Nokia to acquire Trolltech
Of course, I read the press release from Nokia. I even noticed that my fellow FN Champion, Paul Todd, was faster than me to write about it. Never mind, I knew it in advance that I can't be faster than AAS, nor Simon Judge, either.
What comes as a surprise to me, though, that no-one has pointed out to an important aspect of this announcement: am I alone to think that this is Nokia's answer to Google OHA?
Nokia already had a mobile Linux platform, called Maemo, but with this $153M acquisition it has now joined LiMo, too. See brief comparison between LiMo and OHA here.
It's interesting to see how mobile phone manufacturers are committing
themselves to different "open" mobile operating systems (e.g. Nokia to Symbian/S60, Maemo, LiMo; Motorola to LiMo, OHA, Symbian/UIQ)
just to find the ultimate revenue source. If there is such, since who
said that multiple mobile OSes cannot happily co-exist? Anyway, for us,
developers, it might easily become the ultimate hell.
Originally from mobile-thoughts.blogspot.com.
Tote
Re: Nokia to acquire Trolltech
As far as I am concerned, I don't really see the point about this acquisition. Except two things: probably that some people at Motorola are not totally happy with this news... and see (one of) their main competitors almost owning the framework beyond their Linux platform. I also don't see the point in developing so many different UIs: with S30 / S40 on top of their proprietary OS, S60 on Symbian OS and Maemo (Hildon) / Qt on top of Linux, Nokia is almost everywhere... they just lack their own flavor of Windows Mobile!
According to the slides shown during the press webcast, one of the plan of Nokia would be to port Qt on top of Series 40 / S60 and also to benefit from its PC version. A first step towards unification of all Nokia's mobile environments and a real "multimedia computer" offering? That would be my bet.
Re: Nokia to acquire Trolltech
That might be a good bet. I don't really know Qtopia, is it a complete software stack, a mobile operating system? Can it replace Symbian in its entirety?
Re: Nokia to acquire Trolltech
I think Nokia do a right thing. Symbian is still far away from "perfect", MS's windows mobile is a more powerful
weapon, it just can not find a right "gun" to launch it. so Nokia must not stop it steps. Linux or Symbian or something
else is not the point, the point is there should and must be somthing to hit back the MS's challenge.
Maybe, Nokia could combine Symbian and Linux into one?
Re: Nokia to acquire Trolltech
People often ask me how Nokia/Symbian will handle the "threat" posed by MS. To be honest, I don't see a big threat right now - perhaps I'm just too blind to see it. What I can see, though, is that MS is struggling with gaining a remarkable market share in mobile space. And they have been trying to gain more for a few years by now. Why do you think that they're so special?
Re: Nokia to acquire Trolltech
I have the same feelings. I also have big troubles to deduce what was on Nokia's mind when they decided to acquire Trolltech, but somehow I have a nagging feeling that whatever it was, it won't make me as a third-party developer happier. But anyway, Nokia is a commercial company that exists to make money, not to making me happy...
Compared with the *billions* Nokia spent for another recent acquisition, 100 Mio USD is really small change, and I deem it possible that they said, a company with that much influence for that small price is such a bargain that we buy it anyway, and let us worry later what exactly we will do with it.