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by bryanlarsen 3078 days ago
IMO, Purism's biggest innovation is their business plan, they're profitable selling a small number of phones. The Ubuntu Edge failed their crowdfunding campaign with $12M pledged; the Purism succeeded with $2.5M.

The business plans of Nokia, OpenMoko, Firefox and Ubuntu all depended on selling millions of phones. Built on the ashes of those efforts, Purism appears to have a viable business plan making good profits selling many thousands.
4 comments
nextos 3078 days ago
Nokia's N770-N9 Maemo/Meego saga was profitable despite being a side-project and having little to no marketing.

It's the best mobile platform I've ever tried. After all, it was just a tweaked Debian distro.

It's exciting to see Purism might head the pure Linux stack way, not just a de-Googled Android route. I also wish Jolla eventually open sources Sailfish, or gets bought by someone who does this.

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seba_dos1 3078 days ago
Nokia (Maemo) - not really, it was more of a side project that worked pretty well for them and still would with such volumes as it got. They had a chance to turn it into something bigger, but waited for too long, playing internal battles between Maemo and Symbian teams, so eventually Microsoft came and pulled out the plug.

OpenMoko - not really, it was major mismanagement in other areas (and some poor luck) that killed it, but AFAIR production volume was actually being predicted quite well.

Firefox OS, Ubuntu Edge - sure.

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nickik 3066 days ago
Totally agree, Nokia had it in its hand to create a third option. Nokia had lots of consumer good will, the N900 (and Maemo) was super well received specially by developers but it could even compete against Android for normal consumers as well.

They should have iterated on this with every flagship phone and push it to the cheaper phones as well.

I was so sad and angry when this never came together. They just spiraled out of control after that.

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shmerl 3078 days ago
I think what's helping here is also gradual commoditization of mobile hardware components.
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nabeards 3076 days ago
Almost a return to the 70s era of computer startups! I'm hopeful for their success.
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