Qt and Nokia’s new strategy
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Qt has created awesome stuff within few years and this can not vanish like this.....I am sure there must be some bullet that makes us the developers happy:)
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[quote author="Andre" date="1297699907"]Question that is just coming up in my mind:
Does this change in direction mean that bugreports & wishes in Jira that have been closed because focus has shifted to the mobile development will be re-evaluated? It seems mobile is not that important anymore after all...[/quote]It will be important, there are people still writing Symbian apps because there are lots of Symbian users out there, to the 75 million Symbian devices there will be shipping 150M more devices and these needs new and updating older apps, and of course I think all the bugreports and wishes will be added where appropriate.
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This "150 million more Symbian devices" is a rather cynic joke: Symbian is being killed exactly because there are cheaper (better?) local alternatives in emerging markets, where would potentially still be a future for Symbian phones. So, where could Nokia sell all those phones? Not is Asia, because of those annoying "little" local alternatives all around there. Surely not in Americas and, from now on, not even in Europe: entry - level (=cheap as dirt) Android phones are busy killing the Symbian market here right now. So, that leaves us what? Australia and the Pacific region - too few potential customers, even theoretically. Africa? Last time I checked most Africans have slightly bigger issues than purchasing Qt-based applications for their Symbian phones. Come on, we are (almost) all developers here, so we might as well face the truth: Qt's future at Nokia has already been redirected to /dev/null. Qt can and most definitely should survive, but somewhere else. Will there be potential buyers for what remains of Trolltech? I guess there will. Will Nokia sell the Trolls? Well, I have a bad feeling about that: I guess Qt's corporate future will be (or has already been) decided in Redmond. And I wouldn't bet a jar of beer on that decision... Thanks God for LGPL, at least that's an insurance. After all, if Python can survive (and it is doing ever better, it seems) "out in the wild", why Qt couldn't do the same? Now paid Qt developers are another issue, sadly. Having been on this market for 20 years, my only advice to them would be to wait for a month to see whether Qt is sold in some form or another to a reasonable entity (Intel, Canonical, whoever) and if not, escape while you can. Unless, of course, you discover a sudden interest in yourselves for .Net and C# :-)
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Would be a nice initiative...
[quote author="dguimard" date="1297725547"]http://nokiaplanb.com/[/quote] -
I particularly liked the fact that Plan B doesn't wholly discard the WinPho option. From the start I had the feeling that Nokia might actually be needing the WinPho to get some market share in North America. What I don't understand though is that once again they're betting the entire company on one horse. If I were to bet on one horse, it would not have been a product/supplier with a bad reputation and track record in mobile environments. From that point of view Plan B makes much more sense to me.
But hey, I'm just a developer. I make complex systems for a living. What do I know? :P
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Personally, I don't give Plan B a big chance, but you never know. Sure, they will probably have to ship some WP devices, but that is also in the Plan B plans. There is always fine print to these contracts, so there may be a way out. Other phone suppliers have in the past.
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Personally, I don’t think that now shipping or not shipping Windows phones would really matter to Qt at all.
I would welcome them to ship them at Europe too, given they can promise they’ll port Qt later to it. Otherwise I’d rather leave it to market areas that aren’t Nokia’s strong area.
Dropping Meego was something not wise from Nokia though, Qt-wise and strategically, now Nokia is again competing only with one edge.
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This "plan B" doesn't seem to be related with Nokia.
What i can't understand is why Nokia is replacing their platform (Symbian) for which they have infrastructure: store, SDK's, full control over the decisions regarding the platform and a pretty big community (which has been moved once, or moving in progress, from Symbian C++ to Qt C++...) and then buy a platform from Microsoft.
Anyway Nokia said Symbian is "burning", but how this "burning" platform is still the leader in a market with other younger and greater platforms?
So leaving/retire the platform with 30% of the market and getting (please read buying) the one that has 3% is a brilliant idea... sarcasm off
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I'd like such plan to become reality ... Especially I'd like to see MeeGo platform becoming main OS for Nokia.
It was interesting to me where Nokia spent these billions for research ... Apple having less money managed to do it much better ... So maybe Nokia had management and efficiency problems but it's strategy was correct enough. Does anybody analyzed what problems caused such situation and does anybody tried to fix it? Sometimes I have doubts if Nokia problems truly were so serious. Maybe Elop has overblown its scale for easier motivation to start partnership with Microsoft. Microsoft needed some partner quickly because it was sitting with its WP7 in the a...s. WP7 is not ideal platform. I have read some reviews about it, its interesting but has many flaws that Microsoft is still fixing or promise to fix in the feature. -
http://meego.com/community/blogs/imad/2011/update-intel
at least some light in the darkness that we are living since last friday
