The Future of Qt, MeeGo for Future disruption
With Nokia announcing Windows Phone was Nokia’s new Primary focus, it seemed to have signed the death certificate of Symbian, MeeGo and of course their shared development platform Qt (which has shown so much potential for Nokia and the MeeGo ecosystem).
What is really happening to Qt? This it outlined in the official Qt blog. Some suggested Qt for WP7 but for technicalities I don’t fully understand, it’s apparently not possible.
- * The retention of Nokia’s 200 million Symbian-users is vital and Nokia has targeted sales of 150 million more Symbian-devices in years to come (Rafe from AAS suggests this possibly means Symbian lasting until 2013). To achieve that Nokia needs to continue the modernization of Symbian in Qt – to keep existing consumers engaged and to attract new customers, either upgrading from existing Symbian devices to Qt enabled devices or entirely new to Nokia.
- * Qt everywhere. Qt continues to make vast inroads into especially low end Linux devices and distro’s. Qt also continues to provide a platform for others to innovate and differentiate upon. For example Dreamworks switching all their internal animation tools to Qt and making cool movies like “MegaMind” and “How to Train Your Dragon”.
- * Nokia also announced it will ship its first MeeGo-related device in 2011, which will rely on the Qt ecosystem – and then will continue with MeeGo as an open source project for future disruption (By disruption, they mean, next big thing. Like the TOUCH SCREEN. It appears, my hopeful side says, that MeeGo might still be the inevitable future for Nokia when they LEAD the next big change as opposed to following it). Nokia can’t afford to be behind the next disruption again and Qt can play an important role in making sure it isn’t.
- * With Qt Quick and Qt SDK 1.1 releases in the coming months we are expecting the Qt developer community to continue to grow – adding to the 400.000 developers using Qt today. Qt is developed together with the community and we expect the pace of innovation to increase even further as the community grows.
- * We in Nokia are one of tens of thousands of companies in multiple industries actively using and contributing to Qt, making Qt relevant forboth mobile, desktop and other embedded developers
- * Qt expansion: We have continued to hire Qt developers and we will continue to improve and expand Qt in the future. Qt is great at delivering innovation; we have been doing that for 15 years. With the upcoming release of Qt Quick, we will reach out to new users and make it even easier to create great apps and UIs for many platforms including Symbian and MeeGo.
- * The new Qt SDK 1.1 technology preview. We now offer only one SDK for both desktop and mobile developers, which makes it easier to target more platforms by using just one SDK.
Cheers to Jim for the heads up!
Via Qt blog
Category: Nokia, Windows Phone
About the Author (Author Profile)
Hey, thanks for reading my post. My name is Jay and I'm a medical student at the University of Manchester. When I can, I blog here at mynokiablog.com and tweet now and again @jaymontano. We also have a twitter and facebook accounts @mynokiablog and facebook.com/MyNokiaBlog. Contact us at tips(@)mynokiablog.com or email me directly on jay[at]mynokiablog.comSubscribe
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- Do you see anything positive about #NokMsft in 2011? : My Nokia Blog | February 12, 2011
This is great news!
With enough user and developer support, MeeGo’s future could be very promising. All Nokia has to do is release a hardware-rich, high-quality MeeGo device.
Fingers crossed for MWC.
Don’t hope to much.
@jay: “Cheers to Jim for the heads up!” Thanks. I said I won’t tip nokia news anymore but I can’t help it, however some of the anger is passing by, and I watched those webos devices and I might buy an webos tablet. I also found that web os has qt 4.6 on it. maybe there will be 4.7 as well because after all webos is much more linux than android is.
You should also read Ari Jaaksi’s Blog : http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/
Part of me wants to be optimistic.
Suppose MeeGo is actually rotten at the moment in terms of not being ready for consumer launch? Remember, it should have gone mainstream in late 2010. What do Nokia do – they have to plan for the future and whilst the vast amount of Symbian’s annoyances can be fixed with some simple UI updates we all know it was due for transition to MeeGo via Qt.
So, Nokia are faced with having no new OS, an existing OS that, although successful has fallen behind the times and which has been tarnished by the media, and a need to be seen to compete.
Enter Microsoft, an OS provider who have failed to capture the market by releasing a watered down OS, but one that can be rapidly improved. So Nokia go with WP7 – Android really would be suicide and the rest are closed.
But what of MeeGo? I think it needs taken in house and the partnership with Intel terminated because, and I’ve always maintained this, it’s a stupid idea trying to make a cross platform/hardware OS when the focus should be on optimising for the next generation of ARM chips. The Symbian Foundation should have shown that this kind of venture doesn’t work.
If it’s kept in house then maybe, just maybe, Nokia can do a Samsung and quietly develop their own OS whilst surviving (or even thriving) on WP7. Then, like Samsung, they can start to introduce their own OS branded handsets and build a customer base because, let’s face it, if Bada takes off then Samsung will drop Android like a hot potato.
So that’s one possibility. The other is, of course, that it’s a hostile takeover by MS in all but name and Maemo (what it should be) and Qt are toast. Judging by the projected future R&D spend I’m more optimistic than pessimistic though.
The alliance with Intel was announced in 2009, how come you can expect it to be ready by the end of 2010?
Do you know that Google bought Android 2005 and Android started playing in the market in 2007 and harvest in 2010.
IOs started in 2007 but the development in secret was 3 years.
It was not a problem at all if Meego was not ready. Maemo was very close to a finalized product. Nokia just provided a transition from Maemo to Meego, compatibility that was in the plan making the Meego work. QT would also help it.
But now it was brutally killed at its early birth by short-eyesight BoD and idiot Elop!
Maemo was much further down the development path towards Harmattan than Android and iOS were from inception to end state. Entering a commercial arrangement with Intel buggered that up because:
1) Lack of focus on core purpose – a mainstream smartphone operating system with possible tablet options based on ARM architecture.
2) Loss of direct control of the product.
A total clusterf**k in other words.
And ‘very close’ translates to ‘too late’. It had its chance, didn’t deliver on time and will now, hopefully, be taken back in house so it can be developed into what it was supposed to be before they wasted over a year with this idiotic partnership.
Take off the rose coloured glasses. That’s the reality.
So um…does that mean we’re still getting the new Symbian QT UI? Im in the market for a new phone, and although Symbian’s being taken out to pasture and shot, it looks like the N8′s gonna be the only thing that can do it for my photo/video needs, as well. I just hope they don’t dismantle Ovi completely, at the very least Ovi Maps….
ovi maps is heading to microsoft, they will use it extensively
which doesn’t help symbian, meego or qt at all
So it’s just gonna be Bing Maps or some shit like that? Gross…
No, yes new UI and enhancements will come to S^3 phones. Also, Ovi Maps will be used in S^3 phone until symbian is alive.
UI/enhancements were mentioned by Elop and others.
according to elop itll be
BING Maps
powered by nokia ovi maps
AND
NOKIA Search
powered by Microsoft Bing
I’m not a programmer so I have a question for the more skilled people out there: Is there any chance to port Internet Explorer from Windows to Symbian? If so, would that work for the keyboard as well? Apart from that I’m pretty happy with Symbian and see no need for change (well, maybe the way to call up apps is also not ideal; a simple vertical swipe on the homescreen to bring up your apps would do it for me though).
It’s a bit of a shame that these 2 issues, namely keyboard and browser have never been addressed by the Symbian coders even though requested multiple times by users. And while I certainly understand that developing a browser is a really huge and tough thing to do a more intuitive UI should be doable in no time. I still recall when I went to the N8 truck here in Germany and the guy had to explain to me how to enter a web address because I simply couldn’t find the address bar. Is it really so hard to put that bar on top? Also, is it too difficult to add a back button on the bottom of the screen? I mean, this wouldn’t enhance speed or smoother scrolling but it would at least facilitate every day use massively.
What I find really sad is that now that Symbian is finally catching up with the competition and there are not too many things that need to be done to get that OS back up to the industry standard it’s being dismissed. Had those user requests only been reacted to quicker, I think Elop would have had a much harder time justifying such a big strategy shift.
All of this would sound reasonable, if Nokia was an independent player who is using WP7 experimentally in some high end devices.
But as it turns out, Steve and Stephen are buddy buddy, MS execs are being hired, and thus Microsoft pretty much controls Nokia. They’re not partners, they’re master and slave. MS gets free access to all technology, maps, users, data and patents, just like that. Elop gets a fat bonus and a pat on the back. Nokia gets nothing.
Obviously there is no way Microsoft is going to allow a Linux distribution (MeeGo) to disrupt anything. They’re not going to allow Qt to becomes a competitive toolkit on Symbian, otherwise why would people switch from Symbian to WP7, which is the ultimate goal. There is no upgrade path, people who leave Symbian have no particular reason to choose WP7 (MeeGo would have had app compatibility), they can choose IOS and Android too.
Effectively Microsoft runs Nokia, that’s why MeeGo will never get a real chance, and that’s why I am worried about Qt.
So we don’t want to hear this PR talk from Nokia, we want to hear how Nokia is NOT a Microsoft puppet now.
WHICH shareholders agreed to this!!! I don’t get it. Fire the BoD and Elop. WTF
I fully agree.
Don’t believe Nokia’s PR talk anymore. There is no single chance for QT/Meego at all if MS (ELOP) controls Nokia.
The only way to reverse the MS deal in order to save Nokia’s future is to sack the BoD and Elop (and those incompetent executives altogether)!
Elop is the 7th biggest microsoft share holder ..!!!
you know what that means ..!!!! haaaa
I agree with that too. That deal stinks. But please keep in mind that Symbian developers are not completely innocent regarding Nokia’s shift from Symbian to Windows. Had Symbian come up with a super-intuitive (not necessarily polish, but intuitive) and smooth UI, Elop would have had a much harder time convincing people and justifying his strategy shift.
It’s over for Qt at Nokia. They will only care about it during the transition period. Elop and Microsoft doesn’t want Qt to succeed; they want .NET everywhere.
I might not totally agree with Don, but it was quite clear what MeeGo will be for Nokia. It will something like N900 at best, very niche device that wont ever get full weight behind it and so wont ever been advertised or developed as heavily.
To me MeeGo being phased out sounded inevitable, but Nokia trying to look at least partly sane company next to all developers. Company that changes it’s software strategy every year is a nightmare for the developer community.
The bottom line is that Elop has codemned Nokia for good. There are very few people that have achieved what he is trying to achieve at Nokia by overhauling a company completely. There are many more failures and you are bound to be 1 too. Now depending which way you look at it, you’re a hero to microsoft.
So you call yourself a strategist? You believe that it is in the best interest of Nokia? Lets put it blatantly to you.
1. Firstly, you state that devs can still continue developing software for the current crop of phones in the market and that there’d be new ones? Do you think they are mad? They feel gutted especially considering the time and effort that was put into the projects with the old strategy. In my opinion that was a sure win. You wanted to change something then you should have simply created more ventures in turn around times from a concept to a product. That was the sour points of nokia and nothing else. Be that in hardware or software, that was requiring focus and it was to be a sure win for nokia.
2. You believe that the consumer is going to believe anything coming out of nokia now? I dont think so! There are millions that have lost faith in nokia and that is evident even in your investors confidence too. This is a planned hostile take over and masterlly executed for that matter. Thats it and it sticks to your consumers heads. No need even trying to convince otherwise as we can read between the lines. You state that there would be still support for those that own s^3 devices too yet there are leaks that you have been collaberating with ms for a while now and behold a concept phone too! Already?! I thought the roadmap is like 2 years but clearly it isnt. Soon a wp7 phone would be released and there would also be no support for the current owners of symbian devices too with not many devs left and any that are would just be either finishing off what they started or making the last quick buck. After that they’d jump ship to get a footing in somewhere else. Gone are your customers like me that eagerly awaited your meego device at mwc. Even if is launched you may never support it which is my worst fears and many others. Most have jumped ship and i will too if meego isnt taken on as a priority along with your ms venture.
3. Did you even consider the people that supported nokia let alone your workers? I mean at times brutallity has to happen but not like this! Did you not expect retalliation or wait, maybe you did and wanted that cos your vested interest are still with ms. I great leader would consider 2 things in any business when making huge decisions that being its people and its assets. You didnt give a damn about neither. You created turmoil, stress and uncertainty with your workers while at the same time tossing away ovi, symbian, qt and meego!! The people that made this company would break you in an instant but you knew that would happen and wanted it to!
4. The Kaizen theory states that change should come in a series of small steps with intermittent large steps towards the final goal. Those large steps are your breakthroughs. I would like to ask what happened to these simple rules that large corporates still follow up till today. Your large step was a giant leap and the rule book ripped to shreds! That is why your workers walked out!
5. Kotter states that change needs to come but to make it effective, buy in from the people is of utmost criticallity. Did you even consider this? That is why your people walked out as well! That is why your customers are walking out. Your old strategy was planned perfectly with even the customer considered. All that had to be fixed was the breakthroughs that hardly ever came!
Finally, the good that you’ve done but with the BUT’s:
1. Bringing something refreshing to nokia, but you dropped symbian which was still #1 and making money along with the brilliant qt and your brainchild meego for just the 1 os!? What do you have to fall back on if all fails?
2. Moving opps for things concerning ovi to a decentralised point and almagamating it with wp7. Nice touch, but it was nokias and now?! Handed or should i say gifted it into the clutches of ms! How nice for ms. They scored big time, moreso than nokia. What nokia gets? An ecosystem, yipee!! But we had that with our old strategy! Nokia would save millions cos they dont have to handle or manage ovi anymore.
3. Dropping symbian and meego hence freeing up personel and saving millions in r&d. But nokia owned these and now? Ms owns nokia and dictates what happens from now on. You dont listen then tough, you have nothing to fall back on and when symbian has been completely removed from its history!
3. Getting a office set up in the US. Nice. Teaming up with ms just bought you a piece of the pie in the US. But what about the rest of the world? You sold your soul for the US and lost lots of loyal supporters everywhere else! Sorry that counterweight doesnt balance out with what you’ve lost!
Anyway, bring on meego and release it soon and watch. Millions would support it and please provide the backup etc because it would become your #1 os, not wp7. Its what the nokia community want. Trust me, not wp7.
SENT FROM MY NOKIA N8 THAT ELOP MISLEAD US INTO BELIEVING THAT IT WOULD BE UPDATED AND SUPPORTED BUT AFTER NOKIA BLACK FRIDAY, HE CLEARLY LIED TO US ALL. I HOPE YOU DONT CHOKE FROM THE MILLIONS OF CURSES.
Soooooo RIGHT !!!
This news feels as: OK, i have 2 pairs of shoes. One pair (symbian) is worn down , but may be can be repaired. The other pair is well not quite finished. It looked like maemo, but when it looked as almost finished, i did not like and am having them modified into MEEGO, which dang why does that still is not finished.
But wait there is a totally new pair (wp7), almost new, almost nobody uses it.
Hey lets throw away my old shoes (goodbye symbian; goodbye meego)
Hey buddy i have new shoes. do you like them?
hmm.. is it your size, do they walk OK?
don’t know haven’t used them yet …..
I can understand you bet on 2 or more horses.
focusing on wp7/android for us market; and if worldwide that results in starvation of symbian
so be it.
But now it sounds 2 much as throwing away your current shoes, without even walking one day on your new ones.
And you also degrade the company to a hardware
company. that is not where the money is nowadays.
it is software,services,apps. clever companies as IBM pushed away their hardware such as thinkpads.
focusing on where the money is made.
http://aol.it/dJVuT0 Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop, is the 7th biggest owner of MICROSOFT stock. His Nokia stock = 0
Anti-trust, Fraud and Insider charges should be brought against him.
He sold Nokia for $0 so that he and his Microsoft bosses profit.
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=fi&ie=UTF-8&sl=fi&tl=en&u=http://www.hs.fi/talous/artikkeli/Nokia%2BP%25C3%25B6rssilaki%2Besti%2BStephen%2BElopin%2BNokia-ostot/1135263769613&prev=_t&rurl=translate.google.fi&usg=ALkJrhjYcn7Qzzzo6ST8U20HV6UfTC8qIQ
It seems that Elop actually couldn’t buy any Nokia shares or sell rest of his MS shares, as he had inside information.
I just reposted all this. Wow. WTF.
I believe something like this just happen in Mexico, not in the old Europe…
Well, I was naive.
Nokia siempre nos ha estado mintiendo, N70,N80,N73,N96,N85,N86,5800,N97,X6,N900,N8,siempre fiel a NOKIA y ya no comprare nunca mas un Nokia,QT QT QT Maemo maego S^3 que rollo se estaba marcando, Nokia eres patetico, estoy poniendo mi N8 en ebay.
There is 0 zip nada chance of MeeGo surviving or receiving adequate resources inside Nokia. Does anyone really believe that while selling WP7s and waiting for the need of ‘next disruption’, MS is just going play nice and accept the fact that they’re obsolete when the disruption comes? Is it very MS like to compete fair (innovate)? I’m 100% sure that any attempts of MeeGo getting better than the MS alternative (whatever it’s called then) will be sabotaged.
Very important post about Meego and Nokia
http://blog.mardy.it/2011/02/committed-to-linux.html
This is a continuation of the war against Linux and open source by Microsoft. Phones will be the new main computer and there is no way they wanted a true open source version in the mix
The giant microsoft was threatened when Nokia started backing up Linux development and marketing.
Meamo running supper smooth on a small handset must have scared MS.
The things happening today must have taken over a years planning.
I think there should be another way to fix this maybe to make symbian like android another company to make symbian, Nokia would only make the phones the other company wouldd make the Os like symbos or somtehing like that.
So,
other phome maker use symbian, except : NOKIA?
What the f??
Friends
It is too soon to discuss cooperation between Nokia and Microsoft
they have not launched the product today
we’ll wait and see
Microsoft and Nokia are very experienced
they may not take the wrong decision
I think this partnership will cool
about symbian and MeeGo
I do not think they will die
Symbian and MeeGo will evolve
do not be deceived issues unclear
thank
sorry my english is very bad because I’m Indonesian
They are practically already dead. Nobody will develop for them after Micros..err…Elop flushed Qt and Symbian down the toilet on Friday and pissed on every developer that were trusting Nokia and learning/using Qt. Who is going to buy a phone from a platform that has no 3rd party app development and continuity? And MeeGo is just another Maemo now.
My prediction is that Qt will be spun off from Nokia within a year. It could be sold to someone else, it could be TrollTech returned to independent status, it could be punted to a “community” — but I don’t see Nokia investing a lot of effort into it anymore.
am not famous with swearing .. but elop .. fuck you man
Is there a native English speaker who can explain to me WTF is a disruption
?
Does it have anything to do with the Force?
http://www.google.com.pk/search?q=define%3Adisruption
Only now I noticed that Jay had put a clear explanation of the term – sorry, I had skipped the quoted parts because I had already read the Qt blog entry!
Anyway I just found it funny that never before I had heard that the term used by itself to mean “the next big thing”, or a positive thing at all, but after Elop spoke it, all sites began quoting it as if it was a word of everyday
.
To be Honest , this was the first time i heard it as well. :S
My thoughts, for what they’re worth, is that while this is definitely not a result i ever wanted to see, it is worth remembering that Nokia will still be investing >around< half a billion annually in the broader MeeGo ecosystem after this change in direction.
While MeeGo is not now going to become one of the 'big-three' or the lead Nokia platform, it probably does have a healthy a viable future as a niche platform.
http://jedibeeftrix.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/nokia-microsoft-and-what-it-means-for-qt-and-meego/