IBM Picks Qtopia Over PalmOS And PocketPC

Bill Kendrick writes "ZDNet, Geek.com and others are reporting IBM's decision to choose Trolltech's Qtopia (the embedded version of their Qt library, used by the Sharp Zaurus PDA) in their forthcoming devices. See the announcement at Trolltech's website, and an earlier press release at IBM.com." Here's an earlier post about the new IBM reference platform.

Comments

Re:Quite a shift

[swillden]

It was Microsoft who wrestled the computer world from the headlock IBM had it in.

This is almost certainly a troll, but for those who might share the same misapprehension, it's worth pointing out that the above statement is completely false.

If there is a single cause of IBM's loss of control (and, actually, the company still is a monopoly in some spaces, though a relatively well-behaved one), it's the US Department of Justice. The consent decree IBM signed forced the company to stop bundling, which pretty much gutted the company's market strategy. If you want to add a second reason, it's the emergence of the personal computer, but the fact that IBM didn't retain control of that market is also largely attributable to the consent decree. At the time the IBM PC came out, IBM was deeply mired in red ink and floundering badly, which was a lot of the reason why IBM never put any real focus on the PC market and ended up giving it to Microsoft instead.

The reason that the DOJ hasn't had a similar effect on Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, of course, is that Microsoft chose to ignore its consent decree and force the DOJ to make it stick in court, which has been so difficult, expensive and time-consuming that the US government has pretty much lost the will to press the charges home.