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Digia To Acquire Qt From Nokia
First time accepted submitter MrvFD writes "Ever since the most recent layoffs were announced by Nokia last month and the end of Qt related programs at Nokia was rumored, the fate of Qt has been in the air despite it nowadays having a working open governance model. Fear no longer, Qt brand, since Digia has now announced acquiring the Qt organization from Nokia. While relatively unknown company to the masses, it has already been selling the non-free (non-LGPL) licenses of Qt for 1.5 years. Hopefully this'll mean a bright future for Qt in co-operation with other Qt wielding companies like Google, RIM, Canonical, Intel, Skype, Microsoft, Jolla and the thousands of Qt open source and commercial license users. Digia now plans to quickly enable Qt on Android, iOS and Windows 8 platforms, where work has already been underway for some time."
Good to hear. Maybe Digia can also push them to fix a number of the bugs they neglect since it doesn't fit into their mobile device circle jerk that never amounted to anything.
Is Digia a solid company ? as in: "profitable enough not to get bought in 6 months with Qt changing hands ... again"
Embarcado bought CodeGear not Borland. CodeGear being the spunoff company from Borland to handle Delphi/C++ Builder, etc. Borland was bought by Micro Focus.
Nokia sells patents to a patent troll: suicide by M$ almost complete.
http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120809005600/en/Vringo-Nokia-Execute-Patent-Purchase-Agreement
That's it for Nokia....all the talent has left, and now they sold the last real assets to a troll. M$'s trail of destruction continues.
- credit to phands on IV for pointing this out.
--
BMO
Good.
Now Digia should acquire the Trolltech trademark as well if they haven't, and rebrand themselves as Trolltech. Then everyone could forget Nokia ever happened.
A company I've never heard of to acquire something I've never heard of from a company going out of business. Nice.
Just because you've never heard of it, doesn't mean it's not important. Are you sure you're reading the right newsfeed?
I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
It doesn't really matter Qt is under open governance. And if the toolkit is failed to be released, it all goes BSD. So begin that speculation. If MS "killed" Qt, it would free it. MS has two possible position here: .NET.
1. Qt as LGPL or commercial. This limits Qt more than:
2. Qt as BSD. A top-notch C++ library that runs on all platforms would be competition to
I believe that #2 is the worst outcome for MS, especially given their failing position in approval (Win 8, Win Phone). The only benefit to #2 for MS is they can run Qt themselves, but they won't because .NET is their baby.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
It really is a shame that Qt has languished in relative obscurity for so many years. It really is a great toolkit (and I say that as a non-programmer who has only dabbled with it).
It's relatively simple, consistent, and has a large number of Windows-like constructor tools. It can be easily bound with many different other languages to construct a working program in a fairly short period of time. It's cross platform, running on everything*. The CPU overhead is relatively negligible (sans a massive framework like KDE).
It really astounds me that it's remained so cursory over the past decade or so. We had things like Qtopia way back in '00, and then it kind of went nowhere, even though there have been a lot of promising projects where it's been used - it's just fallen short of dominating like I'd have expected it to have. For instance, it was used in Maemo - but then replaced with something GTK-based. Why?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Nokia has really shot itself in the foot. They could have pushed the porting effort to get Qt on Android and then get a nice native app ecosystem going but instead they went the (classically) shortsighted take-the-money route with Microsoft. Now they are stuck with this burden called Windows 8 Phone which is on a whooping 4% of cell phones. Windows 8 Phone just needs some apps, right? Well it's bad enough to come into the game late but when you have a hostile environment for developers (developers! developers!) you are not going to get anything but crappy ports from Android or iOS from developers that dont know any better.
It seems this culture of CEOs/board members coming and going on a regular basis has made corporate investments shortsighted.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Hey, you may be right: who needs the decades of know-how in building great phone hardware, the global logistical network, the long-held relationships with operators and sales channels... This all has been eliminated in a poof of universal Windows Phone hate ('cause everybody thinks about it exactly like you do), where Symbian was not a problem at all.
I don't see very much Windows Phone hate. Mostly I see wonder at how Microsoft could be so late to this party and mild amusement at their struggle to remain relevant in that market. As for the MS/Nokia deal and considering who Nokia's CEO is, it doesn't take much tin foil to realize that something smells bad there.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
decades of building great phone hardware which then had to be scaled back because the OS didn't support current hardware and then 2 years after the deal a new version is forced on them which is incompatible. That's great for the hardware designers, great for their global logistics network, great for their operator and sales channels. They are becoming great at shrinking lots of great resources.
FYI, it was a poor choice because the OS sucked, was outdated and already had a shrinking market share after many years on the market. It just so happens that it was such a great technology company like Microsoft who built and owns that product and I happen to know them too well.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
This is a good thing. The best thing for Qt is for it to be owned by someone whose business depends on it. I worked for a firm that, for legal reasons, had a commercial license from Digia, and I attended the Qt Dev Days in SF in 2011. I was impressed with what I saw. Digia seemed like a good company. I hope they can make a go of it.
Not being mentioned is not the same as dropping - and the situation was clarified in the days after the story was "broken", so why are people still posting bullshit about it a year later? FUD, thats why.
Microsofts effort on C++ is not replacing .Net - it's being brought up to the same level of development effort so it can stand beside .Net as a development environment rather than staying as the step child that it had become in recent years. They were bringing it up to scratch because people wanted it, not because its replacing .Net.
Both are intended to be your first-class development platforms on Windows.
They had Meego, they had Qt, they even have a lot of cash. So they could have done something unique. Now all that is gone. Enter Windows.
Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware.
Except; this was a lie.
If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market. It's well worth looking at some of the graphs which show how Nokia's Symbian sales only started going down after the "Eliop Effect" made everyone think they were a dead end.
His logic was good, but his facts were completely wrong. If you pick up a gun; decide for no apparent reason that it's a "wrong way round gun", and then shoot yourself, it's not your logic which is at fault. Grip on reality? Maybe? Sanity? Yes.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
If you had just taken Nokia's spare money, put it into a separate company and started building a mobile phone based on Android, recruiting people from scratch, you would have had a very good chance of getting into a major position in the market
If the shareholders could have easily gotten equity out of Nokia there wouldn't have been a problem. But under the labor rules they had layoffs were going to cost the company a pretty penny. They couldn't get the money out.
Nokia was profitable!
Nokia had increasing sales! Including increasing sales of "smartphones"!!
Nokia had a huge cash mountain (> 5Billion Dollars!!)
Absolutely. Symbian was still doing well but....
1) They had decreasing sales on the high end.
2) Margins were collapsing
3) Their Meego / Maemo strategy wasn't ready to go. It wasn't until 2011 they released the N9 and that phone is priced much to high for the hardware.
I don't think that Elop's facts were wrong. Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. The Samsung Galaxy II is out. The 4S comes out 1 quarter later. How do you sell 100m of those N9s at that price point? I don't see it, so the the N9 is a great phone that sells at best a few million. Now it does have the realistic potential to be a $250 phone by 2014 / 2015 and replace Symbian low end base all over the world. I just don't see how Nokia had 5 years, based on Symbian given how much staff / overhead they had.
Elop needs Balmer's cash. If you see some way to get around that, tell me the plan that works. How do they get people transition from Symbian to Meego during the 2010-2014 time frame without viable Meego / Maemo phones?
Honestly I read his article in Business week where he outlined the logic. The whole thing makes sense. Nokia was desperate and need the cash plus a credible OS to run on their hardware. Balmer wanted the credibility Nokia bought him and had cash. It was a dangerous play but I don't buy it was corrupt. It makes a lot of sense for the board / shareholder's perspective where chewing up the equity and bankruptcy are roughly equivalent.
Nokia didn't need anything. And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets. They had a credible OS and one they didn't need to pay someone else for. And as someone else pointed out, they were profitable and didn't need the cash. Their ability to remain profitable changed only after they started pursuing Windows at all costs.
If you want to get an accurate picture of what Microsoft and Stephen Elop did - try reading this blog from a former Nokia Exec that is highly respected in Mobile Phone Sales. You'll see why Nokia is doing so poorly and having to sell off everything, and why Windows Phone will be a no-go (and who made it such).
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
And in all reality their Maemo/MeeGo devices outsell the Windows Phone devices when in the same markets.
Their Maemo/MeeGo devices don't sell nearly enough to sustain a company Nokia's size. If Nokia was a small company the N9 would have been awesome. Elop BTW agrees, that they might be able to get the N9 down to around $250 by 2014/2015 and then they do have a viable device.
The N9 and its cousins without any marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.) sold at full price and outsold its Lumia brethren which had millions of dollars in marketing (promotions, discounts, etc.). The Maemo/MeeGo OS also would have run on a lot cheaper devices than they can run the Windows Phone OS on. So I call bull - especially on it coming from Elop. If Nokia pursued Maemo/MeeGo on their phones they could easily have transitioned to it from Symbian. If they had put out the N9 and its brethren in sufficient quantity they could have lowered the price through volume discounts. Instead, under the direction of Elop, they did the least possible - low volume kept the price high, no marketing meant lower sales than they could have had, etc. It was simply a matter of he didn't want the Maemo/MeeGo platform to outshine the Windows platform - which, ironically, it did anyway only proving how strong a platform it is. Jolla will have a good business at Nokia expense as a result.
The problem was he didn't have enough money to last that long.
They had plenty of money, and plenty of sales to last that long. Nokia was far larger than the smart phone market and dominated the phone market around the world. The exception was the US where they didn't dominate the smart phone market, and were not quite as strong in the feature phone and dumb phone markets. However, the rest of their business more than offset it. Until Elop, his direction for abandoning Maemo/MeeGo, and his statements about abandoning Symbian for Windows in a very short time frame Nokia was very profitable. And, btw, it's hard to destroy a company like Elop did to Nokia, and as the article I linked to shows the shareholders have a very good likelihood for a successful lawsuit against him for what he's done - in 3 different countries nonetheless.
Certainly customers hate the Lumia and that hasn't worked out for Nokia yet, and may not work out. But the problem with MeeGo devices when we start talking about sustaining Nokia was the ability to produce something inexpensive enough to transition their Symbian base quickly enough. I've read Tomi's blog. Its an interesting blog. But he tends to think like a guy who works for Nokia not a control investor. The people who held Nokia's bonds didn't share Tomi's opinions about Nokia's prospects. Nokia was at $40 a share in late 2007 and at $15 a share when Elop came in. If there had been a MeeGo phone like the N9 when he showed up with a strategy to cut the cost of manufacture there never would have been an alliance with Microsoft.
Now don't get me wrong I think Tomi's criticism of the terrible job Elop did in managing the transition are spot on. But I don't have access to the T&C with Microsoft. I don't know that Microsoft, after the fiasco with LG, can afford to let Nokia sink and the strategy may always have been: heads Windows works out and the investors get profits from Windows, tails Windows 7 flounders and Microsoft buys Nokia the time it needs.
Who knows what the strategy was. As the blog noted, the board had to be involved in the decision for such things to go on without Elop's head rolling (thus they're liable too).
Share value is not a metric of how successful a company is, but rather a metric on how willing others are to bet on the success of the company. You can be the most successful company in the world and have a zero share price; or the worst in the world and have a very high share price.
Only time will tell if the investors truly agree with Elop. For now, they seem to be sitting on the sidelines; but they may be waiting for another shoe to fall (or so to speak) before doing anything more.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
Assume the N9 comes out June 2011 at $550 ballpark comparable to the iPhone 4 though a bit cheaper. [...] How do you sell 100m of those N9s at that price point? I don't see it, so the the N9 is a great phone that sells at best a few million.
Why do I have to assme that?
We can speculate about alternate realities all we want. How about discussing something about the real world as it actually is?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();