Hi, Quim Gil wrote: > On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 14:02 +0200, ext Dave Neary wrote: >> In fact, I would use this as an opportunity to do a real competitive >> analysis, and not specifically look for advantages MeeGo has over >> Android. After all, Android has more market share, more handsets, more >> apps, a very coherent developer story, great developer tools, and (in >> spite of what Steve Jobs says) a relatively unfragmented developer >> experience across a wide range of devices. Perhaps we can learn >> something from them, without necessarily copying them. > > Sounds great. Are you volunteering for picking this task? :)
I can think of a couple of ways we could structure this: first would be as a SWOT analysis (Strengths/Weaknesses/Opportunities/Threats) on MeeGo, which would not just cover Android, but also iOS, Windows Mobile 7, WebOS and other smartphone OSes. The second is to do a straightforward comparative analysis of MeeGo & Android. This is what I would prefer for the moment. We could then do further comparisons with the other platforms if we felt it could be useful. Within this comparison, there seems to me to be three or four very high-level categories into which we can group comparison factors: * User experience - what is the out-of-the-box user experience for a MeeGo handset user vs Android handset user? * Application developer experience - How does the platform look to a third party application developer? * ODM/operator experience - How easy/hard is it to get the platform on a device & into the hands of a customer? * Core developer experience - How easy/hard is it to influence & co-develop the platform? Underneath each of these, there are obviously a large number of criteria we could look at. For the user experience, availability, functionality, consistency & integration of applications come to mind. The availability of choice in hardware. User experience of the default platform. Maybe objective criteria like sexiness. As an application developer, market opportunity & size, distribution channel, easy-of-use & popularity of platform APIs, availability of developer tools, high quality documentation and developer support, "buzz", a critical mass of "momentum users", platform fragmentation/consistency... am I missing any big ones? ODMs & operators will look for a good porting guide, low porting cost & time to market, out-of-box support for popular hardware, buzz & momentum behind platform (ODMs & operators think about user experience & market opportunity too), cost of platform licencing, availability of professional support, stability & featurefulness of platform, extensibility for operators. And since I'm not coming from an ODM/operator background, I'm sure I've missed many other criteria that operators consider. Finally, as a co-developer, I'm looking at the governance model, transparency of operation, public roadmap, open access, availability of source code, timely response to patch integration requests, etc - basically, the ability to work with the project on an equal footing to sponsoring companies. I'd welcome some feedback & further criteria we should include in the comparative analysis - I can start a wiki page with a table where we can start listing this stuff - once we have our list of criteria, we can start evaluating how Android & MeeGo fare in each one. Cheers, Dave. -- maemo.org docsmaster Email: dne...@maemo.org Jabber: bo...@jabber.org _______________________________________________ MeeGo-community mailing list MeeGo-community@meego.com http://lists.meego.com/listinfo/meego-community
