Originally Posted by lopho

hi there,
i'll just leave this here:

http://www.msqt.org/



Well, WTF is all i know. Dunno.

Originally Posted by Kajko

So Elop went with a different platform. So what? Stop sounding like a bunch of crybabies because your little pet project wasn't chosen.

Go Nokia!

Originally Posted by ragnar

It's in Microsoft's and Nokia's best interest to succeed. The user experience that WP7 is able to provide is very good already in its 1.0 incarnation. No doubt the future versions will be even better, filling some of the gaps. Microsoft has a lot of assets and services in its disposal. If they're as determined as with say take Xbox as an example of a successful platform, only a fool would count them out.

Originally Posted by pelago

Does anyone know where Alberto Torres has gone to?

I don't know the guy, but what do you think of the possibility of him setting up a new MeeGo/Qt-based company and poaching a load of ex-Nokia developers? Maybe I'm just dreaming...

Originally Posted by ragnar

But you all know what the endgame is likely going to be. It's HTML5 or HTML or whatever you want to call it, and that game hasn't still been really even started yet. From platform-specific code to universal. Develop once, with standards, and it'll run on all the devices.It's coming, and it'll change the rules of the game, especially the ecosystem rules, one more time. If things go in a certain way, it will create a very interesting almost level playing field for devices to innovate around other parts of the user and developer experience.

Just be patient.

Originally Posted by qgil

These days you have the Nokia leadership team and comms department bringing radical news about the company. There is a myriad of journalists, financial analysts and enthusiasts like you hunting new quotes from Nokia employees. Be no surprised if most of the @nokia.com contributors you used to follow are silent - busy with the same work we were doing before yesterday's announcement.



I have to say that I'm waiting for more news to come in relation to Qt and MeeGo, from Nokia, from my colleagues working in these teams and from other Qt and MeeGo stakeholders. Mobile World Congress hasn't even started and the dust from yesterday's announcements is far from settled.

I understand how someone reading yesterday's headlines and trying to catch up with all the heated feedback and rumors can get to fast conclusions about Nokia and its role around Qt and MeeGo. Even to fast conclusions about Qt and MeeGo themselves.

If that helps, I haven't reached to my conclusions yet.

Nokia indeed announced a partnership with Microsoft to fight together on the segment of smartphones with an offering based on Windows Phone and its developer tools. And this is indeed a segment that the previous plan aimed to address with MeeGo, Symbian and a Qt based developer offering.

However, Nokia also announced yesterday plans to sell a billion devices to new Internet mobile users, sell 150 million Symbian devices, release a MeeGo open source product this year, and position MeeGo under the CTO activities as an open source platform for future disruptions. Stephen Elop said explicitly that these activities are out of the scope of the Microsoft deal and I'm still waiting to hear more about them. Also, the technophile in me can't avoid thinking of the possibilities and feasibility of putting Qt to work together with Windows Phone, regardless of the business and marketing sense such feature would have yesterday and in the times to come.

As a software freedom lover (just like many of you) and as a professional with a full time job in this field (thanks for reminding this little detail) I still ask myself what is the best work to do there. Sure, Qt and MeeGo had a chance to be at the edge of the Nokia strategy on high-end devices and this plan has changed now. But considering the size, the sophistication and the potential of innovation in the activities out of the scope of the Microsoft deal, I have no hurry to write off any of the technologies or the people I'm working with today. Any of these activities might bring a big and deep contribution to the free software community, which at the end is the main motivation of my work.

Following my nose is part of my job planning and ironing open source strategies. Today, even with all this unsettling dust, my nose tells me that there is a lot of interesting work to be uncovered somewhere under these renovated Nokia goals. Bare with me these days if I'm too silent outside, have no doubt that I keep doing my best inside.

Originally Posted by ragnar

As a Nokian working for Meego (for a long time now, as some might remember), I understand the ecosystem thingy painfully well. Qt is very cool, QML is very cool (hey, even I was able to build an app with it), but coolness doesn't alone cut it.

I would have chosen slightly differently as Elop, regarding Qt at least, but hey, who am I.

Developers want to reach consumers, i.e. target platforms that have a) good developer tools to create attractive UE:s and b) many users. Rather than company C selling platform C and D selling D and E selling E, aligning where possible makes the platform a bigger ball and therefore more attractive. You know that Nokia is very capable of delivering a large amount of devices with a given SW platform. It's like a huge factory: turning around takes time, but then when the machines are chugging 'There Will Be Devices'.

It's in Microsoft's and Nokia's best interest to succeed. The user experience that WP7 is able to provide is very good already in its 1.0 incarnation. No doubt the future versions will be even better, filling some of the gaps. Microsoft has a lot of assets and services in its disposal. If they're as determined as with say take Xbox as an example of a successful platform, only a fool would count them out.

-
The decisions that Elop had to make reminded me a bit of what Barack Obama said in a recent interview with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: What is it about the job that has surprised you the most? That you weren't prepared for coming in here?

OBAMA: You know, I think that the thing you understand intellectually, but you don't understand in your gut until you're in the job, is that every decision that comes to my desk is something that nobody else has been able to solve. The easy stuff gets solved somewhere by somebody else. By the time it gets to me, you don't have easy answers. You don't have the best...


The easy answer would have been just to stay the same course. But well, I ... the realist in me, and hey it's just my opinion, feel free to disagree, Meego in it's current form wouldn't have been so super-powerful-earthquake to have overcome the chicken and egg -problem, competing against Android and Apple and Microsoft and HP and Samsung and whomever all at the same time.

-
But you all know what the endgame is likely going to be. It's HTML5 or HTML or whatever you want to call it, and that game hasn't still been really even started yet. From platform-specific code to universal. Develop once, with standards, and it'll run on all the devices.It's coming, and it'll change the rules of the game, especially the ecosystem rules, one more time. If things go in a certain way, it will create a very interesting almost level playing field for devices to innovate around other parts of the user and developer experience.

Just be patient.