Nokia’s risks

Hi!

In a recent report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission Nokia is talking about the risks of their new strategy. First of all, they, seem to forget about Qt and Free Software Communities, only few words about Qt:

We have also endeavored to offer a better experience to developers through the unified Qt development environment. By using Qt’s programming interface, both our own and third party developers are able to build an application once and simultaneously make it available for our Symbian and future MeeGo-based products as well as many products supported by other mobile and desktop operating systems without having to rewrite the source code.

Yes, thet was a really nice idea, but they forgot to mentioned that that is over now, at least for them, Android and Necessitas will now become the mobile platfor suitable for simple cross-platform development.

For developers, we believe that we can create new and highly attractive monetization opportunities. By leveraging Microsoft’s proven developer tools and support, based on Silverlight, with our operator billing, merchandising and global application store, we intend to offer new monetization mechanisms for developers while providing access to Nokia’s global scale. We will continue to promote Qt as the sole application development framework for our Symbian smartphone platform on which we expect to sell approximately 150 million more devices in the years to come. For our Series 40-based feature phones, we will continue to support a Java-based development environment.

Is that a joke? It should be “attrictive” for developers, if they are changing their programming languages and APIs all the time, completely? And they forgot that not every developer wants to have “monetization opportunities”, but there are vibrant Free Software/Open Source communities, and for them this great platform – part of this great “strategy” – is certainly not very nice: No GPL, but Microsoft’s own semi-free, copyleft license? One word: immoral! Silverlight? Yes, we want to port all the existing C++-code to an entirely different proprietary platform, of course. Really surprising that they have forgotten us in that short time.

Interesting:

Today, industry participants are creating competing ecosystems of mutually beneficial partnerships to combine the hardware, software, services and application environment to create high-quality differentiated winning smartphones.

Well, and they will simply stop to innovate with software.

Well, they have pointed out some risks we all knew about, too:

• It may be a good deal for Microsoft, but they may damage Nokia directly for various reasons (the brand, privacy)
• Microsoft does not guarantees anything
• Windows Phone may be just bad
• It takes long time to switch to that platform (two years)
• Bad support for low-end phones
• Symbian will not be attractive for anybody in the meantime
• They will fail to make MeeGo a nice system for mobile-phones
• They will not be able to innovate, all innovation will have gone
• Nobody will want to work for Nokia, because it is just uninnovative
• The developers get discouraged, of course, because a lot of them will be fired (reducing R&D costs), and their work of years will be screwed
• Reducing costs might fail, because they will still need a lot of support for Symbian and Microsoft will recieve a lot of money
• Target-platforms are very limited (they are not talking about the desktop, but about missing tablets)
• Nokia-phones will not have any distinguishing features
• Integration of their services might fail because of Microsoft’s interests

• The “next generation user devices”-story is a farce, after that bad, bad Microsoft-deal, years later all the FLOSS-people will come back to use MeeGo, which will be awesome because of Nokia’s research? Seriously…
• They are now totally noncredible not anly for business-partners, banks and investors, but also for all developers
• With less research and development (“R&D”) they want to release more innovative products, that is strange
• Nokia will die. This short and simple statement has been forgotten

It is horrible…