In a letter to developers today, Nokia announced that it was switching from Symbian to Win7 as the OS for its mobile phones!
Now comes the bad part:
What they are saying between the lines is that Nokia mobile phones for the USA and other 1st world (read rich) markets will be running Win7 Mobile. For the market in India and other 2nd world (read poor) markets their phones will continue to run Maemo.
I heard about this as a rumor a couple days ago and didn't believe it would happen, until I learned that Nokia's recently hired CEO, Elop, is a former Microsoft executive. Only a CEO saturated with MS Koolaid would think merging a company which has a market share at 22% and falling with a company that has a 3% market share and falling a good idea. It's obvious that this "partnership" will help Microsoft in the mobile phone market place MORE than it will help Nokia, so it has me wondering if his decision was made in the best interest of Nokia ... or Microsoft. IOW, who is he really working for? My first thought was that "partnering" with Nokia and getting it to switch to SilverLight would be something Microsoft would do to hamper or stop the exploding adoption rate of Qt4. After all, what was the sum total of their "partnership" with Novell? Getting enterprises running RH, CENTOS and other Linux servers to replace them with SUSE servers, which were installed deliberately without "Master Browser" capability, so that they could be easily replaced with Win2003 servers at a later date without disrupting the enterprise network.
A little over 24 hours ago Nokia stock sold for $8.49. Now is hoovering around $6.90, a drop of more than 18%.
That may indicate that investors aren't looking too favorably on this "partnership". Perhaps they had Novell on their minds. Will Nokia be "Novell Part Duce"? I suspect that some heavy money moves will try to bolster the Nokia price level or pump it up, then sell. Typical pump & dump.
The comment section to that announcement has been flooded with msgs from ANGRY developers, who justifiably feel EXPLOITED. Only a few wrote that the partnership was a good idea. Nokia interspersed the mostly negative comments with soothing words of encouragement, but the developers arn't having it.
Nokia courted the FOSS developers to enter a "partnership" after it purchased Trolltech. It enhanced Qt4 and added QtCreator and an awesome SDK, putting Qt4 in the world class level of developer tools, if not the TOP development tool in the world. There was a LOT of free coding given to Symbian /Maemo by FOSS developers, and they also wrote lots of apps (even to sell), because apps is the name of the game in mobile phones. So, IF apps are the name of the game, and mobile Win7 has done poorly, many say, precisely because it has so few apps available, and no one is writing apps for it because 3% isn't a big enough market share to encourage developers to take the risk and invest their money and time, WHY does Nokia tell its app community to switch to Windows Phone 7, SilverLight and XNF? Was Nokia management so arrogant that it did not understand the culture it was exploiting, shamelessly it now turns out?
But, all is not lost. Thankfully, Qt4 is under the GPL (or LGPL) and so regardless of what Nokia does or does not do, it will continue to thrive as a development tool because it is SO good, and it is truly "write once, compile anywhere". It may be called something else, but Rose by any other name is still a Rose, and Linux will continue to benefit from Qt (or what ever it will be called if it is forked) and KDE. So, don't abandon your Qt skills nor hesitate to learn how to write software using Qt.. The tools are in the repository. When you install them be sure to install qt4-docs, which will write the API to your local hard drive and you won't have to depend on Nokia's webpage for the API.
The bad news, I feel, is only for Nokia. May it RIP.
Nokia and Microsoft today announced plans to form a broad strategic partnership that would combine our complementary strengths and expertise to create a new global mobile ecosystem, one we believe would have all the elements needed to fuel innovation – including search, location, advertising and exciting new devices.
As part of this, Nokia plans to adopt Windows Phone as our primary smartphone strategy, helping drive the future of the platform.
...
Microsoft would make available the existing free Windows Phone Developer Tools; Visual Studio 2010, Expression, Silverlight and the XNA Framework to developers. Together, we will provide guidance for developers wishing to port their applications to Windows Phone.
,,,
As part of this, Nokia plans to adopt Windows Phone as our primary smartphone strategy, helping drive the future of the platform.
...
Microsoft would make available the existing free Windows Phone Developer Tools; Visual Studio 2010, Expression, Silverlight and the XNA Framework to developers. Together, we will provide guidance for developers wishing to port their applications to Windows Phone.
,,,
The Qt ecosystem
Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian/MeeGo/Maemo and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices (whatever they are?, but Qt R&D is being reduced - GG); continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.
Extending the scope of Qt further will be our first MeeGo-related open source device, which we plan to ship later this year. Though our plans for MeeGo have been adapted in light of our planned partnership with Microsoft, that device will be compatible with applications developed within the Qt framework and so give Qt developers a further device to target.
Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian/MeeGo/Maemo and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices (whatever they are?, but Qt R&D is being reduced - GG); continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.
Extending the scope of Qt further will be our first MeeGo-related open source device, which we plan to ship later this year. Though our plans for MeeGo have been adapted in light of our planned partnership with Microsoft, that device will be compatible with applications developed within the Qt framework and so give Qt developers a further device to target.
I heard about this as a rumor a couple days ago and didn't believe it would happen, until I learned that Nokia's recently hired CEO, Elop, is a former Microsoft executive. Only a CEO saturated with MS Koolaid would think merging a company which has a market share at 22% and falling with a company that has a 3% market share and falling a good idea. It's obvious that this "partnership" will help Microsoft in the mobile phone market place MORE than it will help Nokia, so it has me wondering if his decision was made in the best interest of Nokia ... or Microsoft. IOW, who is he really working for? My first thought was that "partnering" with Nokia and getting it to switch to SilverLight would be something Microsoft would do to hamper or stop the exploding adoption rate of Qt4. After all, what was the sum total of their "partnership" with Novell? Getting enterprises running RH, CENTOS and other Linux servers to replace them with SUSE servers, which were installed deliberately without "Master Browser" capability, so that they could be easily replaced with Win2003 servers at a later date without disrupting the enterprise network.
A little over 24 hours ago Nokia stock sold for $8.49. Now is hoovering around $6.90, a drop of more than 18%.
That may indicate that investors aren't looking too favorably on this "partnership". Perhaps they had Novell on their minds. Will Nokia be "Novell Part Duce"? I suspect that some heavy money moves will try to bolster the Nokia price level or pump it up, then sell. Typical pump & dump.The comment section to that announcement has been flooded with msgs from ANGRY developers, who justifiably feel EXPLOITED. Only a few wrote that the partnership was a good idea. Nokia interspersed the mostly negative comments with soothing words of encouragement, but the developers arn't having it.
Nokia courted the FOSS developers to enter a "partnership" after it purchased Trolltech. It enhanced Qt4 and added QtCreator and an awesome SDK, putting Qt4 in the world class level of developer tools, if not the TOP development tool in the world. There was a LOT of free coding given to Symbian /Maemo by FOSS developers, and they also wrote lots of apps (even to sell), because apps is the name of the game in mobile phones. So, IF apps are the name of the game, and mobile Win7 has done poorly, many say, precisely because it has so few apps available, and no one is writing apps for it because 3% isn't a big enough market share to encourage developers to take the risk and invest their money and time, WHY does Nokia tell its app community to switch to Windows Phone 7, SilverLight and XNF? Was Nokia management so arrogant that it did not understand the culture it was exploiting, shamelessly it now turns out?
But, all is not lost. Thankfully, Qt4 is under the GPL (or LGPL) and so regardless of what Nokia does or does not do, it will continue to thrive as a development tool because it is SO good, and it is truly "write once, compile anywhere". It may be called something else, but Rose by any other name is still a Rose, and Linux will continue to benefit from Qt (or what ever it will be called if it is forked) and KDE. So, don't abandon your Qt skills nor hesitate to learn how to write software using Qt.. The tools are in the repository. When you install them be sure to install qt4-docs, which will write the API to your local hard drive and you won't have to depend on Nokia's webpage for the API.
The bad news, I feel, is only for Nokia. May it RIP.
?). MS presented Nokia's board a mafia deal: we'll inject a lof of cash into Nokia through a Partnership. Familiar anyone? Is this a Novel idea? 
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