Qt sees its future in Microkia
Symbian and MeeGo embers will float
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A Qt loyalist reckons that his cross-platform app and UI framework has got a bright future, even though Nokia has swallowed Microsoft's Windows Phone.
Qt ecosystem director Daniel Kihlberg, responsible for Qt sales, marketing, and services, has blogged that Qt "will continue to play and important role in Nokia".
Unfortunately, he's betting Qt's future on the past that Nokia just dumped: Symbian and MeeGo. The former was put out to pasture as a "franchise platform" for anybody actually interested in licensing Symbian, while MeeGo has become a project for "longer-term market exploration" devices, platforms, and "user experiences".
Regardless, Kihlberg reckons that Nokia must and will maintain Qt on Symbian because it needs to retain a claimed 200 million customers already using Symbian devices. Also, Nokia must hit targeted sales of 150 million more Symbian devices in "years to come."
Nokia might have wanted to hit 150 million Symbian devices in some forgotten past, but the Microsoft deal will produce "significant uncertainties" that Nokia has decided not to provide in its guidance for 2011. Translation: all the old calculations are now off.
Kihlberg also reckons there's plenty of potential for Qt on MeeGo, given Nokia plans a MeeGo handset later this year. Also, he feels, the MeeGo project will continue to be a force for disruption. "Nokia can't afford to be behind the next disruption again and Qt can play an important role in making sure it isn't," he said.
Qt was completely overlooked by Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop last week as he banked Nokia's entire smartphone future on Windows Phone.
Nokia bought Qt company Trolltech in 2008 for $153m. Back then, the handset manufacturer couldn't stop gushing about Qt, and it described the deal as something that would enable the company to innovate faster and to reduce time-to-market while also increasing the competitiveness of S60 and Series 40. This was all supposedly thanks to Trolltech's "deep understanding of open-source software and its strong technology assets".
The idea was that Qt would help Nokia's growth on devices and PCs, as apps would work on both these platforms and talk to the web. Qt worked on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and at the time, it was being ported to Windows CE and Windows Mobile - the predecessors to Windows Phone.
Nokia's pick of Microsoft, however, drastically demotes the need for, or the possibility of, any such cross-platform, device-to-PC strategy using Qt.
Microsoft dominates enough PCs to give Nokia enough of a target market, while Microsoft is also rolling out an apps marketplace, which provides Microsoft with a foot in the clouds. The third piece of the equation is mobile, with Windows Phone. The lingua franca connecting all three are apps built using a combination of Microsoft's Silverlight media player, DirectX, and .NET.
Considering that Microsoft has historically been averse to committing resources to non-Microsoft platforms and that Nokia will now rely on Microsoft to make Windows Phone run on its handsets, it's hard to believe Qt has any future at Nokia. ®
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COMMENTS
W32.ELOP.worm
I am sure that people working at Yahoo and Novell also thought they had a future. Unfortunately, the W32.ELOP.worm infection at Nokia seems to have preempted any future but the one dictated by Microsoft.
I guess Nokia really should have updated its virus/trojan scanner running on its HR computers. A particularly nasty infection -- capable of destroying their entire company (as well as any scraps of employee personal integrity) -- seems to have run rampant through their organization.
Symptoms of W32ELOP.worm infection include:
- Hallucinations of tall, bald, pot-gutted ogres, combined with sudden-onset hearing loss.
- Hallucinations of billions of easy dollars arriving at your doorstep. Hallucinations usually resolve in a 12 month period, as lack of sales and customer moral boycotting -- combined with MS-authored lowbrow advertising -- cause onset of bankruptcy. This may be accompanied by suicidal ideation (AKA the Yahoo/Novell syndrome).
- Depression and social alienation of all those to whom the Nokia name previously represented open-source and user-hackable open innovation (now replaced with locked-down, remote-controlled, DRM-encumbered, poorly-coded software). No more "user-serviceable parts" inside.
There is no presently-known cure for W32.ELOP.worm infestation. The best practice is to quarantine all known infected systems and products. In particular, users are advised to strictly avoid all Nokia, Microsoft, and WP7-containing products.
This keeps getting better and better!
Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop saying "I am not a shill" is very much like Richard Nixon saying "I am not a crook".
The evidence tends to blatantly contradict that.
Apparently the investors on both the Microsoft and the Nokia side are not very happy with that deal.
Since the deal was announced Microsoft stock has taken a sharp decrease and Nokia stock is headed straight for the loo.
Investors at Nokia are very unhappy, employees at Nokia are very unhappy and many are already handing in their resignations.
Yeah, I am in the US and I keep up with the news, that and I do have sources other than the internet.
If you do some research you will find that his guy Stephen Elop has quite a history and especially one with Microsoft.
It certainly gives the impression that he was positioned there as a shill to provide the proverbial foot in the door so that Ballmer could move in and literally take over, which he will.
Nokia will become exclusively a Microsoft Windows Mobile phone outlet.
The problem with that is, most people just don't like Steve Ballmer or Microsoft and it's not like their dirty and sneaky and often illegal way of doing business is a secret or anything.
Given a choice most people avoid getting involved with Microsoft or their products because of their hideous history.
Yeah, their desktop OS is still widely used but they don't produce anything else that you can't get someplace else better, cheaper and without the hassle that you have to put up with when you have to deal with Microsoft.
Ok, maybe Kinect for what that is worth.
Actually Microsoft didn't have anything to do with the development of Kinect, they bought and took over the company that originally developed it.
Typical Microsoft, look for Nokia and their phones and all of their clever work at development to go the same way.
Now I understand
how Nokia got left behind, apparently the leaked memo hasn't even reached Daniel yet! Communication inside Nokia must be terrible.
But Aron seems to be better informed "Qt will not be ported to Windows Phone 7. One of the key benefits of joining an established ecosystem is that there is an established toolchain that everyone uses. All Windows Phone apps will run on all WP7 devices. Adding Qt to the mix would only cause fragmentation."
So yep I figure Qt is dead at Nokia.
Interesting thing is when Qt moved to Nokia an agreement was made with KDE which says that if Nokia stoped developing Qt Free then the KDE Qt foundation has a right to release the source code under a BSD license...
See http://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.php
So maybe something good out of this all!
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