Nokia & Microsoft Get In Bed, Qt & MeeGo Take A Back

[entropy]

Let's see how "Plan B" turns out...

http://nokiaplanb.com

[Thatguy]

And you know the exact details of the deal because the next M$ strategic partnership is gonna be with your company I take it? No offense, but I really couldn't resist.

It doesn't have to be with anyone in particular and no I am not a microsoft partner. but its obvious you don't run a bussiness. I run a small bussiness, but I make decisions everyday based on how to best generate revenue and increase profits.

so from my perspective how does nokia gets to windows phone. I think the answer is pretty simple.

comparable product, lower developement costs, low legacy cost, lower support costs.

thats it. that is the bottom line. Microsoft can offer those things at a substantially lower cost then nokia can in house. Given nokias financial position and loss of market share in recent years. the first thing is fat cutting. coders are exspensive and ineffective if they are let run wild and if romours are to be belived often late in delivering and at substantially higher costs then the microsoft options.

BTW most people buying phones don't care that its andriod or whatever.

can they text, watch videos and send email and play some games.

The xbox games angle is huge BTW.

Man, you just made my day by totally cracking me up. I've spattered all over my laptop's display and still have a hard time breathing. That was simply hilarious. By the way - Deus Ex is one of my favorites, which makes me incredibly sorry for the unfortunate demise of Loki Software, especially considering they went belly up just moments before they managed to finish the GNU/Linux port.

stupidity is funny, specifically yours.

[Thatguy]

Let's see how "Plan B" turns out...

http://nokiaplanb.com

fat chance, sounds like a opensource wet dream. you know the problem is that most shareholders don't really give to shits about innovation, they care about margins and units shipped.

everything else is topical ointment.

[RobbieAB]

fat chance, sounds like a opensource wet dream. you know the problem is that most shareholders don't really give to shits about innovation, they care about margins and units shipped.

everything else is topical ointment.

You are right, and you know something? The shareholders don't seem to think much of the MS deal... Down 25% in two days trading? I would be surprised if the vultures aren't circling already! The markets really don't think more of the plan than the MeeGo fans, that much is clear.

[Nevertime]

You are right, and you know something? The shareholders don't seem to think much of the MS deal... Down 25% in two days trading? I would be surprised if the vultures aren't circling already! The markets really don't think more of the plan than the MeeGo fans, that much is clear.

Ignoring the wisdom of their decision for a second. The sharholders are of course going to be alarmed that nokia makes such a big uturn after investing so much time, effort and money into meego and qt. The bosses are basicly saying they messed up big and wasted money and market position. They would realise short term shares would be hit with this anouncement yet believe its their best option anyway.

[liam]

The vast majority of KDE is volunteer-written, and that's much more software than Qt. I think that there is exactly one developer paid to work on KDE full-time, and that's it. This is very different from GNOME, which is more corporate-driven.

The fact remains that Trolltech did a good job on Qt, and that it will be hard to compensate for the loss if Nokia decides to reduce funding.

But people are overreacting here -- Qt was a profitable product long before Nokia thought of smartphones. Trolltech is not losing money. There is no reason whatsoever to kill Qt.

Developing KDE, and developing both KDE and QT are two different things. Creating and maintaining a toolkit is not easy and requires extensive knowledge of each platform for which it targets. Until now, possibly, KDE hasn't had to worry about these issues since they've let Trolltech handle these issues. Having people volunteer to work on a sexy DE is not the same as getting volunteers to do the hard slough of toolkit work. You see a similar thing in Gnome where the gtk+ development is mostly handled by paid people but the user facing side is all over the place. Also, Gnome as a whole is largely (the pie chart that Neary created makes it look like 75% or so) volunteer driven by number of developers. By commits it's hard to say but he gave a list of the top contributors and most were paid, but there were a few near the to who were volunteers. So while it is fair to say that Gnome is MORE corporately driven, in the sense that many companies actually spend money developing the tookit, it also has a very healthy volunteer base. My point is that KDE doesn't have a broad base of companies behind it to provide funds for the kinds of development that volunteers, largely, don't want to do.
Trolltech may not be losing money but it also isn't it's own company anymore. Nokia doesn't seem very interested in maintaining their own stack (they sure didn't mind contributing heavily to gtk via maemo, however, so it'd be nice if they were consistent). So if Nokia decides to draw down development of Qt, that would mean the future development would be very much in question. Sure, some volunteers would come along and help, and possibly some companies, but will it be enough? Would Skype or Vlc continue to use it? For the time being, I would imagine they would, but what about in 5 years? I could easily see either moving towards WxWidgets, gtk, or create separate builds for windows and mac, and drop Linux.
As for the other big force behind Meego, Intel had already bought OpenedHand, which created and continues to develop Clutter, and have spent a lot of money creating the excellent Mx along with optimizing a linux build for low power environments. They already have these people on staff so I don't know why they'd be interested in taking over the development of yet another toolkit, especially with talk of merging Mx and St.
At the moment things are in flux, and Nokia could try and sell-off Trolltech, but as was said on one of the tech blogs (PC world, I think) who would buy it? It would need to be a large company looking to develop their own application but hadn't yet done so, and needed it to be somewhat crossplatform. You might think someone like Adobe would be interested in something like this but they just maintain two builds. That seems to be what most of the major software companies do. To them, a cross-platform toolkit apparently means less than having perfect application/desktop synergy and knowing that the code they are using to build their system will continue to be maintained.

[Azpegath]

Virusscanners (they have one calles OneCare)? Live Messenger (versus Watsapp)?

Maybe they've should have named it 'NoOneCares'

But the MSN messenger I would say is the dominating one on the market. I remember when everybody left ICQ for MSN, I was horrified. I'm the only one that went for Jabber, hehe. But thanks to Pidgin (Gaim at the time) it was possible to run all three in one IM.
But nobody IM:s any more, right?

[V!NCENT]

Maybe they've should have named it 'NoOneCares'

But the MSN messenger I would say is the dominating one on the market. I remember when everybody left ICQ for MSN, I was horrified. I'm the only one that went for Jabber, hehe. But thanks to Pidgin (Gaim at the time) it was possible to run all three in one IM.
But nobody IM:s any more, right?

On the desktop it is domunant, but nobody is using IM anymore. People are using Facebook and sms over ip nowadays, like Watsapp on iPhone and Android, and Blackberry users use ping.

Now that you have the information overload of Facebook and instant smartphone messaging no one is using IM anymore (and thank god). Especialy so now that that Live Messenger has become a totaly fscked up application. I installed it for the lols on my Windows partition to see if people where still using it (not) and the interface was so fscked up that I couldn't keep myself from canceling all my plans so just so that I could get if off my hdd as soon as humanly possible =x What a disaster!

[1Samildanach]

Man, you just made my day by totally cracking me up. I've spattered all over my laptop's display and still have a hard time breathing. That was simply hilarious. By the way - Deus Ex is one of my favorites, which makes me incredibly sorry for the unfortunate demise of Loki Software, especially considering they went belly up just moments before they managed to finish the GNU/Linux port.

Happy to be of service .

Nooo! I thought i'd defeated you!
Remember? I ushered in a new dark age and made nokia abandon meego for windows.

What? After joining the competition and coming to my base to stop me, you decided to helped me merge with Helios and take over the world .

[?John?]

stupidity is funny, specifically yours.

Here we go again. I think saying that someone is stupid simply because he happens not to agree with you is at least just as stupid. So is insulting the others for their opinions on public forums.
In case you didn't notice, I never result to violence no matter what you say - that's because I respect the others along with all their thoughts and opinions, no matter what I think about them.
Don't bother answering any of my comments until you learn some manners as I won't waste another second of my life answering back until you do.

you know the problem is that most shareholders don't really give to shits about innovation, they care about margins and units shipped.

everything else is topical ointment.

I believe you're right and this is most likely what makes them do exactly this kind of short-sighted decisions. It seems that most people hunting for money are pretty much always willing to recklessly trade tomorrow's bright future for today's profit.
I believe that's what's causing all this mess, including the majority of all global problems.

On the desktop it is dominant, but nobody is using IM anymore. People are using Facebook

It's extremely hard to keep track of it's usage because of it's decentralized nature, but it seems that the most widely used IM protocol is XMPP, simply because the Facebook along with it's >600M users started using it internally; unless the web version of Facebook Chat is still based on HTTP like it used to be before the XMPP came along.

Now that you have the information overload of Facebook and instant smartphone messaging no one is using IM anymore (and thank god). Especially so now that that Live Messenger has become a totally fscked up application. I installed it for the lols on my Windows partition to see if people were still using it (not) and the interface was so fscked up that I couldn't keep myself from canceling all my plans so just so that I could get if off my hdd as soon as humanly possible =x What a disaster!

Sounds familiar.