Nokia Gives Some Hints On the Future of Qt

An anonymous reader writes "Continuing the damage control following the announcement of the Nokia-Microsoft partnership, Nokia has a post on their official blog outlining the future of Qt which includes some (cherry picked) comments from Qt users. Phil from Nokia writes, 'Lots of great questions and comments coming from you all on the future of Qt. One thing is for sure: Qt remains to play an important role in Nokia. We'll have more Qt-related posts coming this week during Mobile World Congress, but for the time being, the Director of Qt's ecosystem, Daniel Kihlberg, wrote a post on Qt's official blog on the future of Qt.'" An anonymous reader points to one unattractive possible future for Qt.

Comments

Gag me.

[lexidation]

Lots of great questions and comments coming from you all on the future of Qt. One thing is for sure: Qt remains to play an important role in Nokia. We’ll have more Qt-related posts coming this week during Mobile World Congress...

I'm used to PR people spray painting happy faces all over everything, but this is some of the gaggiest PR barf I've had spilled in my path.

Fool me once

[Compaqt]

Back last autumn, Nokia had promised that it had finally gotten its platform house in order:

-S40 for dirt-cheap phones. No apps anyway, so it doesn't matter for developers.
-Symbian for feature phones.
-And Meego for advanced phones and devices.

But devs would only have to use one platform (Qt) to target both Symbian and Meego. Oh, and Qt will also run on Win/Mac/Lin. Icing on top.

That's a story. And after all the bungling, it looked like devs and users would forgive Nokia, and give it another shot.

But now, it changes the platform story once again. No stability. No trust. And no reason why users and devs shouldn't abandon Nokia for Android.

Re:Fool me once

[imroy]

Back last autumn, Nokia had promised that it had finally gotten its platform house in order

That would have been before Stephen Elop, former Microsoft executive, became the president and CEO of Nokia?

Re:Fool me once

[Paradise Pete]

Instead we are seeing the slow-motion theft and destruction of the entire company. It started with appeasement. Then this move, accompanied by some BS hand-waving about the future of the other technology. That was necessary to keep the in-house people from a full-scale revolt. Then those systems will be, when the time is right, "deprecated," and divisions laid off, and it becomes an all-Microsoft OS operation. The company will steadily lose market share and money and eventually get bought for a song, ala Palm. But along the way they'll have shoveled a big pile of money Microsoft's way, while at the same time allowing Microsoft to prolong its own fantasy of being relevant in the future.

Re:This is probably great news for Qt

[davester666]

Yeah. There will be exactly one first class implementation, available on one operating system [Windows].

Then there will be partial implementations elsewhere.

For an example of this see...Microsoft SilverLight.

good luck with that

[t2t10]

The retention of Nokia’s 200 million Symbian-users is vital

Yeah, it is. Good luck with that. You effectively just canceled their platform (Symbian) and the only platform with any viable migration strategy (MeeGo). You also just removed the incentive for developers to create new apps for the Symbian platform.

You could have done something special by turning MeeGo into a platform that allows users to run Symbian, Qt, and Android, giving people a viable migration path. But none of that is going to happen with Windows Phone 7. And nobody is going to believe you are going to keep spending money on MeeGo now that you are in Microsoft's pocket and have your company run by an ex-Microsoft exec.

Developers are perceiving that MeeGo is dead, and with it, Qt is dead for your products. You might as well stop investing money in them now.