What is keeping Sailfish OS alive

Image by Jolla

In my previous post, I used Windows phone as an example of how focusing too much on design can hurt your product. This post is a follow-up for it, focusing on the importance of design intentions and the overall reasons to do things in the first place.

Be realistically ambitiuos

For the sake of comparison, let's pretend that Jolla chose the strategy everyone expected it to choose: follow iOS and Android to join the mobile OS and smartphone business. Just close your eyes, and picture Jolla offering the same experience what Apple, Samsung and others already do.

Wonderful, here's the thing: that strategy has been perfected by Apple, Google (later Samsung et al.) since 2005. They will keep doing so in the future, without any intentions of slowing down. 7 years later Jolla was ready to compete against industry giants, with the announcement of Sailfish OS.

Enough pretending. Competing with this strategy, against these guys, is like trying to race against a bullet train, with a bicycle, without pedals. You will get nowhere; even if you pretend to. It's utterly silly to think you can beat them in their own game they've rigged beyond recovery.

You'll be spending all your time on things you can't compete with. And since everything you implement has a cost, it's more logical to find a simple solution for all those things that make your product a reality. Move through the mandatory feature list as fast as you can, so that you can save time and effort to use on what, in your vision, makes you relevant.

This is where Microsoft stumbled. WP tried to create value too close to competition, instead of building on top of and strengthening existing ones; those that made Microsoft relevant. In the end WP sabotaged Microsoft's opportunity to not limit its users to stationary computing. Their ambition to build a smartphone OS ended up instead limiting people also on the go. Looks like they're finally fixing this with Windows 10, so let's move on.

Be honest to what you exist for

Three years after the Windows phone launch, Sailfish OS rolled out as a very limited and rough experience. You were all set, if you had enough interest and patience to wade through tutorials, reviews and forum posts. It worked if you knew exactly what you were doing, but it didn't leave any room for user errors. There was hardly any guidance to help user. To be open about things, we shipped it with a beta stamp. Digital pioneers and average consumers alike received their copy, installed on the finest hardware we had access to; a mid-range phone on all accounts. A failure by industry standards.

But the thing is, we're not competing solely within industry standards; things what others already master. We have our minimal solutions for those, but our real business is where others cannot easily go. Either because they're too scared, lack the required vision, or don't really care as long as they can convince people buying their next wave of latest and greatest.

People deserve more natural and focused interfaces than current industry standards require. We need more openness, collaboration and sustainability =  a thorough value domain reset. Automation and computing in general are less about the technology, and more about finding a common direction to increase human potential; everyone deserves more time for things that are defining humanity.

What makes Jolla and Sailfish OS relevant, is our reasons to exist in the mobile space, and what our actions stand for in contrast to the competition. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what keeps Sailfish OS alive. Not what it can directly offer, because it's not much at the moment. There's a mountain of work remaining -- actually -- make that two mountains; the operating system alone is not what you need for your computing tasks. It's merely a start.

We still need apps, more supported services and other natural functionality integration points. They are paramount in making sure Sailfish OS also stays relevant. There's a big functionality debt we owe our community. It's through their passion and trust, that we've given this chance to make a difference.

Respecting that debt would not only be human, but also an exception that this industry sorely needs to change.


Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.

Follow-up: Why the status bar has to go

My earlier post, about calling a persistent status bar a ghost of desktop days, got somewhat mixed reception. I was mainly talking about individual details, and forgot to summarize the big picture.

I'd like to take another swing at the topic from a less technical angle, by asking why do we own smartphones?

Everyone uses them to communicate with people important to them. We use them to consume content through any channels available. We all have slightly different ways we use them. Others take things further, while the rest settle for less. But everyone has one thing in common;  we all do it on the go.

We pay money to carry a piece of technology around all day, to do all these things when we want to. The value comes from the device enabling communication, access to information and entertainment. It exists so that we don't have to be tethered to our grampa's box all the time.

I don't understand why are we required to babysit our devices all day, using that small bar at the top of the screen?

When facing a critical error, all smartphones have that "I just soiled my pants" -look of a small child on their faces. But children are much easier to debug, because all issues are local. With cellular reception woes, the catastrophe can occur in places you don't even know that exists. You're only left with the stink.

We must stop traveling a road, where you have to keep one eye on the status bar and one on the content. We can't live under a constant fear of our devices jumping off a cliff the moment we're not able to see the status bar. It's a UX shot so wide, that you could park Jupiter with its moons between it, and the "smartphone" target you we're aiming at.

Making better products and better software is not easy, and will only happen gradually. Nobody makes software that behaves badly on purpose. It's bad because we, as users, are holding on to certain things extremely tight. We're constantly demanding more features on top of the old ones, without understanding the complexity it invites. Complexity in the software is the same for bugs, what blood in the water is for sharks. An open invitation to ruin your pool party.

That's why rebooting the smartphone value domain is important to see what is really needed.

Look at any, big, companies, that are throwing thousands after thousands of developers and testers at their software products, to keep the quality on an acceptable level. Even they struggle to keep the water safe for swimming. They're not bad at software, but their products are simply unwieldy.

And they're complex because we demand them to be. So make sure you demand only what you really need, because it will affect with who you're sharing your swimming pool?

Is it with people important to you? Or with bunch of f*cking sharks?

The decision is yours.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next post. In the meantime, agree or disagree, debate or shout. Bring it on and spread the word.