whole “I got kicked out…” – that was drama. Unnecessary.
Was he ever writing Gravity for WP?
I read it was something he wasn’t gonna consider anyway until it reaches sufficient mass.
Hopefully we’ll see something though I fear that if he waits too long he might get overwhelmed by the other twitter devs.
I believe he’s considering windows phone 8, not windows phone 7. He tweeted that he’s waiting for the new windows phone devices.
Much ado about nothing in the end. Shaking my head at this whole situation but it kinda leads me to believe that the developer was making a mountain out of a mole which led Nokia to do damage control.
*mole hill
If they listen to media/blog pressure, they should also ditch WP right away!
This whole ordeal, plus the burning platform memo, has probably ended legitimate symbian development, reserving it for hobbyists only.
Hay sucks is that Nokia can’t release the entire source code into the wild because some of it it is licensed from third parties. So John Q. Public and his rag tag team of Symbian enthusiast won’t even be able to advance the platform to it’s full potential.
I sincerely hope WP8 is stellar
We ragtag team of Symbian enthusiasts can’t do much with the platform because it’s still closed source and locked down. Nokia should do the smart thing and release it under a fully open source license, like what HP have done with WebOS. No other company is using Symbian anyway.
Just don’t let it die a slow death out of neglect.
“Just don’t let it die a slow death out of neglect.”
Maybe letting Symbian die is not out of neglect. I am glad Jolla Mobile fought and got itself a decent chance.
Maybe Janole and other Symbian devs think Windows Phone is shit.
What’s with using the word Champion? It sounds really corny/cheesy!
I look forward to seeing Jan’s contributions to Windows phone
Let’s get those talents to Jolla!
i much prefer jan ole joining jolla or BB10 than staying at nokia
Since Elop wasnt able to surpass symbian sales with wp and developers still work on symbian (some), I think someone got the idea to kick the devs on the behind, but it was worse, very bad press, and who in their right mind will develop for nokia again if they treat their devs like that.
happy for ya janole .