The title is incorrect -- the original was, "Leadership, Strategy and Qt". Nokia has not at this point fired the Qt team. They fired the folks in the Ulm office. Those are not the guys that formerly worked for Trolltech (in Oslo, Brisbane and Berlin). While there's naturally some uncertainty about what their futures will hold, the axe hasn't totally fallen yet.
Edit: To be clear, I my intent wasn't to question Mirko, but to point out that the title here was added on HN; it wasn't the title he used and I didn't read his post as saying the entire Qt team was fired.
This is actually my understanding as well, which is leaving me quite a bit confused about Mirko's post. I trust him, however, and he's currently attending the Qt Contributor Summit while I am not, so he may be more up-to-date. But the total number of Qt staff employed by Nokia is certainly above 100, too.
4 1/2 years later, Nokia is pulling the trigger on it.
My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?
And to compare to an equivalent business, Novell tried to shutter down Mono, thankfully the people behind it forged a new company out of it, called Xamarin.
I keep seeing cases of companies being acquired, only to then be semi-destroyed or shut down later on. Sometimes you get the impression the the acquirers only want to buy others just to shut them down and stop them becoming a threat.
For example, look at what Google did to Jaiku, or Slide, or Dodgeball.
I'm coming to the view that when you start up a business, if you care about what you've built more than you care about money, and what you've built is profitable, then you shouldn't sell to a big company, because chances are they will destroy it.
Let's be clear, though: Nokia also did a lot of good for Qt. They significantly grew the number of people paid to work on it, and by moving to the LGPL license they significantly grew the community.
They also turned it into a proper open source project. There was no public repository history under Trolltech. Nor did Qt under Trolltech have a working contribution process; now tens of thousands of contributions have flown into Qt from the outside. There's even review rights and write access for non-employees, and maintainers that are non-employees.
Qt today has a much better chance of surviving Nokia than it had a chance of surviving Trolltech back in the day.
Fair enough. I'm just concerned in that trying to downsize to save money, Nokia has missed the opportunity to take what was a profitable business (Trolltech's 2007 numbers (in NOK): 174m Rev, 46.5m Profit, 26.7% Net Profit Margin, 227 employees), and salvage it by spinning it back out into a separate business.
In dollar terms, Trolltech in 2007 was doing $30m Rev and making $8m profit. Obviously that's 5 years ago and I don't know what the current fundamentals are, but it would be interesting to know if that business within Nokia was doing more revenue or less, and what it's costs were.
> salvage it by spinning it back out into a separate business.
That's assuming a newly spun-out neo-Trolltech could be profitable again using the same business model as before, which isn't the case. Trolltech's business model was to sell Qt licenses to folks making closed-source software with it, who couldn't or wouldn't deal with the GPL-and-similar licensing of the open source version. This business model mostly died with the move to LGPL: There hardly any money left to be made selling Qt licenses now.
That leaves Qt-related consulting/development work, which companies like KDAB, basysKom, FrogLogic and others are doing.
"My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?"
Because they think it will bring in less than what it costs them to sell it?
You cannot just put a "on sale" sticker on part of a company and sell it. It will take an effort to find a buyer, and one (likely a larger one) to define what the sale will contain (patents? Copyrights? What source code? Which employment contracts? Pension rights? Etc.
Why defend Elop? He is a big reason Nokia is failing.
They could have had something great with Meego. The N9 was selling well even though Elop was trying to destroy it. Why else would he fail to disclose sales of the N9?
The N9 may have outsold the Lumias in Q4 last year even with this lack of support.
I can't understand how anyone can defend a CEO who takes a company with a few mature operating systems and goes to his old employers company and uses their juvenile product instead? What the fuck, people?
This is a complicated question, and at this time it's impossible to answer it without heading into the realm of speculation. I'm going to try anyway, to at least put some of the facts out there that many outside the direct community may not be aware of.
First of, the Qt Project, that is the sum of all contributors within Nokia and without and so also including KDE, is currently busy putting together the next major generation of the technology, Qt 5. But our ongoing 4.x release series is still based on Qt 4, which Nokia's developers have not been targeting for a while now. Instead, commercial support of Qt 4 has passed to Digia some time ago, and they have been putting out new point releases since. So in the short term, this will not affect upcoming releases of KDE's platform, workspaces and applications.
In the longer term, the loss of the Nokia-employed workforce would obviously hurt the Qt Project considerably. Hopefully, however, this loss would not actually be quite that complete: It's unclear at this point whether Nokia might try to sell Qt, which could preserve the workforce entirely in the best case scenario. Alternatively, many of the developers who spent much or all of their professional careers working and loving Qt would likely band together and go on in some way, or find new homes at any of the Qt-focussed software development consultancies out there, which might also band together with us and others in the community to form a new home for the project in Nokia's absence.
I would wager that Qt's chances of survival are greater than Nokia's. With Nokia's current Microsoftian strategy, the earlier they part ways, the better for Qt.
Hi! This headline is wrong, and out of context. I made the post more clear in that regard.
Also, our server broke down under the requests, so please be patient :-)
Did Nokia even made money from QT ? Because it seems to me it paid 700 devs (the article mentions 10000 !!! people laid off) + Accenture (for Symbian development) without really making any real money from this.
RIM has contracted KDAB to port Qt 4.8 and Qt 5 to the BlackBerry PlayBook and BlackBerry 10. I think we'll see RIM react to this announcement by hiring more developers. We've already seen that happen, see the postings below.
You can keep trumpeting RIM's death, or you can do your own research and see what they're working on. They're gaining a lot of points with developers, especially in the Qt and FOSS communities.
Will they beat Android/iOS? Maybe. Are they better to develop on? In my (and many others) opinion, yes.
> Any chance the team will stick together and recreate Troll Tech? Kind of like the Ximian/Mono team formed Xamarin after being fired from Novel?
The Mono team did not recreate what they had in Novell.
1. Mono in Novell put a lot of work on building Mono as a general platform. Xamarin is focused on where the money is: Mono for Android and iOS.
2. Mono in Novell was developed to form part of the SUSE Linux desktop. Xamarin does not do Linux, and in fact the devs themselves have apparently mostly personally switched to OS X.
3. Practically all Mono work at Novell was open source. Most of the work at Xamarin is closed source, the business model is to sell software for iOS and Android.
There's nothing wrong with either model, but just pointing out, they didn't just recreate the same thing outside of Novell. The two situations are hugely different, so it isn't surprising they are not that similar.
There's little need, Qt bootstrapped a new community-lead process a few months back, the project is independent of Nokia already (and there is sufficient critical mass in the user base to keep the project alive).
As for major new development, well, what is lost is a matter of opinion. Already with Qt5 the focus is no longer on native widgets (it's vaguely shocking how the project's path while at Nokia has got so distorted and diverged from the story that made Qt a success).
It is a long way from independent as yet. By far the majority of the code still seems to be coming from Nokia. See here, for example (a few months out of date, not sure how much has changed): http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/12/22/qt-5-%E2%80%93-a-look-ba...
I think it will be beneficial for Qt; for a few recent years Nokia is a sort of anti-Midas -- whatever they hold or touch turns into junk (Symbian buried, phone Meego wasted, computer Meego demolished...). Plus it is a chance for Qt to finally end with this commercial burden dangling since TrollTech.
I've read quite a few comments about what happens to Qt next. Short answer is, well no one knows. Long answer is that it's all open source, there's a lot of people using it for commercial products (myself included) who are committed to it.
Will the pace of progress slow down? Sure, you're going to be losing a lot of developers all in one go, who made the majority of the commits. Is it game over? Well, no, it will end up community lead by the very smart cookies in the community.
It's hugely sad Nokia has gotten rid of it, but if they hadn't it wouldn't have made any sense. They don't use it and they'll struggle to find uses for it now unless they ported it to Windows Phone 8, but that's a whole other level of interesting fantasy.
> if Android was based on Qt/c++, not java, then Android would be the perfect platform!
No, it wouldn't. It's significantly easier for bad developers to make mistakes in C++ than in Java (one of Java's few advantages). Manual memory management alone would account for a significant increase in crashy apps. And while afaik, iOS has manual memory management, it also has Apple's App Store review process to at least ensure apps don't crash from a segfault every second launch, or similar issues.
In mobile platforms, be it iOS or Android, the main problem is the SDK/API itself, not the actual language. For me, Qt is much more pleasant to work with than over-engineered Android platform.
Shuttleworth announced ending Canonical support for KDE (Kubuntu carries on as a full flavour). The one developer that Canonical paid has since I believe taken a job elsewhere.
I don't think this is all that sad. I think it is good to see that Nokia is focused on its new main strategy, and at least attempting to save itself.
Consider the alternative; continuing internal struggles between the Windows and Symbian/Qt teams, funding all sorts of frivolous projects while strapped for cash. With Windows Nokia has a chance of surviving (although it doesn't look all that brigh right now), but without focus and determination death is certain.
Sad but unsurprising. And there are quite a few points I would disagree with the author on:
1) Implying that Elop is not competent or responsible because he fired the team rather than "talking to them" is ridiculous. It is the only sensible option. Qt developers are not .Net developers and retraining so many at one time is impossible.
2) Finding developers for Nokia's strategy won't be a problem. There are lots of .Net developers around. And I am sure more than a few would be interested in the mobile space.
3) I fail to see what possible benefit Qt brings to Nokia's future strategy. They are unquestionably a Microsoft shop now. It is irrelevant how great Qt is as a technology.
4) The blame for Nokia's current woes does not lie with Elop and his current strategy. It lies with the previous one. And those employees need to start taking some responsibility for letting Nokia lose control of the industry. And it is not just CEO level it is product manager and engineer level.
Is this the common wisdom these days?
Experienced software developers who are good at C++/Qt can't learn themselves to use C#/.NET?
They have to be trained? And that's impossible to do?
If we are talking about full time employees - they should have been given the option to work with .NET if this is what they wanted.
Also - employees have to take responsibility for Nokia's previous strategy? Weren't you just talking about those employees like an easily replaceable cogs? Get rid of a few "C++/Qt"s and get a few new "C#/.NET" ones.
Regular employees are responsible for managing their own career not the company.
About Elop - his statement about the burning platform reminds me about the Léo Apoteker public announcement about dumping the PC division of HP. Even if we assume both decisions about new strategic direction were correct - the public announcements were not very helpful to say the least ...
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1) Implying that Elop is not competent or responsible because he fired the team rather than "talking to them" is ridiculous. It is the only sensible option. Qt developers are not .Net developers and retraining so many at one time is impossible.
2) Finding developers for Nokia's strategy won't be a problem. There are lots of .Net developers around. And I am sure more than a few would be interested in the mobile space.
"Is this the common wisdom these days? Experienced software developers who are good at C++/Qt can't learn themselves to use C#/.NET? They have to be trained? And that's impossible to do?"
1) Yes, common wisdom.
2) Experienced devs can learn anything if they want easily, what happens if they don't want to?.
3) Yes, a little
4) No is not.
It is more complex than than. Employees are people, and people are complex.
First there is a philosophical issue. The best c,c++, Qt programmers love Unix, and that's one of the reasons they work there. If you want to force them into Windows and .NET those people will take the door. It is not really difficult for them to find another job that needs c, c++ if they are great.
I know it sounds ridiculous from some mindsets who believe everything in life is money and he who pays is the master that could slave their serfs(suit's mentality) but geeks tend to be the more idealistic people I know.
Once the best programmers(best programmers could automate things and be more than 10x efficient than standard ones) are gone the entire system collapses.
Except c/c++/Qt programmers -- they're pretty simple to predict, apparently.
The best devs I know tend to accept challenges to learn new systems and do well whatever they're working with, even if there's a particular language/platform they love more than others.
Some aspects of a platform are not a challenge, just painful.
For instance say I am looking for a bit of text.
In *nix I have vi in which I can type "esc/foo." Now, before I can blink the I am at the first match. Hitting "/" goes to the next one just as fast. If I don't know what file to look at, grep will tell me quickly.
Visual Studio has a search function, but it's not regular expressions by default, will not work on all of the design surfaces, and requires going through several dialogue windows. Typically I have to put my hand on the mouse to get any results.
For some tasks platforms and tools can make a big speed difference.
However it is true people are complex and hard to predict.
Perhaps some c/c++/QT programmers when given a, a shiny new windows based development environment, may enjoy the extra time they spend searching through source code. Who knows?
It's not impossible but retraining 100+ developers in a new platform takes a lot longer than hiring a new team. And it is not just about knowledge but also culture and enthusiasm.
Can you not see how the clean slate approach where you leave behind all of the Linux/Qt/Symbian baggage could be appealing ?
It's not dissimilar from what happen with Apple's failed Copland project where a new team came in (NeXT), took control of a new OS/apps strategy and ultimately saved the company.
> It's not impossible but retraining 100+ developers in a new platform takes a lot longer than hiring a new team
So you don't get rid of them all.
I saw a team go from LISP to C++ in the space of a few months. Some people got disgusted and left, some people got disgusted and stayed (and we'd wished they'd left), but a surprising number prospered, hunkered down and shipped.
As long as you're in roughly the same domain (say, "phones") I imagine it's less expensive to keep most of a team around, deal with attrition, and hire in new folks to fill the cracks.
Why do you need to retrain developers? I'm certain that I've never had any corporate training outside of what jokes not to make, places not to touch others, and things not to give to anonymous (yeah, seriously). I've never undergone technical training through a career that has gone through at least a few pretty big companies (Omron, Abbott, EADS).
I can clearly see why this kind of thinking may be appealing to some people.
The question is - how is this clean break and leaving "the baggage" behind going work?
I can't stop thinking about this imaginary company:
They have Java/Linux based system that is not selling very well so they hire new CEO. The new CEO announces to the company's customers that the Java/Linux is "burning platform". He fires all 100 Java developers and hires 100 C#/.NET developers ...
Somehow I think this is not going to end up well ...
A competent CEO (or CTO) will try to sell the new platform to developers by pointing out the advantages. He would hire maybe 25 experienced .NET developers to replace the 25 developers that left because they believe more in Java/Linux in the long term. He may have to let 10 developers go because they just don't want to learn anything new ... You end up with a team that still has the business knowledge, is committed to moving to the new platform and has people with experience about it.
Meanwhile you still make money selling the Java application until you are ready with the .NET one.
Isn't this 101 common business sense?
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Can you not see how the clean slate approach where you leave behind all of the Linux/Qt/Symbian baggage could be appealing ?
Fair enough. It does present an interesting scenario where there's suddenly an increase in good Qt developers in the market.
Since RIM is doubling-down on Qt for BlackBerry 10, it allows them to recruit experienced developers to help them. Maybe they can leverage it to pull off something similar to Apple with NeXT.
Of course the blame is Elop's. Putting all of Nokia's chips on Windows Phone was stupid no matter how it turned out. Lowering Nokia's risk by doing an Android phone or two was a no-brainer. The smarter play was doubling down on Qt. Not just Symbian, Meego and the desktop - we know they could have added Android (demonstrated), iOS (community projects existed and still do) and Windows Phone.
And don't say Microsoft wouldn't allow it. Windows Phone was irrelevant and Nokia was Microsoft's few chances to change that. And more than that, Microsoft needed access to Nokia's patents (to keep up the pressure on Android, among other things). Nokia was in the driver's seat and could have written their terms. Instead, they let Microsoft effectively acquire them for peanuts. If Nokia had only kept their options open and jumped on what worked, today's mess was entirely preventable.
Elop's strategic move was to get Nokia out of the Operating Systems business where they were clearly losing - and likely to continue to lose over the short, medium and long terms - and to focus on their core competencies which are those of manufacturing and logistics.
The switch to Windows Phone was tactical in that sense. The strategic aspect of the switch was that Microsoft offered a long term partnership, allowed them to liquidate maps, and could provide a clear technology roadmap for their product line.
Nokia's software was good and competent, but they simply don't have access to the mountains of UX data needed to develop the next generation of OS's to compete on the touch screen.
>>> Nokia's software was good and competent, but they simply don't have access to the mountains of UX data needed to develop the next generation of OS's to compete on the touch screen.
This statement doesn't seem correct to me. Nokia has a vast amount of research on mobile UX, even from before Apple joined the play, probably as no one other company. As a (stellar) example, check out Jan Chipchase's work (http://janchipchase.com/) with a ton of in-loco research on mobile phone usage, and many research papers presented - with a particular focus on the non-developed world.
In my opinion Nokia suffered from big-company chronic slowness: the current cash-cow was still providing the income, hence all future investment was unfocused, under-funded.
PS: A nice question is still how much/if any of the investment of Nokia in the undeveloped world will still be able to bring some returns. Windows Phone completely eschews that...
Your analysis of UX data is a bit of a "true scotsman," i.e what matters is the exact sort of data Nokia has. Given that this data is based on "five button" interaction with a small screen, it's hard to see that as critical in a world of "large" touchscreen devices.
I agree with you to a point, but would maintain that a significant amount of behavioural and cultural data coming from the "5 button" research, would also apply to touchscreen devices.
I have enough computers around me to not need a smartphone. The single feature I need from smartphone is tethering.
I am dreaming of cheap 5 button nokia phone (like my current phone) that would provide tethering so that I can use my cheap wifi android tablet anywhere. My 5 button nokia phone looks prehistoric, but it works perfectly and has fantastic autonomy.
My cheap Japanese phone can tether -- but the carrier makes a distinction between packets originating from the phone and those from the computer, and they charge extra through the nose for PC packets (100$+ per month if you exceed a few megabytes, in extra to normal phone charges). All this while I can get a dual-mode WiMAX/3G WiFi router that fits in a pocket, has a day of battery life, unlimited data and transfers much faster for 50$/month. The problem isn't the hardware, it's the carriers.
>The single feature I need from smartphone is tethering. I am dreaming of cheap 5 button nokia phone (like my current phone) that would provide tethering
OK, but the reason tethering is hard is that carriers want to charge extra for it, not because of any decision of Nokia (or any other phone manufacturer)
>Lowering Nokia's risk by doing an Android phone or two was a no-brainer
Have you looked at Android OEM's financials lately? Samsung is the only one making any profit, HTC is barely ekeing out one, LG, Sony, Motorola etc. are running in losses.
And bringing out an Android phone would cut off the $1B/yr lifeline platform support from Microsoft, which Nokia knew it would need in the painful transition. Nokia did approach Google for a similar deal, but Google told them to take a hike. Also, they're licensing maps etc. to Microsoft for a huge amount too.
Also, people seem to be ignoring that Nokia's signature cash cow feature phone business is collapsing because of ultracheap Chinese clones and white label phones being dumped into the market. Nokia trying to start their own ecosystem with QT would've been foolish in the face of entrenched competition.
I don't understand the notion that QT is some magical technology that's so much leaps and bounds ahead of other GUI APIs like iOS, Android, WinRT etc that developer would automatically flock to it. QT is definitely nice though.
In short, Nokia knew that they were going to go through extremely tough times for a couple of years regardless of what they pick, and they chose a partner with deep pockets($60B cash in the bank) rather than going solo.
> they chose a partner with deep pockets($60B cash in the bank)
Is only half the story. They chose a partner who has a record of being a horrible partner for companies in their condition -- which is in a lot of ways similar to both HP and SGI pre-Windows (good hardware, trying to get out of the OS business, rely on Microsoft). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Belluzzo
So, this partner has a horrible relevant track record, twice. I don't see how Nokia can expect (or could have expected a couple of years ago) to fare better than SGI or HP's high end computing unit did.
The circumstances are a bit different from SGI and HP; Microsoft couldn't care less if SGI or HP sank, Windows already had a near-stranglehold on the market and there was no shortage of companies willing to produce Windows boxes. Now, WP is seriously behind in the market and they desperately need a first-tier vendor dedicated to them (Huawei is relatively unknown, HTC is struggling, and Samsung's are an afterthought to the money-printing Android based SGS line), so Microsoft needs Nokia's clout as much as Nokia needs MS's cash. Even assuming treachery, Nokia's worst case here is more then likely getting bought vs. being left for dead like SGI.
... Microsoft has recently disclosed that they are producing tablets. Phones are a short stride away. I don't think Microsoft is going to treat Nokia any better than SGI in the long run.
> Nokia's worst case here is more then likely getting bought vs. being left for dead like SGI.
... for 10% what they were worth at the time Elop gave the "burning platform" speech.
SGI was technically bought as well. That's really a bad resolution for Nokia, and is far from being a "worst case". If MS decides to produce phones themselves, it is likely Nokia will be left to whither and die.
It might look unlikely now, but unless you were in the know, just a month ago it seemed very unlikely that MS will make their own tablets.
Despite the internal similarities, it's much more difficult to get a cell phone on the market vs. a tablet. Unless you want to be resigned to the sidelines, you have to be able to convince the carriers to sell your phone. This is very difficult unless you:
a) already have a good relationship with the carriers
b) have someone like Steve Jobs
Nokia at least has (a), Microsoft has neither (Verizon likely still has enough Kin that they won't be hurting for paperweights for quite a while). Microsoft can't afford to kill their only guaranteed in with the carriers.
Nokia has a) only outside North America. In the extremely important US market, which makes or breaks smartphones, Nokia is a nobody. Part of the reasoning in shifting to WP was that Microsoft (or at least the power of their brand) would have delivered that relationship to the Finns. The fact that it didn't happen is quite telling.
Why would they care about Nokia's survival? Frankly, it's even better for Microsoft if Nokia fails - they'll be able to acquire whatever's left for a tiny fraction of its value before going WP7.
Also, another parallel is Palm. They had PalmOS phones when they partnered with Microsoft and made the Treo WinMo line that ended up competing and reducing their own offering's relevance.
First, it doesn't matter if Microsoft's "platform support" was contingent on giving up other options. There is one and only one circumstance under which a company like Nokia should be willing to give up their strategic flexibility like that. And that's if Microsoft were willing to acquire them (then-and-there not a few years later when they're cheaper).
Nokia's market cap was over $38B at the end of 2010. It was just under $32B at the end of Q1 2011 (after the "burning platforms" memo). It is under $9B today. As you note, not all of that is Windows Phone, but plenty of it is. Microsoft's $1B/year is peanuts. To put it another way, how much was avoiding the "Nokia rejects Windows Phone" headline worth to Microsoft? Plenty more than $1B/year, I bet.
Second, Nokia's feature phone business is one big reason to have an Android project going. Low-end Android phones are one of the big things eating feature phones. Until recently, Nokia had been spending plenty of effort (e.g. Meltemi) trying to create something to compete with Android at the low end. They shouldn't have been re-inventing the wheel. They should have picked up Android and leaned on some of their other strengths (e.g. manufacturing, distribution, etc.) to win low-end devices.
Third, I don't think Qt is a magic elixir. Establishing a Qt ecosystem easily might not have worked. But it was a way to transition off Symbian without immediately deprecating those devices (and we saw how immediate deprecation turned out). And it was a decent story to tell developers: "Build with Qt and you can make your app available on every mobile platform you care about (except maybe Blackberry)". Of course the devil is in the details and it wouldn't be that easy, but plenty of developers want a cross-platform mobile story. It could have been the hook that got an ecosystem off the ground, so it was at least worth trying. And if it didn't work, you'd have been offering devices from each of the alternative platforms you could consider. It would be a lot easier to pick if you could see how those devices were doing in the marketplace.
Fourth, the measure of success of including Android (and I'll emphasize again that I didn't say don't do Windows Phone, too) isn't whether they would have remained profitable while doing so. It is whether they would have had better options today and would they have lost less money along the way. I think the answer is obviously yes on both counts. If nothing else, being able to point to a more successful Android line and a less successful Windows Phone line would have driven up their eventual acquisition price.
The market cap measures sentiment, not reality. It's not that Nokia's underlying value went from 38 billion to 9 billion in that time, it's that people figured out they're only worth 9 billion and sold down the stock. The fundamentals affecting Nokia were already in play long before that 'burning platform' speech.
The problems of LG, Sony and Motorola are of their own making. One of the problems is clear marketing.
Samsung has done a very good job with marketing the Galaxy brand so far. In 2012, you know the S III is the best Samsung phone. And SII is the second best. This is simple to understand, even though Samsung makes dozens of Android models.
But if someone asks you which Sony phone should I buy: http://www.gsmarena.com/sony-phones-7.php . Good luck with that. The consumer chooses to go with the simpler options of Samsung, Apple or even HTC.
Sony in particular had(and has) some massive opportunities with deep Android+Google integration with their Playstation Network platform. But they continue to shoot themselves in the foot by throwing money at half baked phones. And dedicated gaming devices, which have taken a massive beating from smart phones.
It's still Elop's fault that he Osborned their Symbian business. And now Nokia's been Osborned by Microsoft with the Windows Phone 8 announcement. And Samsung makes the Android money because they make the best Android phones. That could be Nokia.
They knew about the plans when they even signed the deal. They sold a decent bit of phones and made a good name for themselves with WP7, with WP8 it looks like they're gonna release a bunch of new phones and go all in.
Old Symbian team kept beating the Symbian drum and heading towards the cliff
At the same time, Linux team developing Maemo, viewed by the rest of the company as "the linux kids and their toys"
Linux team trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of several Linux services (and since most of them are not focused on mobile, and some are just crap but it's the only solution) it takes a lot of time
Not to mention "ok, let's merge with Intel and rewrite a crapload of stuff" then "ok, let's buy Qt and rewrite a boatload of stuff with Qt" (not sure how those are ordered, still)
Meanwhile Android just built the bare minimum, discarding lots of Linux infrastructure and came ahead
So when Stephen Elop got there, sorry, boat had already sank
> 2) Finding developers for Nokia's strategy won't be a problem. There are lots of .Net developers around.
Just FWIW, Windows Phone 8 adds a native development option, so .Net is no longer the only game in that town.
(It follows that it may be possible to put Qt there, too, but that's not really what I was going for.)
> 3) I fail to see what possible benefit Qt brings to Nokia's future strategy. They are unquestionably a Microsoft shop now. It is irrelevant how great Qt is as a technology.
That's true, but to add the historical context: Until this round of layoffs, Nokia had several hundred people at their Ulm office work on a new Linux/Qt-based mobile operating system. It is now, with that project shut down, that they have no internal use case for the technology anymore.
Many of the workers at Ulm were genuinely surprised at this development.
I see you consistently making posts that go against the local grain by glorifying the decisions of CEOs, defending ideas that most hackers attack, etc. What is your background that gives you this radically different perspective?
It's common sense that Nokia was not going to have a use for Qt or anyone involved with it once they moved to a MS strategy. I would honestly love to know what is being communicated internally for Nokia employees to be surprised at this.
It's generally understood that finding a talented Dev team is far harder than transitioning a team to a new technology. Many company's have transitioned code from platform A to platform B without building a new team from scratch.
Not because everyone will make the transition but because what separates a great QT/.net/java/c++ developer from an average one has vary little to do with experience. So, while such transitions are a great time to remove deadwood, and you want to find some experts in the new stack laying off the old team is expensive and rarely worth it.
FWIW, Elop made public comments along the line of, roughly, "we're currently working on something that is going to make everything we're selling right now, including Lumia, irrelevant", which may serve as a basis for extrapolating what was being communicated internally, or at least how it was understood by some.
>It's common sense that Nokia was not going to have a use for Qt or anyone involved with it once they moved to a MS strategy.
The radical perspective is that they have a "MS strategy" and that that "MS strategy" will do them any good.
You seem to believe something which, judging by Nokia's results and MS recent (10 year) history, it seems ludicrous if not suicidal.
Plus, if that "Surface" thing goes well, what's to stop MS trying to build their own phones? From a mobile leader that it was in the past, Nokia will become --at best-- a insignificant MS home making division, and at worst an ex-partner with no recourse.
Of course the more probable outcome is that Windows Phone 8,9,10,x will continue it's Zune-like irrelevance, and Nokia with enter a RIM like free fall...
Anyone who takes that blog as anything except entertainment needs to take a good look at the realities of the mobile market.
Go back and read his blog in 2008-2009 where he conclusively proved every time he wrote that Nokia phones were much better than the iPhone and Android, and that no one really wanted a touchscreen device anyway.
It would be a shame to interpret the blog in that way.
I believe the author (Tomi Ahonen) gives a window into how most businesses product management and marketing work for good or for bad.
Companies start with a technology base for a product and hire pretty smart people to look at the market and identify the features which will sell more units or the segments they need to target. The decisions are usually very fact driven because they have to justify in terms of a business case, and in general I think Ahonen is factually very solid.
If you looked at the figures and facts from 2008-09 I don't think you'll find much wrong and public position of Nokia (outside of the US tech community) was pretty strong.
However, the fundamental problem about relying solely on this approach is that it is a. very reliant on execution of your engineering org. b. takes no account of the ability of engineering to scale c. remains susceptible to disruptive big-bang technologies.
This is why product development organizations need a coherent personality rather than be treated as factories and prescient leadership.
I have no argument with the financial conclusions he draws - yes, Nokia has lost vast market share, profit and the value of the company has suffered as a result.
What I disagree with is his mindset: it is all Elop's fault, and there is a vast Microsoft conspiracy to destroy Nokia.
I don't agree with Elop's decision to go to Windows Phone. But I do agree with Elop's conclusion that the Nokia platform(s) were "burning" and that they should be abandoned.
I think he should have gone with Android, but I understand the reasons why he went with WinPhone.
Meanwhile, Tomi Ahonen still claims that Meego was the ultimate solution to all of Nokia's problems. Ahonen has never accepted that Meego was 2 years too late for it to be a viable player, and he's never accepted that Nokia isn't a big enough player to build a sustainable ecosystem around an operating system that was so late.
At least Nokia now has a chance of survival (even if that means being bought by Microsoft), unlike RIM which going down and nothing can save it (With their current management approach).
Nokia is not in trouble because of Elop. It is in trouble because of two trends. One is the rise of the middle class in emerging markets who don't want cheap, nasty feature phones. And two is the move from both Apple and Android into lower and lower price points.
And the fact is that Meego had nothing going for it. It had no apps and no related ecosystems like Google, Microsoft and Apple have. And as we are seeing with RIM developers simply aren't interested in building 4 versions of their apps. So this idea that Meego was going to save the day is pure delusion.
of course the root cause is not Elop. But Elop grossly mishandled the situation and now company is near bankruptcy. If only Elop had been more cautious, nokia would be still profitable and maybe in a position to utilize this great QT technology which they invested a lot. There was no need to declare the death of Symbian and MeeGo so early. There was no reason to jump to Windows Phone bandwagon as their sole hope a year before WP8. And Elop was aware that WP7 devices would not receive update to WP8.
What a shame...
Aside from timing and suicidal memos, given the obvious incompetency of Elop, I doubt WP was the right decision at all. Of course I do not have all the information that Elop had back then, but I wonder did they consider other options, such as forking android (maybe in cooperation with amazon), seriously. I wonder what role his previous employment played here.
>this great QT technology which they invested a lot
Sorry but only a few geeks care about QT, and other developers care about the ecosystem and go where the money is. I wrote some QT code about 10 years ago and it was good, but is it so great compared to iOS/ObjC, Android/Java and WinRT/C# that developers would just flock to it blindly? I seriously doubt it.
With the exception of iOS, a single Qt app can run on all of those platforms with minimal modification. (Except maybe WinRT, I know little of it at this point, but Qt can be used in applications for Windows, Linux, OSX, and Android.) Of course, there are all those geeks involved with KDE, which I'm presuming are inconsequential because they don't produce mobile apps? =)
That being said, we already knew Nokia was going to dump it, they already sold off the commercial support and licensing division and made a shallow claim "we're going to continue contributing to Qt," which almost always should be read by adding "until..." at the end.
I'm happy to see Qt back in the hands of someone who cares about it. Personally, I'm not much interested in whether or not Nokia plays in the sandbox.
Windows, Linux, OSX, yes, if you're writing a desktop app. That's what Qt is good at.
But Android? On devices with a completely different form factor, input schemes, and resource requirements? I don't think that is feasible, particularly from a user experience point of view.
It is absolutely feasible. Meego and Symbian devices habe about the same form factors, input methods and resource constraints and Qt works like a charm on those. It's just that few people have actually seen how well Symbian works these days.
I was responding to the claim that: "a single Qt app can run on all of those platforms with minimal modification".
And having ported a fairly successful iOS app to Symbian^3 (using mostly Qt Quick/QML), I would seriously contest the claim of 1) Qt working like a charm on Symbian and 2) how well Symbian works in general.
Rather, that to provide the best user experience on each different type of device (i.e. to follow platform conventions and paradigms and take advantage of unique device capabilities where present), it's best to use platform specific tools and design your application to be consistent with the expected user experience for that particular device.
I'm shipping a Qt-based embedded product with >$1MM USD in revenue. If you work for a particular large restaurant chain on planet Earth you may have encountered it. Does that make me a geek, or someone concerned about Qt's roadmap for other reasons?
I think the point is that your success with Qt doesn't really have a lot of impact on the possibility of Nokia shipping a successful consumer-mobile phone that happens to have a UI written in Qt.
No, my point is that Qt is not a project that is only used or cared about by "a few geeks". Many of us use it to build and ship real products, and we could give a rat's ass what Nokia does in the future. But don't dismiss the project as a toy or trivial idea (I can point you to Java Swing if you need that).
When I said that "only a few geeks would care", I meant it as a selling point for consumers or developers. "Hey, this phone uses QT, buy it, develop for it!"
I did not mean applications like yours and never implied it was a toy.
But what can it do for RIM that can't be done by Darwin, Linux kernel or the NT kernel? As I said, us geeks by our very nature get excited by the things that the users don't, unless they can see a difference in usage.
QNX is a true microkernel that allows true scalability, multitasking, and sandboxing. Honestly, just look at the PlayBook OS and BlackBerry 10, and you can see what's possible vs. Darwin.
Also, the fact that it's POSIX compliant helps immensely when porting existing code.
Moreover, RIM is doubling-down on Qt. It's unclear what this move by Nokia does, but I think you'll see a lot of Qt developers being hired by RIM. Whether they'll pick up the project and run with it is another story.
If I was a developer that just got laid off from a sinking company I don't think my first reaction would be to jump on board to another sinking company...
(Not trying to be snarky, but I would indeed be concerned about RIM following the same path as Nokia, especially considering the massive job cuts they've recently announced.)
The "massive" job cuts are in the legacy BBOS Java side. If people couldn't be re-purposed for BlackBerry 10, they were let go because BBOS is going into maintenance mode. It's the exact same situation Nokia is in with Qt. They're moving on to Windows Phone 8, and Qt developers are not a part of that plan.
RIM may be on the decline right now with BBOS, but you simply need to look into the great work they're doing to seed the developer community with the support they need to create great apps for BlackBerry 10. I know the typical thing to spout is that RIM is dead, long live Android/iOS, but if you actually looked into it yourself, you would see that RIM is doing some really great things with BlackBerry 10. They're reaching out to FOSS communities, seeding actual hardware, and making their tools easier to use than ever.
But I know that many, maybe yourself included, will call me a fanboi, downvote me, and won't bother looking into it themselves. They'll continue spouting this nonsense about RIM's death, never changing their opinion, and taking Apple/Google's word for it. That's fine, continue being uninformed.
The rest of us developers with an open mind will happily pick up the slack on the sinking ship that is RIM. We might be wrong, and you might be right. But what happens when we're right? Where will you be?
> if you actually looked into it yourself, you would see that RIM is doing some really great things with BlackBerry 10. They're reaching out to FOSS communities, seeding actual hardware, and making their tools easier to use than ever.
That's great, but the health of a company and it's products depends on a bit more than their developer relations team. The engineers at HP/Palm were also doing great things with webOS before it got axed entirely.
> But I know that many, maybe yourself included, will call me a fanboi, downvote me, and won't bother looking into it themselves. They'll continue spouting this nonsense about RIM's death, never changing their opinion, and taking Apple/Google's word for it. That's fine, continue being uninformed.
I have no personal stake in the matter nor do I particularly care whether RIM survives or dies. I was only making the observation that if I was a Qt developer that just got laid off from Nokia, I would not want to take up a job at RIM for fear of the same situation repeating itself in 12-18 months. I mean, in the best case scenario it's a gamble that BB10 succeeds in the marketplace at all. If I had a family to support I would be looking to find a less risky proposition.
> The rest of us developers with an open mind will happily pick up the slack on the sinking ship that is RIM. We might be wrong, and you might be right. But what happens when we're right? Where will you be?
The same place I always was? RIM's success or failure is entirely irrelevant to me.
If you were a Qt core developer at Nokia, then what other employer would actually take you on? Even if it's just 12-18 more months, at least that gives you the opportunity to put food on the table while you pivot into another opportunity.
I perceive Qt's ownership by Nokia as negative, as Qt in fact is the only crossplatform UI framework for C++ that is up to date with the current industry demands in the field of UI, graphics and animation, and Nokia of course ignored the platforms of their competitors. Instead I would like to see Qt as a crossplatform framework for all the important mobile and desktop platforms, then I could use it for my projects. So I hope Qt will go on as completely free software not belonging to any particular capitalist.
Edit: To be clear, I my intent wasn't to question Mirko, but to point out that the title here was added on HN; it wasn't the title he used and I didn't read his post as saying the entire Qt team was fired.