Hit the nail on the head! I worked for Intel nearly a decade ago. I was a full time employee for a few years. They saw Android and the Apple app store capturing mobile users and decided to dump $$$ into an app store for the PC (Intel AppUp). The effort lasted a few years before it crashed and burned HARD. During this time they also tried to spin up Meego/Moblin for mobile and tablet, then a partnership with Samsung to work on Tizen, and bought up McAffee.

The amount of money Intel flushes down the toilet with fruitless endeavors is sad, especially considering the number of people that end up jobless (like many of my good friends did) because of it.

Platform fails without them, though.

Announce a platform, intending for it to fail? Big fish like Intel are masters at this now.

I see as rich people who buy expensive things and let them rot because they forgot they bought them or so.

I have no idea how Intel could work their way into running an app store beyond "we have tech and market dudes, good enough right?"

It’s still software and besides the hardware which wasn’t much different from a standardized gaming PC, they worked on building the software platform and developer accessories. Something they happen to be pretty decent at...

Oh wait.. they did. And there's not.

The design of the UI and the design of the apps was like the first time using a brand new system where everything has been thoroughly thought through. It used touch very well to be as basic and straightforward as possible.

Lots of people really thought Windows Mobile was great (including here on HN). Meego was great too.

It doesn't matter.

The point is that it's unclear why Intel (a company that has failed at every consumer focused business they have ever tried) would have done better with Nokia than Microsoft did, given that MS has had considerable success in consumer markets, already had carrier relationships, had developer relationships etc etc).

By consumer market, you mean PC market. They were tiny in mobile market. Its the reason they try to shove Nokia into its platform

Nokia already has they the dev relationship, carrier relationship, retail relationship. They dont need all that from microsoft. The only thing they need is money and strong leadership. Nokia was mismanaged into oblivion.

> It doesn't matter

No, it does matter. They were already one foot in the grave, but jumping ship into windows mobile is just the nail in the coffin.

A little less sarcasm and snark will probably leave room for absorbing what people are saying.

What? Not at all!

Nokia was screwed before Microsoft bought them. If they'd shipped Meego on phones two years earlier (start of 2009) they'd have had a chance, maybe.

At the time I thought Microsoft was Nokia's best hope (and Nokia was the best hope for Microsoft's mobile strategy).

I'm pushing back on the idea that Intel would have been some magic lifeline for them.

Apple had revolutionized the category and was making over 90% of the profits, had all the apps and other ecosystem lock-in, the ipad on top of that, the highest user satisfaction, an avalanche of free publicity, almost all of the consumer mindshare, and a fleet of rapidly expanding and phenomenally popular stores for distribution. A brand new "well thought out os" with no apps simply wasn't going to make any kind of dent in Apple's market share.

Meanwhile the anti-Apple enthusiasts had been coalescing strongly around Android for several years. A bunch of big companies were fighting tooth and nail for the scraps and who won? The guys with the "most well thought out Android skin"? No. It was the guys who were by far the most ruthless and shameless competitors. That's what won between all the android handset makers, that's who won between Android makers and other "well thought out OS's" and imho that's who wins all hypothetical matchups as well if all you're bringing to the table is being cool and well thought out.

Now if Intel wanted to lose $5B a year and buy marketshare then yeah they could have done that but they would have never made back that money.

"Despite a limited release,[5] the N9 received widespread critical acclaim, with some describing it as Nokia's finest device to date. It was praised for both its software and hardware, including the MeeGo operating system, buttonless 'swipe' user interface, and its high-end features"

At launch, we know that the software are great. Hardware are great. But the management was abyssimal. Alot of internal politics, burning money, and ultimately, Meego was killed before it was borne into the world. The irony is that N9 was still a great revolutionary phone critically acclaimed, despite knowing its gonna be short lived.

I wouldnt have been so bitter about it if N9/Meego was not great.

(Typed from a Sailfish OS running Xperia X. :-) )

Actually it was only Nokia Mobile that was bought and after how everything went Nokia Siemens Networks, got enough money to buy Siemens part back, become the current owner of Bell Labs and via the HMD agreement, one of the best Android OEMs.

In what concerns Windows, although it lost on the phones, it is winning on the tablet space via 2-1 hybrid/convertible laptops against Android and ChromeOS tablets.

And most PDA like industrial deployments are still mostly Windows based.

Now they're doing drone shows and sports as incremental business attempts. Sometimes I think of Intel as a PR agency with a semiconductor fab in the backyard...

Pretty sure you can guess how well that worked. My suggestion, making the tacky 90's robot recite Cartman lines or otherwise swear in ridiculous ways, was... not exactly in alignment with the rest of our content strategy, you might say. And probably not what Intel had in mind. But I bet adoptions would have broken the two-digit barrier.

I think they have a tendency to ditch products prematurely. They enter markets that will take 10 years to mature and then cut their losses when the expected level of profit doesn't appear. They even do this to divisions that are actually turning a profit. Which goes over really badly with their customers.

Amazon was far from the first company to do cloud. For instance, Sun Microsystems pushed it in the 90s, and Loudcloud, I mean "Opsware" did it in 2003.

I think the difference was that Amazon committed to it for a loooooong time.

I worked on OpenStack for a few years. Take this with a grain of salt, but I heard that Intel funded a great deal of it... quietly.

Basically they wanted to promote OpenStack, but at the same time they didn't want to piss off companies competing with it.

That's what the article says. They had two lines that did basically the same thing, and axed one of them.

According to the article, the hardware on Nervana was better, but the software was worse.

Literally the first sentence of the second paragraph in the article (that you read, right?)

> The announcement itself isn’t very surprising. In mid December the company announced its acquisition Habana Labs for approximately $2 billion.