Is one of MeeGo's problems its name?

Randall Arnold is proposing that one of MeeGo's problems is its name (which likely anyone from the Maemo community around when MeeGo was announced last year would agree with): But months later, Nokia’s retreat from MeeGo was followed by dismay amongst the faithful and abandonment by the casually interested. Many were put off by the name “MeeGo” and are now left to wonder if the childish-sounding appellation has some involvement in the operating system’s recognition problem. [...] Could MeeGo’s name be hurting its chances? I know it sounds trivial, but at some point adoption and acceptance are driven by marketing more than anything else. When consumers are faced with dozens of products that really aren’t differentiated at a meaningful level, then buy-in comes down to presentation. The best-looking of the bunch. The most clever commercial. The coolest name. The name is hardly the platform's most pressing issue (nor the most tackleable of them), and a name change at this point seems unlikely to generate more confidence in the platform.

Does MeeGo have a $32 license fee? No

More FUD from the man who brought you the excellent-journalism-in-action piece last year in Dublin: "Nokia's MeeGo is doomed". Back again with "MeeGo will be dead in eight months" Tamlin rants about MeeGo's inability to competent in the market, going so far as to invent a fictitious "32 dollar licence". An excerpt, A MeeGo licensee tells TechEye there's no chance for the platform. The 32 dollar licence (Android is $2, Microsoft is $100) is only getting bought up as a way to show and save face, to tell the partners involved that you're current and as a pat on the back. According to informed sources, MeeGo will be doomed as soon as eight months from now.

Despite the money thrown at the huge MeeGo developer conference in Dublin last year, where the entire Guiness brewery was hired out, it's a dead duck. Like throwing money down the drain. The tablet offered to all of the thousands of participants has been described to us as "horrible". Of course as MeeGo is an open source project and under no licencing more costly than the compliance program, the $32 is certainly an interesting one. Henri Bergius's rebuttal is below.

Understanding MeeGo

MeeGo presents a confusing subject, unsure enough of its positioning when it was first announced, recent business shifts have only confused things more. In response to a rather impressive blog post from TechEYE.net, Henri Bergius has written up a summary of sorts of the project and the platform to help clarify when it is and what it could be: Subsequent discussion has highlighted the Tablet and IVI UXes as something where the project's achieved openness fell far short of its publicised openness. Nathan Willis' write-up (in LWN) of Carsten Munk talk at the conference sheds further light.