Nokia + Microsoft

In the short-term (2 years) I don't think MS can even begin to touch RIM's numbers. If we're talking 5+ years, then maybe. but RIM would have to make some serious mistakes.

Microsoft can already get stuff built to its own specs,

as does Apple and everybody else

What value does Nokia bring to the table? Are they really better at engineering hardware? Are their distribution channels notably better? Is the Nokia brand that big a valuable property?

Not at all like Apple. Apple actually designs all their stuff and farms out only manufacturing and assembly.

Clearly iPhone and Android will continue to duke it out for the top, but the #3 position is going to be an interesting battle to watch. Will it be RIM, HP/Palm, or Win 7 Phone?

I actually don't think n. 3 position is at stake, but rather n. 1 and 2 in 5/6 years time.

while an iPhone has a clear, distinct, shiny personality. A LOT of it,

So, I've been wondering why MS did not bring to market its own device with WP7 - I would have entered the market with two: one super shiny to rival the iPhone, another inexpensive

Also, Nokia has a great reputation in that regard, especially in the EU. Here in Italy, for example, nobody/very few people would buy a RIM over a Nokia, still today.

The thing that scares the living crap out of me is what will happen to Qt.

I personally have zero interest in Nokia as a mobile phone hardware manufacturer or MS as an OS supplier getting together. The thing that scares the living crap out of me is what will happen to Qt.

Symbian^3 was just released and with Qt supposedly being ramped up along with Meego devices it looked like the future was bright.

In current mobile market, with Apple, Android, and WP7 looming? I honestly doubt it would have been a bright future regardless of agreement with Microsoft. I am afraid the latter just killed Symbian a year (or so) earlier.

Nokia let the North American market slip away long ago before consumer smartphones were popular. In not reclaiming that market space, they let 4 American companies come along and just own the consumer space (Apple, Google, Palm and Microsoft). Even the Canadian based RIM did well in some part of the consumer market, due to their brand awareness in the corporate world.

compete with the experience provided by Android and Apple,

Nokia will have what Apple has, which is brand recognition. And that brand is much stronger than HTC, Samsung, etc. in mobile, especially in Europe.

I recently talked a decidedly non-techie friend through the iPhone vs. Android decision process. Her iPod was ready to die, and her phone was antiquated, so she wanted to get one device to do everything. We talked it over, and decided the iPhone was the right answer, since it's the best drop-in replacement as an iPod. Stars sync up properly, etc. Otherwise, if that was less important, but having really good Gmail/Google Calendar/etc. support mattered more, she would probably have gone for an Android phone instead.

I have not actually heard of anyone outside of Internet geeks who actually wants an Android phone.

I don't think MS has much of a chance to get to #1 or 2 in that time period. They were not able to do it in the past with less competition.

I don't think they have enough consumer brand caché to pull this off.

having two models as you suggest would only serve to devalue the high end product.

My idea is actually that MS did not really try.

Sorry, but Nokia doesn't mean anything in the US

I'm curious, though. What does Nokia pay for WP7 for each phone? I assume they pay a license fee, don't they?

That's absolutely insane. Both to have actually been in that position and to think that.

Incidentally, I didn't use the insane comment as an insult

I find the Nokia+MS agreement very interesting and possibly bringing some relevant mkt change, and you don't - if I understand you correctly.

Plan B

Seeing that, makes me wonder if Nokia is just going to tear it's self apart before it can even go forward with a concrete plan.

We also have a big business in providing Qt and QML to desktops worldwide, we have 4000 licensees, and...we're obliged and we're interested in keeping that going.

That doesn't sound like they're particularly interested in the desktop market any more....

Check this to see what other developers have to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWFvCJJaNs

Great, but I couldn't give a tinker's cuss about the mobile platform. I'd rather Nokia went to the wall and the Qt bunch got out and set themselves up as an independant company again.

I wonder if Elop still has shares in Microsoft?

I personally have zero interest in Nokia as a mobile phone hardware manufacturer or MS as an OS supplier getting together. The thing that scares the living crap out of me is what will happen to Qt.

You have your Qt software, it works for you and does what you need it to do. If Nokia abandons it, you will still have it, it will still work. Won't it?

The only issue I see is that as time goes by new hardware will arrive on which perhaps Qt won't work. Is that your concern? That is precisely why I am no longer using Ami Pro, a word processor that for my uses was hugely superior to MicroBloat Word, and if future hardware compatibility is the stumbling block, then yes you have something to worry about.

When I looked into it back in 2004, it was just over $6000 USD per developer for commercial use. Crazy money. At the time there was already an "open" license I believe, so what's changed since then in terms of licensing?

Is it currently possible to develop a commercial product without paying over $6000 per developer working on your project?

Barring the commercial licenses, it's hard to see how Qt could go back to its original licensing model now that it's available under the LGPL.

I also wonder how likely a management buyout would be and how they could make it commercially viable, i.e how many of those with a commercial license would/could quite happily migrate over to the no cost LGPL model.

the only way I can see that it can survive and flourish is if Qt becomes a separate business entity once again, but because Nokia LGPL'd it, it's going to be a much harder sell for the commercial licenses.

The Foundation has a license agreement with Nokia. This agreement ensures that the Qt will continue to be available under both the LGPL 2.1 and the GPL 3. Should Nokia discontinue the development of the Qt Free Edition under these licenses, then the Foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license or under other open source licenses. The agreement stays valid in case of a buy-out, a merger or bankruptcy.

It would seem to me the main driver for keeping your commercial licence is proper support.

I also thought the commercial licenses were a tad on the expensive side, but since I've been using it I realise why it was expensive. It's good, it's very good.

Yup. Write once, run on all major platforms.
Very good

Good morning, and thanks for the taking the time to read the post and for great comments. For the start I’ll reply to the big topics raised, and then tackle a few individual comments after the coffee break. Before I start though, be reminded that even though I’ll try to stick to facts, how I interpret them reflects my personal view as the Head of Qt R&D in Oslo.

On the topic of Stephen Elop – I will not start speculating here. He is CEO of Nokia, he has sold his Microsoft shares and invested into Nokia, and he has in my mind lived up to his promise of (brutally) honest and transparent decision making. He and everybody else in the company wants to turn Nokia around, and from all we have heard and seen so far he believes that Qt will play a part in that, both short term and long term. We might not like his smartphone strategy, but if we don’t believe what he and his management team say publicly, then this is not going to be a very constructive discussion.

Regarding the (financial or organizational) independence of Qt in Nokia – Trolltech wasn’t profitable for many years prior to the Nokia acquisition. After the acquisition we put Qt under the LGPL, and we have by now tripled the size of our team. We have invested significantly in our QA infrastructure (automation of quality gates and continuous integration), and there is much more travel between Oslo and Australia. However, assuming that each unit in a large organization has to be profitable to justify its existence is a bit of an oversimplification. Take Google: Android itself doesn’t make money – but it’s a vehicle that brings people into the Google-Internet which in turn increases advertisement revenue.
So financial aspects do as such IMHO not play into this – Qt is an investment, and whatever money we could possibly make with Qt commercial licenses or services would barely be a blip on the radar. As long as management trusts that Qt can help Nokia, management will fund Qt – and everything we believe, and everything we have heard from top-management during the last week, is that Qt as a part of the solution, not as part of the problem.

I consider our organization to be largely independent – we have our own roadmap, we decide what positions we prioritize when we hire, we decide who to hire etc. Naturally, much of our work during the last two years was driven by requirements from other parts of Nokia, and many of the things we started up ourselves were inspired by the new opportunities we saw when working for a leading device company. Our success is of course no longer measured exclusively in “number of Qt users” (although that is still a very relevant metrics), and finding out how our success will be measured is work in progress as part of the strategy change.

I like to believe that Qt as a technology is independent of Nokia, thanks to the community of Qt users and thanks to Open Governance. There is a lot of momentum behind Qt most of which is independent of being able to target Symbian devices with Qt, and many of us get a lot of motivation from working on a technology that transcends short-term product needs and changing corporate strategies.

Qt on the desktop is currently not a priority for our R&D team [edit on February 21st: since this was frequently misunderstood as "We don't care about the desktop version of Qt", please follow the discussion further down, ie in http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/18/buckets-of-cold-water/#comment-19426 and http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/18/buckets-of-cold-water/#comment-19485 ], even though Nokia does use Qt for desktop applications (and not only Qt Creator). That doesn’t mean that nobody is working on it, however we do believe that Qt is a great development tool for desktop applications, even if we just maintain it and keep it working on the desktop platforms. We definitely want to keep it that way, and we continue to improve and modernize Qt on the desktop as well, but I personally don’t really see that there are a lot of new features we could add to make Qt significantly more powerful for desktop development (esp features that are already provided by other libraries – why cannibalize our own community?). And lastly, even with 260 engineers and growing, there is only a finite amount of work we can do, and right now we prioritize getting Qt into top-shape for embedded platforms. We do expect that many of the improvements we make there will also bring value back to desktop developers – for instance, we are working on some exciting stuff with QML, accessibility, HTML5 and improved localization support.

So, what happens 2 years from now when the last Symbian device has shipped? I don’t have that kind of crystal ball, and I generally prefer the presence to the future. From looking at the presence I believe that making Qt’s future depend on the organizations behind non-competitive Symbian devices or a single MeeGo device in 2011 would have been a strategic mistake. On one of our whiteboards in the hallway somebody quoted Abraham Lincoln: “The best way to predict the future is to create it”. Since Friday 11th we have a real chance of doing exactly that.

If you have a commercial license with support, then use that channel to get help, possibly workarounds and maybe higher priority for the bugs. No guarantees that bugs will get fixed, but at least you’ll have somewhere to go

And they have no idea what will happen to Qt after the last Symbian device ships.

Well, since Qt runs on lots of different platforms, my guess is they'll use it to build UI elements for the new Windows mobile OS, and continue on as usual.