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“Maurine Smith died March 8, 1919, at the age of twenty-three years. Nearly her whole life had been one of intense physical suffering, and she knew few of the usual felicities.” Yvor Winters is introducing us to a poet whose name you likely have never encountered. Smith and Winters were members of the Poetry Club of the University of Chicago, along with Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and a few others. Five of Smith’s poems were published in Poetry two and a half years after her death. After another two years, Monroe Wheeler published a chapbook, The Keen Edge, containing eighteen of Smith’s poems. Winters provided the brief introduction: “Unless one speaks of the dead from a very complete knowledge, one speaks with diffidence, and my acquaintance with Miss Smith was slight. . . . Thin, and a trifle bent, withdrawn she surveys the autumn morning through a window. And then the lines from an unpublished poem: “‘I dust my open book, But there is no dust on the pages.’ “A hand as fine as the lines, and that is all.” Winters’ closing line might almost be a poem. After publication of the chapbook, Smith evaporated from literary history for sixty years. She has no Wikipedia page – one's confirmation of existence in the digital age. In 1987, poet and publisher R.L. Barth returned The Keener Edge to print, and he later gave me a copy. The poet-novelist Janet Lewis, Winters’ widow and also a member of the Poetry Club, published a critical article, “The Poems of Maurine Smith,” in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review. Despite the growth in women’s studies and the revival of interest in many previously neglected female writers, Lewis’ piece remains the only substantial critical examination of Smith and her poetry I've been able to find. Lewis tells us she met Smith only once, in January 1919. I’m touched by Lewis using Smith’s first name after more than seventy years: “I think of Maurine as having a mind well schooled in English verse. I can as easily relate her work to that of Christina Rossetti as to that of Adelaide Crapsey, who was almost her contemporary, and certainly an influence.” Describing her sole meeting with Smith some 106 years ago, Lewis writes: “I cannot remember if Maurine submitted any poems for discussion that evening. She was too ill to attend the next meeting, when Glenway Wescott read [Smith’s] “Ceremony.” He read it, as he read each of the poems which we dropped on the table, without giving the name of the writer. I remember, although not knowing whose poem it was, how deeply I was touched by it, the beauty of the control of both form and feeling. This is the poem. It may as well be introductory now, as it was then: “The unpeopled conventional rose garden Is where I shall take my heart With this new pain. Clipped hedge and winter-covered beds Shall ease its hurt. When it has grown quiet, I shall mount the steps, slowly, And put three sorrows in the terra-cotta urn On that low gate-pillar, And leave them there, to sleep, Beneath the brooding stillness of a twisted pine.” Lewis notes that the members of the Poetry Club were interested in free verse, the formless form then still something of a novelty: “It was not entirely respectable in 1918.” Another Smith poem reminds Lewis of Christina Rosetti’s “Haply I may remember, and haply may forget.” Here is “The Dead”: “You, who were blind to beauty, Unheedful of song, You have time now to remember In your quiet under the ground; And does the time seem long? “Harken, in your silence; All things grow. Is not your heart importunate? You, too, must long again To feel the wind blow.” As late as 1930, Winters was hoped to publish a more complete edition of Smith’s poems, with a biography supplied by her sister. He believed some forty poems were extant. In a letter to Glenway Wescott, Winters writes: “Maurine was one of our best poets, I am more and more certain.” See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.
A librarian friend and I were talking about the similarities between library cataloguing and taxonomy in biology – the art of classification – and the sort of people such specialized disciplines attract. Formerly a piano teacher, she was attracted to library science by way of cataloging and loving books. It’s less formulaic than I would have assumed. There’s an art to it, even a creative aspect, that goes beyond author/title/subject in the catalog. The goal is to aid the reader as much as possible in locating what he wants. Until ninth grade I planned to become a biologist. That year’s biology teacher, a bitter, unimaginative man with a crew cut and a pencil neck, changed all that. What I especially enjoyed was binomial nomenclature, the naming practice devised by Carl Linnaeus, the great eighteenth-century Swedish biologist. Binomial: Genus, species – the Latin name; for example, Homo sapiens. The idea that every life form could be named to distinguish it from every other appealed to me. So did the notion that all organisms are related, that you could literally devise a family tree, an effort which always reminds me of Borges’ Library of Babel. The librarian and I agreed that classification, in this sense, is useful (and somehow comforting) but it also invites hubris. Any attempt to collect and systemize knowledge – a dictionary or encyclopedia, the Human Genome Project – has a comically presumptuous aspect. Biologists are forever revising categories, distinguishing sub-species from species. We’ve learned so much and know so little. Accumulating knowledge and attempting to draw lessons from it, is a handy metaphor for out state. The English poet Stevie Smith, in a September 1937 letter to the novelist and journalist Helen Mitchison, writes: “I don’t think we can pass the buck to forces of evil or to anything but our own humanity. We are bloody fools—but then, we are hardly out of the egg shell yet.” Every human accomplishment is shadowed by its opposite. We solve one problem and it turns into another. According to the editors of Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (1982), Mitchison had previously written Smith “‘a gloomy letter’ about the world situation.” During that autumn, Hitler was in his ascendancy and rapidly rearming Germany, Stalin’s Great Terror was accelerating, the Second Sino-Japanese War was well under way and Spain was self-destructing. Smith, whose first and best novel, Novel on Yellow Paper, had recently been published, urges Mitchison to keep her cool: “I think we want to keep a tight hand—each of us on our own thoughts. I think at the present moment you are in a state of mind that hungers for the disasters it fears. If there are forces of evil, you see, you are siding with them, in allowing your thoughts to panic. Your mind is your only province—the only thing that is.” Around the time of Smith’s letter to Mitchison she wrote “Beautiful”: “Man thinks he was not born to die But that’s no proof he wasn’t, And those who would not have it so Are very glad it isn’t. “Why should man wish to live for ever? His term is merciful, He riseth like a beaming plant And fades most beautiful, “And his rising and his fading Is most beautiful. “Not, not the one without the other, But always the two together, Rising fading, fading rising, It is really not surprising To find this beautiful.” Smith died on this date, March 7, in 1971 at age sixty-nine.
Bertie Wooster has asked if he can purchase a gift for Jeeves while he is out, and the valet replies: “‘Well, sir, there has recently been published a new and authoritatively annotated edition of the works of the philosopher Spinoza. Since you are so generous, I would appreciate that very much.” This comes in the first chapter of Joy in the Morning, published by P.G. Wodehouse in 1947. I was reading it late the other night, alone in the front room, and I started giggling and my eyes watered. The dog looked concerned. Ever since my nephew told me he had discovered Wodehouse and was going through his novels and stories like a guest at a party with an open bar, I’ve been reading Plum between more imposing volumes – including Spinoza, a thinker I discovered as a teenager thanks to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. (In another B&J confection, Carry On, Jeeves, Wodehouse has Jeeves say: “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”) A reader tells me in a comment on Tuesday’s post that he is reading Wodehouse’s Something Fresh (1915): “Every silly yet perfectly crafted page," he writes, "was a declaration of allegiance to something more enduring than even the greatest historical catastrophe -- the unexpected pleasure potential of just being alive. God bless the man – it’s a reminder I needed right now.” An amusing scene with a clerk in a bookshop follows Jeeves’ request. While there, Bertie runs into Florence Craye, an intellectual woman to whom he was once engaged. “‘Bertie!’ she says, ‘This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’” Bertie, our narrator, thinks: “‘It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.” Bertie tells Florence: “‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.’” Is there a moral component here, a lesson for all good readers? I suppose so. Don’t lie. Admit your shortcomings. But all of that is irrelevant. We laugh because all of us, at least on occasion, are tempted to put on airs so we appear smarter or better educated than we are. In effect, to lie. I’m reminded of something Nabokov told an interviewer: “All writers that are worth anything are humorists.” This seems obvious to some of us. Much of the best humor implies a nuanced understanding of the world, the ability to see comedy in tragedy and vice versa – the essence of literary accomplishment. The humorless are earnest and dull and leave little room for a good laugh or an insight into human nature. “I’m not P.G. Wodehouse,” Nabokov continues. “I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist. “ [Nabokov’s 1962 interview with Phyllis Meras for the Providence Sunday Journal is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019).]
Varlam Shalamov (1907-82), who ought to know, opens a poem with this line: “Memory has veiled / much evil . . .” Shalamov survived almost eighteen years in the Gulag, in the Arctic region known as Kolyma. His final imprisonment, from 1937 to 1951, was imposed after he referred to Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin as “a classic Russian writer.” Don’t read his stories looking for inspirational tales of courage, perseverance and adversity overcome. He would laugh bitterly at such foolish naiveté. That he survived the Gulag, unlike at least 1.7 million others, may be impressive. That so physically and emotionally damaged a man could write so many stories, Chekhovian in their understated precision, is miraculous. Today, the seventy-second anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death, is an appropriate time to read Shalamov’s poem, as translated by Robert Chandler: “Memory has veiled much evil; her long lies leave nothing to believe. “There may be no cities or green gardens; only fields of ice and salty oceans. “The world may be pure snow, a starry road; just northern forest in the mind of God.” The Anglophone world is finally catching up with Shalamov’s accomplishment. Now we have Donald Rayfield’s versions of his Kolyma Stories (2018) and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories (2020), which I reviewed here and here. Their combined 1,200 pages include 145 stories. An English-language website devoted to Shalamov and his work has posted a remarkable document, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps” (trans. Dmitry Subbotin and Robert Denis). The piece is dated 1961, ten years after his release from Kolyma. Here is the first of his forty-six hard-earned observations: “The extraordinary fragility of human nature, of civilization. A human being would turn into a beast after three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beatings.” Shalamov lived his final years in the Soviet Union in poverty. He was blind, deaf and suffered from Huntington’s disease, but continued composing poems until his final months, when visitors took his dictation. He died in 1982 at age seventy-four. “Somewhat like Paul Celan and Primo Levi,” Chandler writes, “Shalamov seems in the end to have been defeated by the destructive forces he withstood so bravely and for so long. His own life story may be the most tragic of all the Kolyma tales.” Here is a poem by Shalamov from 1955, as translated by Chandler: “All that is human slips away; everything was mere husk. All that is left, indivisible, is birdsong and dusk. “A sharp scent of warm mint, the river’s far-off noise; all equal, and equally light — all my losses and joys.” “Slowly, with its warm towel the wind dries my face; moths immolate themselves in the campfire’s flames.” [Chandler translates nineteen poems by Shalamov in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.]
Often, I think of the late Adam Zagajewski urging young poets – and by extension, the rest of us -- to “read everything.” The suggestion is not dictatorial. The Pole even admits he is a “chaotic reader,” as most of us are. I’ve never been systematic about much of anything and inevitably there are embarrassing holes in my education. Call it the Autodidact Syndrome. When it comes to books, we never know in advance what will come in handy, which volume will help solve a problem we didn’t know we were asking. Here is Zagajewski the literary cheerleader: “Read for yourselves, read for the sake of your inspiration, for the sweet turmoil in your lovely head. But also read against yourselves, read for questioning and impotence, for despair and erudition, read the dry, sardonic remarks of cynical philosophers like Cioran or even Carl Schmitt, read newspapers, read those who despise, dismiss, or simply ignore poetry and try to understand why they do it. Read your enemies and your friends, read those who reinforce your sense of what's evolving in poetry, and also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t yet understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.” Zagajewski’s enthusiasm is almost embarrassing but the juggernaut of aliteracy and the threat it poses to Western Civilization may already be irreversible. My friend Cynthia Haven published an interview with Zagajewski not long after his death in 2021 in which she reminds him of his “read everything” essay. He replies: “What can I say? I’m in favor of reading and taking into consideration past writers. But you know, I don’t know ancient Greek, my Latin almost doesn’t exist; I’m not one of those lofty professors who know everything and terrorize others with their perfect erudition. What’s important is to think, to read, to meditate, to react, to be imaginative. Sometimes a reduced reading list, if given strong attention, can be better than a classical education when pursued somewhat mechanically. Of course I want the past writers to persist but first of all I want thinking and being moved by intelligent texts to persist.” Good advice. Don’t be intimidated by the vastness of the reading list. Choose a volume someone once mentioned he enjoyed or that had a strong emotional or intellectual impact on him. Say, the Life of Johnson, Richard Wilbur’s poems, Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, a novel by P.G. Wodehouse or Unamuno’s Tragic Sense of Life. Read it and see where it carries you.
More in literature
“Maurine Smith died March 8, 1919, at the age of twenty-three years. Nearly her whole life had been one of intense physical suffering, and she knew few of the usual felicities.” Yvor Winters is introducing us to a poet whose name you likely have never encountered. Smith and Winters were members of the Poetry Club of the University of Chicago, along with Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and a few others. Five of Smith’s poems were published in Poetry two and a half years after her death. After another two years, Monroe Wheeler published a chapbook, The Keen Edge, containing eighteen of Smith’s poems. Winters provided the brief introduction: “Unless one speaks of the dead from a very complete knowledge, one speaks with diffidence, and my acquaintance with Miss Smith was slight. . . . Thin, and a trifle bent, withdrawn she surveys the autumn morning through a window. And then the lines from an unpublished poem: “‘I dust my open book, But there is no dust on the pages.’ “A hand as fine as the lines, and that is all.” Winters’ closing line might almost be a poem. After publication of the chapbook, Smith evaporated from literary history for sixty years. She has no Wikipedia page – one's confirmation of existence in the digital age. In 1987, poet and publisher R.L. Barth returned The Keener Edge to print, and he later gave me a copy. The poet-novelist Janet Lewis, Winters’ widow and also a member of the Poetry Club, published a critical article, “The Poems of Maurine Smith,” in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review. Despite the growth in women’s studies and the revival of interest in many previously neglected female writers, Lewis’ piece remains the only substantial critical examination of Smith and her poetry I've been able to find. Lewis tells us she met Smith only once, in January 1919. I’m touched by Lewis using Smith’s first name after more than seventy years: “I think of Maurine as having a mind well schooled in English verse. I can as easily relate her work to that of Christina Rossetti as to that of Adelaide Crapsey, who was almost her contemporary, and certainly an influence.” Describing her sole meeting with Smith some 106 years ago, Lewis writes: “I cannot remember if Maurine submitted any poems for discussion that evening. She was too ill to attend the next meeting, when Glenway Wescott read [Smith’s] “Ceremony.” He read it, as he read each of the poems which we dropped on the table, without giving the name of the writer. I remember, although not knowing whose poem it was, how deeply I was touched by it, the beauty of the control of both form and feeling. This is the poem. It may as well be introductory now, as it was then: “The unpeopled conventional rose garden Is where I shall take my heart With this new pain. Clipped hedge and winter-covered beds Shall ease its hurt. When it has grown quiet, I shall mount the steps, slowly, And put three sorrows in the terra-cotta urn On that low gate-pillar, And leave them there, to sleep, Beneath the brooding stillness of a twisted pine.” Lewis notes that the members of the Poetry Club were interested in free verse, the formless form then still something of a novelty: “It was not entirely respectable in 1918.” Another Smith poem reminds Lewis of Christina Rosetti’s “Haply I may remember, and haply may forget.” Here is “The Dead”: “You, who were blind to beauty, Unheedful of song, You have time now to remember In your quiet under the ground; And does the time seem long? “Harken, in your silence; All things grow. Is not your heart importunate? You, too, must long again To feel the wind blow.” As late as 1930, Winters was hoped to publish a more complete edition of Smith’s poems, with a biography supplied by her sister. He believed some forty poems were extant. In a letter to Glenway Wescott, Winters writes: “Maurine was one of our best poets, I am more and more certain.” See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.
A recent visit to Teotihuacán — the ancient Mesoamerican city in present-day Mexico, built by earlier cultures around 600 BCE and later rediscovered by the Aztecs — left me wonder-smitten by the see-saw of our search for truth and our search for meaning, by a peculiar confluence of chemistry, culture, and chance that unrinds the layers of reality to put us face to face with the mystery at its core. Situated at the foot of a dormant volcano, Teotihuacán stunned the Toltec settlers with the discovery of a lustrous black material partway between stone and glass, brittle yet hard, breathlessly… read article
20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3) Previously in "20 years of Linux on the Deskop": After contributing to the launch of Ubuntu as the "perfect Linux desktop", Ploum realises that Ubuntu is drifting away from both Debian and GNOME. But something else is about to shake the world… 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1) 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 2) The new mobile paradigm While I was focused on Ubuntu as a desktop solution, another GNOME+Debian product had appeared and was shaking the small free software world: Maemo. It will come as a shock for the youngest but this was a time without smartphones (yes, we had electricity and, no, dinosaurs were already extinct, please keep playing Pokémon instead of interrupting me). Mobile phones were still quite new and doing exactly two things: calls and SMSes. In fact, they were sold as calling machines and the SMS frenzy, which was just a technical hack around the GSM protocol, took everybody by surprise, including operators. Were people really using awkward cramped keyboard to send themselves flood of small messages? Small pocket computers with tiny keyboard started to appear. There were using proprietary operating systems like WinCE or Symbian and browsing a mobile version of the web, called "WAP", that required specific WAP sites and that nobody used. The Blackberry was so proprietary that it had its own proprietary network. It was particularly popular amongst business people that wanted to look serious. Obama was famously addicted to his Blackberry to the point that the firm had to create a secure proprietary network only for him once he took office in the White House. But like others, Blackberries were very limited, with very limited software. Nothing like a laptop computer. N770, the precursor In 2005, Nokia very quietly launched the N770 as an experiment. Unlike its competitors, it has no keyboard but a wide screen that could be used with a stylus. Inside was running a Debian system with an interface based on GNOME: Maemo. The N770, browsing Wikipedia Instead of doing all the development in-house, Nokia was toying with free software. Most of the software work was done by small European companies created by free software hackers between 2004 and 2005. Those companies, often created specifically to work with Nokia, were only a handful of people each and had very narrow expertise. Fluendo was working on the media framework GStreamer. Immendio was working on the GTK user interface layer. Collabora was focusing on messaging software. Etc. Far from the hegemony of American giant monopolists, the N770 was a mostly European attempt at innovating through a collaborative network of smaller and creative actors, everything led by the giant Nokia. During FOSDEM 2005, GNOME developer Vincent Untz lent me a N770 prototype for two days. The first night was a dream come true: I was laying in bed, chatting on IRC and reading forums. Once the N770 was publicly released, I immediately bought my own. While standing in line in the bakery one Sunday morning, I discovered that there was an unprotected wifi. I used it to post a message on the Linuxfr website telling my fellow geeks that I was waiting for my croissants and could still chat with them thanks to free software. Those days, chatting while waiting in a queue has been normalised to the point you remark someone not doing it. But, in 2005, this was brand new. So new that it started a running meme about "Ploum’s baker" on Linuxfr. Twenty years later, some people that I meet for the first time still greet me with "say hello to your baker" when they learn who I am. For the record, the baker, an already-old woman at the time of the original post, retired a couple years later and the whole building was demolished to give place to a motorbike shop. This anecdote highlights a huge flaw of the N770: without wifi, it was a dead weight. When I showed it to people, they didn’t understand what it was, they asked why I would carry it if I could not make calls with it. Not being able to use the Internet without a wifi was a huge miss but, to be fair, 3G didn’t exist yet. Another flaw was that installing new software was far from being user-friendly. Being based on Debian, Maemo was offering a Synaptic-like interface where you had to select your software in a very long list of .deb packages, including the technical libraries. Also, it was slow and prone to crash but that could be solved. Having played with the N770 in my bed and having seen the reactions of people around me when I used it, I knew that the N770 could become a worldwide hit. It was literally the future. There were only two things that Nokia needed to solve: make it a phone and make it easy to install new software. Also, if it could crash less, that would be perfect. The Nokia (un)management guide to failure But development seemed to stall. It would take more than two years for Nokia to successively release two successors to the N770: the N800 and the N810. But, besides some better performance, none of the core issues were addressed. None of those were phones. None of those offered easy installation of software. None were widely released. In fact, it was so confidential that you could only buy them through the Nokia website of some specific countries. The items were not in traditional shops nor catalogues. When I asked my employer to get a N810, the purchasing department was unable to find a reference: it didn’t exist for them. Tired by multiple days of discussion with the purchasing administration, my boss gave me his own credit card, asked me to purchase it on the Nokia website and made a "diverse material expense" to be reimbursed. The thing was simply not available to businesses. It was like Nokia wanted Maemo to fail at all cost. While the N800 and N810 were released, a new device appeared on the market: the Apple iPhone. I said that the problem with the N770 is that you had to carry a phone with it. Steve Jobs had come to the same conclusion with the iPod. People had to carry an iPod and a phone. So he added the phone to the iPod. It should be highlighted that the success of the iPhone took everyone by surprise, including Steve Jobs himself. The original iPhone was envisioned as an iPod and nothing else. There was no app, no app store, no customisation (Steve Jobs was against it). It was nevertheless a hit because you could make calls, listen to music and Apple spent a fortune in marketing to advertise it worldwide. The marketing frenzy was crazy. Multiple people that knew I was "good with computers" asked me if I could unlock the iPhone they bought in the USA and which was not working in Europe (I could not). They spent a fortune on a device that was not working. Those having one were showing it to everyone. With the iPhone, you had music listening and a phone on one single device. In theory, you could also browse the web. Of course, there was no 3G so browsing the web was mostly done through wifi, like the N770. But, at the time, websites were done with wide screens in mind and Flash was all the rage. The iPhone was not supporting Flash and the screen was vertical, which made web browsing a lot worse than on the N770. And, unlike the N770, you could not install any application. The iPhone 1 was far from the revolution Apple want us to believe. It was just very good marketing. In retrospective, the N770 could have been a huge success had Nokia done some marketing at all. They did none. Another Linux on your mobile In 2008, Google launched its first phone which still had a physical keyboard. Instead of developing the software from scratch, Google used a Linux system initially developed as an embedded solution for cameras: Android. At the same time, Apple came to the realisation I had in 2005 that installing software was a key feature. The App Store was born. Phone, web browsing and custom applications, all on one device. Since 2005, people who had tried the N770 knew this was the answer. They simply did not expect it from Apple nor Google. When Android was first released, I thought it was what Maemo should have been. Because of the Linux kernel, I was thinking it would be a "free" operating system. I made a deep comparison with Maemo, diving into some part of the source code, and was surprised by some choices. Why Java? And why would Android avoid GStreamer in its multimedia stack? Technical explanations around that choice were not convincing. Years later, I would understand that this was not a technical choice: besides the Linux kernel itself, Google would explicitly avoid every GPL and LGPL licensed code. Android was only "free software" by accident. Gradually, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) would be reduced to a mere skeleton while Android itself became more and more restricted and proprietary. In reaction to the iPhone and to Android, Nokia launched the N900 at the end of 2009. Eventually, the N900 was a phone. It even included an app store called, for unknown marketing reasons, "OVI store". The phone was good. The software was good, with the exception of the infamous OVI store (which was bad, had a bad name, a non-existent software offering and, worse of all, was conflicting with deb packages). The N900 would probably have taken the world by storm if released 3 years earlier. It would have been a success and a huge competitor to the iPhone if released 18 months before. Is it too late? The world seems to settle with an Apple/Google duopoly. A duopoly that could have been slightly shacked by the N900 if Nokia had done at least some marketing. It should be noted that the N900 had a physical keyboard. But, at that point, nobody really cared. When failing is not enough, dig deeper At least, there was the Maemo platform. Four years of work. Something could be done with that. That’s why, in 2010, Nokia decided to… launch Meego, a new Linux platform which replaced the Debian infrastructure by RPMs and the GNOME infrastructure by Qt. No, really. Even if it was theoretically, the continuation of Maemo (Maemo 6, codenamed Harmattan, was released as Meego 1), it felt like starting everything from scratch with a Fedora+KDE system. Instead of a strong leadership, Meego was a medley of Linux Foundation, Intel, AMD and Nokia. Design by committee with red tape everywhere. From the outside, it looked like Nokia outsourced its own management incompetence and administrative hubris. The N9 phone would be released in 2011 without keyboard but with Meego. History would repeat itself two years later when people working on Meego (without Nokia) would replace it with Tizen. Yet another committee. From being three years ahead of the competition in 2005 thanks to Free Software, Nokia managed to become two years too late in 2010 thanks to incredibly bad management and choosing to hide its products instead of advertising them. I’ve no inside knowledge of what Nokia was at this time but my experience in the industry allows me to perfectly imagine the hundreds of meetings that probably happened at that time. When business decisions look like very bad management from the outside, it is often because they are. In the whole Europe at the time, technical expertise was seen as the realm of those who were not gifted enough to become managers. As a young engineer, I thought that managers from higher levels were pretentious and incompetent idiots. After climbing the ladder and becoming a manager myself, years later, I got the confirmation that I was even underestimating the sheer stupidity of management. It is not that most managers were idiots, they were also proud of their incompetence and, as this story would demonstrate, they sometimes need to become deeply dishonest to succeed. It looks like Nokia never really trusted its own Maemo initiative because no manager really understood what it was. To add insult to injury the company bought Symbian OS in 2008, an operating system which was already historical and highly limited at that time. Nodoby could figure out why they spent cash on that and why Symbian was suddenly an internal competitor to Maemo (Symbian was running on way cheaper devices). The emotional roller coster In 2006, I was certain that free software would take over the world. It was just a matter of time. Debian and GNOME would soon be on most desktop thanks to Ubuntu and on most mobile devices thanks to Maemo. There was no way for Microsoft to compete against such power. My wildest dreams were coming true. Five years later, the outlooadministrative hubris. The N9 phone would be released in 2011 without keyboard but with Meego.k was way darker. Apple was taking the lead by being even more proprietary and closed than Microsoft. Google seemed like good guys but could we trust them? Even Ubuntu was drifting away from its own Debian and GNOME roots. The communities I loved so much were now fragmented. Where would I go next? (to be continued) Subscribe by email or by rss to get the next episodes of "20 years of Linux on the Desktop". I’m currently turning this story into a book. I’m looking for an agent or a publisher interested to work with me on this book and on an English translation of "Bikepunk", my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist typewritten novel which sold out in three weeks in France and Belgium. I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress. I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!
A while back, I wrote a post titled “What is a Platform?”. I defined what a platform is and why tech companies are so determined to become labeled as one. My definition of a platform is a tool that allows users to define and build their own things, which can be used by other users. Tech companies wish to own platforms, as they are the engines that propel the flywheel toward infinite growth. But as Bill Simmons puts it best, there’s always a good “zag” to every “zig”. I want to challenge my own assumptions that platforms are inherently the best business model and explore how the opposite model, point solutions, can be just as healthy in product design. I want to compare two companies I admire: Notion (the platform) and Linear (the point solution). I also want to acknowledge my feelings about Kibu’s place in this battle and how forces like competitors, AI, and market needs influence us. Notion, the Platform Notion, known for its minimalism, speed, and extensibility, has been the techy alternative to Google Docs for almost a decade. Its approach of building ‘Lego for software’ is embedded in the company’s culture and felt inside its product. From the beginning, Notion’s mission was to allow anyone to create software. But, after realizing that everyday humans had neither the time nor care to develop, they switched to productivity. Create a Notion account today, and you will be greeted with a blank canvas, much like a Word doc. But the real magic is the first time you press the / key, which opens a world of blocks, allowing you to seamlessly create lists, tables, charts, mentions, and embeds that all cooperate in the ecosystem of your given folder. Notion called itself the Lego of software. With blocks, you can define your own things. With a collection of things, you can design templates, which can be consumed by many. Notion entered a rocky era when it strayed from this path. On Lenny’s podcast, CEO Ivan Zhao recounts Notion’s “lost years,” where he reflects on a failed feature. Notion introduced Sprints, a specific methodology for managing projects. From the start, Ivan and the team felt Sprints didn’t feel right. After a year, they could articulate that injecting a rigid, less adaptable solution didn’t align with Notion’s core philosophy of block-based design. Imagine opening a box of Legos and finding a perfectly curved, painted airplane inside! Where’s the fun and customization in that?? For Ivan and Notion, anything outside of block-based thing-builders is not a tool that belongs in Notion. While incredibly friendly and familiar, Notion is very much a platform. Linear, the Point Solution I’ve already written about what makes Linear so beautiful. Linear’s strength lies in its focus on building the best issue-tracking tool for the IC engineer: the 20-something developer who just wants to code without the bureaucracy. This unwavering focus on a specific persona is what makes them a point solution for modern software development teams. A point-solution mindset is embedded in how Linear decides on features. In an interview with Head of Product Nan Yu, he reflects on one decision (paraphrasing): We never liked the idea of letting management add custom fields to Linear because if you add 100+ custom fields, all your ICs would hate it. But we kept getting requests for it, and we’d ask, “Well, why do you want custom fields?” And 40% of customers said, “Well, I have Customer X, and their request is really important. I need everyone to know that Customer X needs this. I need to track it.” That sounded like a very useful and powerful thing for us to do. So let’s build a solution that solves that problem without making ICs’ lives harder. Instead of building custom fields, Linear created Customer Requests, which captures issues and tags direct customer quotes from various support channels- all without ICs needing to do anything. I’m impressed by the incredible discipline Linear exemplifies here. Clearly, the easy and “more scalable” solution would have been to introduce custom fields. But because they knew it would undermine their key persona, they kept poking at the real problem and addressed that instead. In spirit, Linear and Notion have polar opposite perspectives: Notion welcomes platform-like design with blocks, custom fields, and automations, while Linear rejects it- staying disciplined in building out-of-the-box solutions that fit the lowest common denominator of its addressable market. So, what’s right? Cold take: they’re both right, and the lesson is that two roads can lead to equally desirable destinations. I’m much more focused on the question: what’s right for Kibu? Kibu is already much closer to Linear as a point solution, and I believe it should stay there. Kibu already has an incredible niche in the Disability Provider market, and we’re building real point solutions tailored for Day Habilitation programs within these providers. Our competitors, namely Therap, take a horizontal approach to their solutions- seeing Disability Providers as just one vertical of many. This forces customers to do upfront and ongoing management of defining generic things within Therap. Some providers may see this as powerful and extensible- likely large organizations with dedicated IT resources. Kibu’s bet is that the vast majority of the market doesn’t have this luxury and would prefer out-of-the-box solutions where things are already in their language (service records, attendance, members). Kibu, as a point solution, makes more sense for the market. Our market is exceptionally non-technical, highly regulated, and rightfully sees software as a secondary asset to their true offerings: the physical facilities and human resources that provide the service. Taken together, my bet is that our market would rather be told what they need than inspired to build it themselves. The more specific we can get, the better. A press release that reads “Kibu launches ready-made solution for Day Habs in Georgia” will resonate more than “Kibu introduces custom fields, allowing any organization to build their own solutions.” Kibu, as a point solution, will open the floodgates for our product team to introduce omotenashi- anticipating our users’ needs before they ask. Notifications and help documentation can be more specific. LLM solutions can be prompt-engineered with niche instructions. Our codebase will be hardcoded with the nouns and verbs our market understands, forcing our tech team to truly understand the needs of our users, which is constrained by our inability to dogfood. There’s so much more to unpack with AI’s influence, scaling the “Day Habs in Georgia” solutions, and more. Nevertheless, I believe that point solutions are what our market needs, and our messaging and product decisions should be guided by that assumption.
