Why the Vivaldi tablet never came to market

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In January 2012, Aaron Seigo announced the Spark tablet. Planned as free hardware with KDE's Plasma Active as its desktop environment, the tablet was quickly renamed Vivaldi. Delay after delay followed, with few details, until July 1 of this year, when the project was officially canceled. Recently, Seigo gave his perspective about what happened, and the lessons to be learned from the experience.

Vivaldi and its related projects came directly from the first release of Plasma Active, the KDE desktop tailored to mobile devices, in September 2011. "Everyone agreed that if it wasn't on a tablet or other mobile device, what we were doing was just an academic exercise," Seigo said. "So we took Plasma Active around to various vendors, [and] we got very positive feedback, but nobody was really willing to be the first to release a device with Plasma Active."

In response, Seigo established a cooperative company, MakePlayLive, to produce and distribute the tablet and other free software and hardware products. As might be expected, many of those involved with MakePlayLive were also involved in KDE. In addition, MakePlayLive used git.kde.org to store its code, and KDE sites sometimes promoted MakePlayLive.

However, Seigo emphasized that "there was no official endorsement from KDE." In fact, one reason for establishing MakePlayLive was to create some distance between KDE and the effort to build a tablet. Consequently, the failure to produce Vivaldi has no effect on Plasma Active or any other part of KDE. "Having this hardware would have been a massive strategic and practical boost [to Plasma Active], but without it, Plasma Active is right where it always was," Seigo said.

MakePlayLive's efforts began with several months of researching and testing off-the-shelf devices from Asian companies. Many manufacturers were simply "out of our league," Seigo said, and they refused to take anything less than six-figure minimum orders. MakePlayLive had just settled on a possible device when its efforts were made obsolete with the manufacturer's release of a revised device. To make matters worse, the manufacturer could not say when the next revision would happen, or what its specs might be. Nor would the manufacturer agree to release any of the kernel code under a free license. "And this was one of the better companies we could find," Seigo commented.

Finding another manufacturer was difficult, especially because many of those that claimed Linux support proved, on investigation, to mean that they were planning to add it. However, by December 2013, MakePlayLive had settled on QiMOD, a UK-based company working on open hardware.

What happened then depends on who you listen to. According to QiMOD's public statements, MakePlayLive failed to communicate and kept changing the specifications. However, Seigo claimed, the demands for revised specifications came from QiMOD. Even worse, he said that the parts received were not functional without considerable modification.

QiMOD decided to redo the printed circuit board from scratch, but the delays meant Vivaldi would be released with year-old specifications, making it non-competitive. Moreover, after eighteen months, Seigo was "tapped out" financially. In desperation, MakePlayLive announced Improv, a commercial grade engineering board that would give MakePlayLive something to show for its efforts and help to finance Vivaldi while providing a technical base. The idea was that Improv would help open hardware developers to build prototypes quicker and bring products to market sooner. MakePlayLive got as far as taking pre-orders, but received too few to place an order with a manufacturer.

"The interest for Improv just didn't materialize," Seigo said. "Some people couldn't see past Improv as a 'Raspberry Pi++,' which it really wasn't, and some people thought it was entirely irrelevant. One KDE developer said that they just didn't feel any need to compete against Android like they did for MS Windows or MacOS."

The twin failures of Vivaldi and Improv left MakePlayLive in the position of having to offer refunds on pre-orders and paying for orders of components for which it no longer had a use. In all, the immediate debt "came to a little under $6K. A number of people who purchased an Improv actually told us to keep the money; some even sent more to help defray costs of winding down."

However, Seigo personally claimed to have invested $200,000 over the last two and a half years. This sum consisted of travel expenses, sample purchasing and test runs, support for free software projects, and "some salaries." He added that "my income during that period was pretty insignificant. I was taking a tiny wage at this point, just enough to pay some bills. Thankfully, my wife was working. Everything else went to other people working on [MakePlayLive] and material costs." This information may serve as a partial answer to complaints about transparency, emphasizing exactly how under-funded MakePlayLive actually was.

Lessons learned

Seigo takes a stoic perspective on the failure of MakePlayLive:

Certainly there was a certain amount of egg on my face. The failure was public. I got raked over the coals within KDE more than once for setting up a company that would dare to put money into these things. But that's not something I can't live with. I swung and missed. Next!

However, as might be predictable from such a frequent blogger, Seigo has derived several conclusions from events. To start with, Seigo noted that MakePlayLive was under at least two major handicaps. First, it was under-funded. "I think a more reasonable budget would have been closer to $500k. I could easily make it into a million dollar project," Seigo commented. Second, breaking into manufacturing is "very hard without a track record because you're building the relationship network from scratch. Saying 'no' to you is very easy: there are no existing sales agreements at risk."

Seigo also concluded that trying to deal with Asia while resident in Europe was a mistake:

Were I to start over, I'd forget Asia entirely for this kind of project and focus on Europe and the Americas for engineering and design. There are an increasing number of companies in North America and Europe that are able to do this work from printed circuit board design to manufacture and assembly [with] better quality engineering, fewer cultural gaps to jump through, and fewer time zones to wrangle. The cost will be higher, but the engineering results will be better and, amortized across the production run, the cost per device would not be significantly more. [Besides,] the Asian market for these kinds of products is entirely oriented towards retailers.'

Perhaps most important of all, Seigo now suspects that he was looking for support in the wrong places. "There isn't much business experience in the free software communities," he said, adding: "It doesn't help that most of the companies out there with a focus on free software do not care about mobile in the least. Those that do have their own semi-proprietary platforms already that they are protecting (for example, Android)."

In particular, most free software advocates fail to understand "that everything can go right with a new product and it can still fail. Success is never guaranteed -- not because anything is necessarily wrong with it, but because most new products fail -- which is why this hasn't destroyed my world or anything."

More specifically, Seigo said, "I don't think KDE is the right community with which to engage in these sorts of things. There is not enough understanding of appreciation for why such a thing is important, and certainly too few people willing and able to step up and make a difference-making contribution."

Certainly, an appeal to the KDE community seems to have done little to increase the pre-orders of Improv board — or even to have generated any discussion.

However, the lack of interest ran even deeper, according to Seigo. Despite the publicity given the Vivaldi tablet, "Few applications were made available with a touch interface. With a few exceptions, those that did make this leap were done by the small group of Plasma Active developers." By contrast, "those working on middleware and libraries tended not to see Plasma Active as a worthwhile support target, and some openly stated more than once that Plasma Active was happening at the expense of Plasma Desktop [the main KDE interface]" — an assertion that Seigo, who is a lead developer of both interfaces, characterizes as "both factually incorrect and absurd."

Nor did KDE e.V., the non-profit that oversees KDE affairs, show any "political will" to support Vivaldi or Improv, or even to explore their potential.

Examining how to strategically take full advantage of the opportunities presented by having a mobile stack, a digital content delivery system and store and what was the start of hardware/software cross-over projects would have made sense. Few were interested and opportunities were undoubtedly lost as a result.

Seigo conceded that, "I do think there is amazing potential energy in the various relevant communities. I am, however, at a loss as to how to tap into it." For whatever reason, Vivaldi and Improv simply failed to capture the imagination of many free-software advocates or KDE supporters. Perhaps the new ties between business and free software that MakePlayLive seemed to imply were simply too radical for those who could have helped it most.

Prospects for open hardware

All in all, Seigo found the effort to launch open hardware devices "amazingly stressful at times." Yet, asked if he would consider another effort, he replied, "Crazily enough, yes." He would currently be unable to finance it to the extent that he did MakePlayLive, but he would definitely like to try again. "Beyond all other things, I really hope that people see what we did as evidence that it is worth trying, rather than taking it as a lesson that it can't be done."

If nothing else, Seigo's analysis provides an informed perspective from which to view other free-software-based efforts, such as the Canonical and Jolla phones. Not only does he give insight into the delays and difficulties of manufacturing and marketing, but, if he is correct, regardless of technical quality, hardware with any degree of openness is likely to require not just one or two efforts, but many, before even one succeeds.