"The Platform is burning!"
When Microsoft corporate officer Stephan Elop took control as CEO of Nokia, he told employees that Qt4 was a great API and a good tool for Nokia phones. He was less than truthful because he already had plans in mind to switch Nokia from Symbian/Linux to WinP7. He launched his plan with a dramatic office memo titled "Burning Platform".
(At the end of 2011 they had only one product on the market, Lumina with WinP7. It was a burning platform.)
With bogus market statistics he justified his next step. While he claimed that the Nokia Symbain platform was burning down, he proposed to drop MeeGo and Qt4 and make Nokia just another hardware OEM that will ship WinP7 on their smartphones. How he sold this to the Nokia board is unbelievable, since Microsoft's share of the smartphone market had steadily declined from 15% to 2% before Elop arrived at Nokia. Analyst Tomi Ahonan [url=http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/01/nokia-q4-results-now-official-elop-has-created-world-record-destruction-of-market-share-in-one-year.html]writes{/url]:
Elop burned it down. The platform wasn't on fire, the WinP7 "rescue" boat floating down below was, and it was already leaking water. Massively. Elop pushed Nokia off of a sellable platform that wasn't on fire, and into a boat that had, effectively already burnt to the water line and is ready to sink. Most of us on Kubuntuforums predicted that would happen, and it has.
Microsoft has destroyed just about every major corporation that it has "partnered" with. Nokia is just the most recent. Prior to Nokia it was Novell. Last year it partnered with Baidu, the Chinese search engine, the one which sent almost 75 robots to constantly scour our site. Of course, the Chinese government is behind Baidu and they already own an 83% market share which, no doubt, will be close to 95% or higher when they get all the censorship fully in place. A perfect world for Microsoft ... a government approved and controlled monoply, but it will probably eat Bing's lunch before it all over, and Microsoft will be the biggest loser of all.
Tomi goes on to say:
Nokia is in a death spiral, and there is no denying that. Sooner or later, probably sometime this year, it will unload Qt4, especially since it is obvious that Nokia is bleeding money and cannot survive.
Just two weeks ago Nokia announced the complete tranfer of Qt to a Qt-Governance Project:
However, even though the "Chief Maintainer" is currently a Nokia employee, and even though developers have signed the agreement Nokia requires for them to be able to contribute code to Qt4, and even though a future "Chief Maintainer" may be elected from one of the volunteers, Nokia STILL OWNS Qt4 ! They also have an agreement with the Qt-Foundation that requires them to release significant improvements and/or updates on a yearly basis so that the GPL version of Qt4 does not lag behind the commercial version. HOWEVER, last year they sold the commercial version, so I do not know how that part of the agreement with Qt Foundation plays out. Digia IS forking Qt4, even though they don't call ita fork, but do admit:
My own experience with the Qt commerical license, under Trolltech, was that it WAS worth the money. But, the purpose of the Trolltech/Qt Foundation agreement was to keep the GPL version of Qt4 no farther than one year out from the commercial version. However, Digia is working hard to put Qt4 on a Windows 8 Tablet!!! So, Spark will have some competition, and this time with a desktop that people like, the one it is also using!!! The big difference will be that Spark won't be paying for a license to use Balsam, because it is free, and Digia as a corporation can't give its Windows 8 tablet OS to Microsoft for free, unless Microsoft is paying for all development costs. Anything that Digia adds to its commercial version of Qt4 may never appear on the GPL version, or be useful if it did because it would make proprietary calls to non-existant hardware.
So, does the Digia divergence amount to a breaking of the Qt Foundation Agreement? And if so, can KDE fork Qt4? Should it?
PS:
The analyst evalution of Nokia's performance over the last year prompted me to see what Elop's share of Microsoft were doing. I found some interesting stuff, not about Elop, but about the other Microsoft insiders. During the last two years:
Gates sold 134 million shares at about $30/share = $4 Billion. He has 511 million shares remaining. http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html
Stephen Elop, still an officer in Microsoft, last sale was 23,250 shares at $23.64 per share (Value of $549,630). He owns 261,302 shares.
Ballmer sold 74 million shares...
ALL of the "Acquisitions" (non open market,and at $0 per share == transfers from trusts, spouse, etc. In order to sell?) are in blocks of 1,041 shares, with a few around 200,000 shares.
The massive movement of insider trading over the last two years is sales, not purchases. Insiders seem to be dumping Microsoft shares http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=MSFT
Do they know something they are not shareing with other investors, or are they just abandoning the Dollar and moving to Gold?
While competitors poured flames on our market share, what happened at Nokia? We fell behind, we missed big trends, and we lost time. At that time, we thought we were making the right decisions; but, with the benefit of hindsight, we now find ourselves years behind.
The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.
...
We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience. Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable.
...
We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market.
With bogus market statistics he justified his next step. While he claimed that the Nokia Symbain platform was burning down, he proposed to drop MeeGo and Qt4 and make Nokia just another hardware OEM that will ship WinP7 on their smartphones. How he sold this to the Nokia board is unbelievable, since Microsoft's share of the smartphone market had steadily declined from 15% to 2% before Elop arrived at Nokia. Analyst Tomi Ahonan [url=http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2012/01/nokia-q4-results-now-official-elop-has-created-world-record-destruction-of-market-share-in-one-year.html]writes{/url]:
A year ago Nokia grew smartphone sales by 45%. Under Elop's management, Nokia replaced the strong growth with a massive decline, dropping 25% when the industry itself had a massive year growing by over 60%.
The market share exactly a year ago at Q4 was 29% and yes, Nokia was so dominant in smartphones, it was not just the biggest smartphone maker, it was literally more than twice as big as its nearest rival and obviously also bigger than its two nearest rivals combined. Nokia was not fighting its rivals like in most businesses where the top 2 players are close in size, like Coke and Pepsi, or like Toyota and General Motors, not like Boeing and Airbus etc. Nokia was TOWERING over its rivals. Literally, more than twice as big as its nearest rival, just 12 months ago!
The market share exactly a year ago at Q4 was 29% and yes, Nokia was so dominant in smartphones, it was not just the biggest smartphone maker, it was literally more than twice as big as its nearest rival and obviously also bigger than its two nearest rivals combined. Nokia was not fighting its rivals like in most businesses where the top 2 players are close in size, like Coke and Pepsi, or like Toyota and General Motors, not like Boeing and Airbus etc. Nokia was TOWERING over its rivals. Literally, more than twice as big as its nearest rival, just 12 months ago!
Microsoft has destroyed just about every major corporation that it has "partnered" with. Nokia is just the most recent. Prior to Nokia it was Novell. Last year it partnered with Baidu, the Chinese search engine, the one which sent almost 75 robots to constantly scour our site. Of course, the Chinese government is behind Baidu and they already own an 83% market share which, no doubt, will be close to 95% or higher when they get all the censorship fully in place. A perfect world for Microsoft ... a government approved and controlled monoply, but it will probably eat Bing's lunch before it all over, and Microsoft will be the biggest loser of all.
Tomi goes on to say:
THIS IS A WORLD RECORD OF MISMANAGEMENT
This is not like New Coke. This is not like the BP Oil Spill. This is not like Toyota's problem with brakes. There have been huge disasters in business in history, but nothing like what we witnessed in 2011. Never in the economic history of mankind has there been a global market leader brand, that collapsed so totally in one year. Nokia was growing 45% from 2009 to 2010 in smartphones. Nokia was successfully migrating its 'dumbphone' customers to smartphones, by Q4 of 2010, Nokia had migrated 25% of its handset customers to smartphones while the world had only migrated 22%. All of Nokia's rivals were far behind in that transition, Motorola so badly, they had lost 8 out of every 10 customers they tried to migrate from dumbphones to smartphones. And how did Elop snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Today Nokia's proportion of smartphones is down to 17% - while the industry has reached the point where 29% of all phones sold globally are smartphones!
I cannot emphasize how strategically moronic this is. Previously, up to 2010, Nokia was GAINING customers, as it migrated its customer base from dumbphones to smartphones. The fact was, that Nokia was so successful in designing desirable phones - for Nokia existing customer preferences - that it actually gained customers while migrating them to more expensive smartphones. As long as Nokia was doing that profitably - and it was - that was perfection in executing a transition from a legacy business of dumbphones to smartphones. Elop has now reversed that.
Now Nokia is on a Motorola trajectory, where Nokia customers are actually lost when shifting from dumbphones to smartphones - and alarmingly that rate has been increasing and is now at the rate of two lost for every one retained! Worst of all, now obviously Nokia is doing this generating huge losses in its smartphone unit. Really, readers. It is like Nokia looked at how Motorola collapsed, and Elop came in and said, lets do a Motorola for Nokia but lets just do it much faster. This is strategic: Elop not only destroyed Nokia's today, Elop is also destroying Nokia's tomorrow. And now Nokia is going against the global trend, where the world went from 21% of all new phone sales being smartphones in 2010 to 29% now. And Nokia is going against the grain, shredding its loyal customers as it peddles undesirable smartphones. Nokia's customers are so disgusted - they are more willing to buy a cheap non-smartphone, than a smartphone!
This is not like New Coke. This is not like the BP Oil Spill. This is not like Toyota's problem with brakes. There have been huge disasters in business in history, but nothing like what we witnessed in 2011. Never in the economic history of mankind has there been a global market leader brand, that collapsed so totally in one year. Nokia was growing 45% from 2009 to 2010 in smartphones. Nokia was successfully migrating its 'dumbphone' customers to smartphones, by Q4 of 2010, Nokia had migrated 25% of its handset customers to smartphones while the world had only migrated 22%. All of Nokia's rivals were far behind in that transition, Motorola so badly, they had lost 8 out of every 10 customers they tried to migrate from dumbphones to smartphones. And how did Elop snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Today Nokia's proportion of smartphones is down to 17% - while the industry has reached the point where 29% of all phones sold globally are smartphones!
I cannot emphasize how strategically moronic this is. Previously, up to 2010, Nokia was GAINING customers, as it migrated its customer base from dumbphones to smartphones. The fact was, that Nokia was so successful in designing desirable phones - for Nokia existing customer preferences - that it actually gained customers while migrating them to more expensive smartphones. As long as Nokia was doing that profitably - and it was - that was perfection in executing a transition from a legacy business of dumbphones to smartphones. Elop has now reversed that.
Now Nokia is on a Motorola trajectory, where Nokia customers are actually lost when shifting from dumbphones to smartphones - and alarmingly that rate has been increasing and is now at the rate of two lost for every one retained! Worst of all, now obviously Nokia is doing this generating huge losses in its smartphone unit. Really, readers. It is like Nokia looked at how Motorola collapsed, and Elop came in and said, lets do a Motorola for Nokia but lets just do it much faster. This is strategic: Elop not only destroyed Nokia's today, Elop is also destroying Nokia's tomorrow. And now Nokia is going against the global trend, where the world went from 21% of all new phone sales being smartphones in 2010 to 29% now. And Nokia is going against the grain, shredding its loyal customers as it peddles undesirable smartphones. Nokia's customers are so disgusted - they are more willing to buy a cheap non-smartphone, than a smartphone!
Just two weeks ago Nokia announced the complete tranfer of Qt to a Qt-Governance Project:
Nokia has announced the transfer of Qt 4, under the patronage of the project Qt Project , an independent organization established to manage the development of Qt. The new governance structure involves maintenance of a company controlled by the project to a fully open development infrastructure, in which representatives of the community will be able to directly participate in the development of Qt and influence decision-making. Despite the fact that Qt Project was established in October, changes were made only of the experimental branches of Qt 5 and Qt 4 to inertia developed by the old rules.
The main problem of the transfer into the hands of the Qt 4 Qt Project was to use the internal private development tools and Nokia need to move to a new system of continuous integration is used in Qt Project. Currently, all obstacles removed, prepared a new test environment for Qt 4, including means of automated testing build and run on Linux and Mac OS X (for Windows currently available build tool). Qt 4.x repository is integrated into the review of code Qt Project. All operations of the publication of patches, testing, reviewing, tracking and approval of the code can be processed using the same methods that have been implemented for Qt branch 5 (new patch is the first stage of review by a participant, and then can be approved or rejected by the attendant or claim).
The main problem of the transfer into the hands of the Qt 4 Qt Project was to use the internal private development tools and Nokia need to move to a new system of continuous integration is used in Qt Project. Currently, all obstacles removed, prepared a new test environment for Qt 4, including means of automated testing build and run on Linux and Mac OS X (for Windows currently available build tool). Qt 4.x repository is integrated into the review of code Qt Project. All operations of the publication of patches, testing, reviewing, tracking and approval of the code can be processed using the same methods that have been implemented for Qt branch 5 (new patch is the first stage of review by a participant, and then can be approved or rejected by the attendant or claim).
Our intention is not to fork away from the open source version.
However, there already are and will be some differences. Let’s take an example from Qt Commercial 4.7.4. In open-soure version of Qt 4.7.4 Mac OS X Carbon support was depricated (and thus broken), we however have customers using that and need to keep it working. Thus we fixed the issues for Qt Commercial 4.7.4. Similarly the open-source version of 4.8 no longer supports platforms like Solaris and Embedded Linux, which are important for our customers, but we will continue to support them in Qt Commercial 4.8 resulting in some differences between the releases. Additionally the may well be certain areas that are not even possible to provide to open source due to our restrictions with 3rd parties.
For the error corrections we make, of course we want them to be available for open-source users as well. For new functionality, yes in many cases, but not necessary in all. We see it very beneficial to keep the good the co-operation with open-source community working. Qt is a great example of dual licensing, and we do not want to discontinue it. But our targets are primarily the needs of commercial customers, and then the needs of the community.
And, as said earlier, we truly believe that when making commercial products with Qt, choosing Qt Commercial is the best way to go.
However, there already are and will be some differences. Let’s take an example from Qt Commercial 4.7.4. In open-soure version of Qt 4.7.4 Mac OS X Carbon support was depricated (and thus broken), we however have customers using that and need to keep it working. Thus we fixed the issues for Qt Commercial 4.7.4. Similarly the open-source version of 4.8 no longer supports platforms like Solaris and Embedded Linux, which are important for our customers, but we will continue to support them in Qt Commercial 4.8 resulting in some differences between the releases. Additionally the may well be certain areas that are not even possible to provide to open source due to our restrictions with 3rd parties.
For the error corrections we make, of course we want them to be available for open-source users as well. For new functionality, yes in many cases, but not necessary in all. We see it very beneficial to keep the good the co-operation with open-source community working. Qt is a great example of dual licensing, and we do not want to discontinue it. But our targets are primarily the needs of commercial customers, and then the needs of the community.
And, as said earlier, we truly believe that when making commercial products with Qt, choosing Qt Commercial is the best way to go.
So, does the Digia divergence amount to a breaking of the Qt Foundation Agreement? And if so, can KDE fork Qt4? Should it?
PS:
The analyst evalution of Nokia's performance over the last year prompted me to see what Elop's share of Microsoft were doing. I found some interesting stuff, not about Elop, but about the other Microsoft insiders. During the last two years:
Gates sold 134 million shares at about $30/share = $4 Billion. He has 511 million shares remaining. http://biz.yahoo.com/t/38/567.html
Stephen Elop, still an officer in Microsoft, last sale was 23,250 shares at $23.64 per share (Value of $549,630). He owns 261,302 shares.
Ballmer sold 74 million shares...
ALL of the "Acquisitions" (non open market,and at $0 per share == transfers from trusts, spouse, etc. In order to sell?) are in blocks of 1,041 shares, with a few around 200,000 shares.
The massive movement of insider trading over the last two years is sales, not purchases. Insiders seem to be dumping Microsoft shares http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=MSFT
Do they know something they are not shareing with other investors, or are they just abandoning the Dollar and moving to Gold?
Comment