15 February, 2011

Nokia does the right thing!

For those who've had it with the Nokia discussions - further down I have some positive news too...

So the rumors turned out to be true. Stephan Elop, the new Nokia CEO (and ex Microsoft employee), has decided the future of Nokia is to work with Microsoft. It will be possible to decrease investments in R&D and Nokia won't have to build it's own platform nor focus on services anymore. Instead it can focus on becoming a phone hardware manufacturer, a strategy which will ensure high margins!

Sarcasm aside, it seems to me that Nokia (or at least its CEO) has realized it has had its best time in the nineties and it is over. Better to show good profitability for the next 4-6 years than invest in the future. Within 2-3 years Stephan will leave a company which is "going great" (short-term financially speaking) and receive a big bonus. Usual business of the type which brought us the credit crisis.

How about us?

So what does this mean for Free Software? Hard to say yet but I think it's a fair bet that development on MeeGo won't increase due to these choices. Bad for the linux kernel, infrastructure like Telepathy, Gstreamer and top-level stuff like Qt. Qt will probably not be hurt that much, it is the platform of choice for Symbian for at least the next few years. And if they change their mind Nokia (or otherwise some volunteers, can't stop them can you?) will port Qt to WP7 - write one app, run on MeeGo, Symbian AND WP7. With the open governance model of Qt & the LGPL license, the decreased investments could be compensated by community efforts. Still, I feel sorry for those who might get fired over this. And personally, I was looking for a really open mobile platform - my N900 is pretty awesome and though I'll buy the N9 it's sad it won't have a decent successor.

Meanwhile, stock has gone down some 15% on Nokia, MS' stock went down, Apple and Google went up. Hmmmm, what does the stock market think... Anyhow. I guess more than enough has been written and said about it, let's just wait and see what happens next...

Good News - twice!

In far more positive news, my own employer (that would be Novell) has helped the stability of the UK financial system by migrating the London Stock Exchange from a Microsoft .NET based solution to a SUSE Linux Enterprise stack. The new trading system went live last week. The earlier Windows and .NET based software actually managed to get the CEO of the LSE fired after an 8 hour outage (any idea how much money that costs?). Their new CEO, slightly smarter than Elop if I might say so, decided to go for Linux. This has led to better performance and stability - no surprise. SUSE proves to be about 15 times faster than the MS/.Net system which couldn't get network round trips below 2 milliseconds despite big investments in code and hardware improvements. Meanwhile SUSE comes in at about 126 microseconds! I don't expect any 8-hour outages or fired CEO's, so congrats to everyone involved!

And while at it, let me also mention an interview with my colleague Kerry Kim. Subject was IBM's supercomputer 'Watson' which took on a human in the TV show 'Jeopardy'. Watson runs SUSE Linux - as do, Kerry mentioned, 6 out of the top-10 supercomputers in the world. Check a video of Watson out here (or embedded above).


  1. But dont you think, after few years there wouldn't be anything like Nokia, as MS will completely takeover it somehow or the other ?

  2. > And if they change their mind Nokia (or otherwise
    > some volunteers, can't stop them can you?) will
    > port Qt to WP7

    The problem with that is, WP7 is reportedly completely locked down to any non-"managed" code, i.e. you can't run native code on it at all, only .NET stuff. The darn thing would have to be hacked to run native code before a Qt port can even be envisioned.

  3. Porting Qt to WP7 would be stupid, as it would cause serious fragmentation that is hounding Android. WP7 doesn't need to entirely different development platforms, especially an open source one.

    As for Sj's post, what makes you think a software company like Microsoft would want to own a hardware company, especially one that would be a drain on the company? Microsoft has no interest in owning Nokia. None at all.

  4. joe_h: This is a completely hilarious argument. We are talking about development tools here. The "fragmentation that is hounting Android", as you put it, concerns the distribution, mainly release versions of that, not the development tools. The iPhone has iPhone SDK, Sencha Touch, Appcellerator, Cappuccino, iWebKit, PhoneGap, etc. pp. on that front. There is no "fragmentation" in development tools hounting any platform, only fragmentation of the platform itself, as is the case for Android, and in a certain but much more limited sense for the iPhone as well (there are still many first version iPhones around).

    Let's be honest here. Nokia throws away millions, if not billions, of Euros that are in Symbian. WP7 is not anywhere near ready, just have a look at the feature set (no copy/paste, no multitasking, changing sd card removes all settings, no WiFi with hidden SSID, no video calls, no attached storage, no bluetooth file transfer, no file manager, no sync over wire, no IPSec, etc. pp.).

    The only argument is "differentiation", but noone proved or even tried to prove if WP7 can actually hold this promise, leave alone give a reason why this is required, or why Symbian can't or would be too expensive.

  5. Actually, porting Qt to WP7 *and* abide by the Microsoft rule of running only managed code on WP7 would be possible.

    Visual Studio is able to compile normal C++ code to .NET code with minimal modifications.

    Problem is, that would require the .h and .lib files, which Microsoft seems reluctant to provide.

    In my opinion, Nokia has three cores units: software (operating systems and development tools: Symbian, MeeGo, Qt, QtCreator, etc), hardware (the devices) and online (Ovi, etc). By giving up on two fronts (software and online) they are committing suicide. Elop will get his hefty bonus in a couple of years but in 5 years Nokia would probably be only the shadow of what it is now.

  6. joe_h: it's more like - for MS the fragmentation means - ability to port the code easily for other platforms. For example with OpenGL ES, you can easily port your games to all major platforms - it's even possible to run unmodified binary from WebOS on N900... So what's good for MS is bad for 3rd party devels. They have to bet on one platform and it's quite big barrier. With native library + managed UI (or QML) it's much more easier.

  7. What about the EU project with Symbian? Isn't Qt part of the stack?

  8. Isn't it the opposite? What i have read and understood the margin will be less. Sure the short term profits from layoffs will increase the margin but in the long run it will not hold. Look at the other companies... they are all trying to find there own OS. LG tried to buy Palm, Samsungs Bada and so on. The margins for hardware suppliers are small cause you are not the only one suppling hardware.

    So this is a bad decision on all fronts for Nokia.

  9. Nokia, Nokia. Until we hear that they've slashed MeeGo/Qt development, let's hold off just a bit more on the speculation. Heck, give it a month or two to let the dust settle and such.

  10. On the contrary, I do find it interesting and something Nokia absolutely needed to do right now. They did have other possibilities in the past, but those flew them by (Palm as I used in my previous example). I also think it's going to shake up the market in Nokia/MS favor in some geographic locations, but IMO, I think they need more exclusivity in this venture. The other companies using MS software are still leaning more toward Android and I don't think they're going to do anything to help make the WinPhone platform shine as brightly as possible.
    Check this to see what other developers have to say: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfWFvCJJaNs


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