Leadership, Strategy and Qt

http://www.agile-workers.com/web/2012/06/leadership-strategy-and-qt/

by mariuz • 14 years ago

173 118 14 years ago

agile-workers.com

twelvechairs• 14 years ago

text only google cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

mseepgood• 14 years ago

This was foreseeable.

taligent4• 14 years ago

Sad but unsurprising. And there are quite a few points I would disagree with the author on:

1) Implying that Elop is not competent or responsible because he fired the team rather than "talking to them" is ridiculous. It is the only sensible option. Qt developers are not .Net developers and retraining so many at one time is impossible.

2) Finding developers for Nokia's strategy won't be a problem. There are lots of .Net developers around. And I am sure more than a few would be interested in the mobile space.

3) I fail to see what possible benefit Qt brings to Nokia's future strategy. They are unquestionably a Microsoft shop now. It is irrelevant how great Qt is as a technology.

4) The blame for Nokia's current woes does not lie with Elop and his current strategy. It lies with the previous one. And those employees need to start taking some responsibility for letting Nokia lose control of the industry. And it is not just CEO level it is product manager and engineer level.

sho_hn8• 14 years ago

> 2) Finding developers for Nokia's strategy won't be a problem. There are lots of .Net developers around.

Just FWIW, Windows Phone 8 adds a native development option, so .Net is no longer the only game in that town.

(It follows that it may be possible to put Qt there, too, but that's not really what I was going for.)

> 3) I fail to see what possible benefit Qt brings to Nokia's future strategy. They are unquestionably a Microsoft shop now. It is irrelevant how great Qt is as a technology.

That's true, but to add the historical context: Until this round of layoffs, Nokia had several hundred people at their Ulm office work on a new Linux/Qt-based mobile operating system. It is now, with that project shut down, that they have no internal use case for the technology anymore.

Many of the workers at Ulm were genuinely surprised at this development.

nitrogen• 14 years ago

I see you consistently making posts that go against the local grain by glorifying the decisions of CEOs, defending ideas that most hackers attack, etc. What is your background that gives you this radically different perspective?

taligent4• 14 years ago

What radically different perspective ?

It's common sense that Nokia was not going to have a use for Qt or anyone involved with it once they moved to a MS strategy. I would honestly love to know what is being communicated internally for Nokia employees to be surprised at this.

chris_wot• 14 years ago

Play the argument, not the man.

luminaobscura2• 14 years ago

> 4) The blame for Nokia's current woes does not lie with Elop and his current strategy. It lies with the previous one.

wrong. see http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/12/calcula...

taligent4• 14 years ago

Sorry but that is just nonsense.

Nokia is not in trouble because of Elop. It is in trouble because of two trends. One is the rise of the middle class in emerging markets who don't want cheap, nasty feature phones. And two is the move from both Apple and Android into lower and lower price points.

And the fact is that Meego had nothing going for it. It had no apps and no related ecosystems like Google, Microsoft and Apple have. And as we are seeing with RIM developers simply aren't interested in building 4 versions of their apps. So this idea that Meego was going to save the day is pure delusion.

curyous• 14 years ago

At least Nokia now has a chance of survival (even if that means being bought by Microsoft), unlike RIM which going down and nothing can save it (With their current management approach).

nl3• 14 years ago

Anyone who takes that blog as anything except entertainment needs to take a good look at the realities of the mobile market.

Go back and read his blog in 2008-2009 where he conclusively proved every time he wrote that Nokia phones were much better than the iPhone and Android, and that no one really wanted a touchscreen device anyway.

edragoev2• 14 years ago

Is this the common wisdom these days? Experienced software developers who are good at C++/Qt can't learn themselves to use C#/.NET? They have to be trained? And that's impossible to do?

If we are talking about full time employees - they should have been given the option to work with .NET if this is what they wanted.

Also - employees have to take responsibility for Nokia's previous strategy? Weren't you just talking about those employees like an easily replaceable cogs? Get rid of a few "C++/Qt"s and get a few new "C#/.NET" ones.

Regular employees are responsible for managing their own career not the company.

About Elop - his statement about the burning platform reminds me about the Léo Apoteker public announcement about dumping the PC division of HP. Even if we assume both decisions about new strategic direction were correct - the public announcements were not very helpful to say the least ...

-- 1) Implying that Elop is not competent or responsible because he fired the team rather than "talking to them" is ridiculous. It is the only sensible option. Qt developers are not .Net developers and retraining so many at one time is impossible. 2) Finding developers for Nokia's strategy won't be a problem. There are lots of .Net developers around. And I am sure more than a few would be interested in the mobile space.

taligent4• 14 years ago

It's not impossible but retraining 100+ developers in a new platform takes a lot longer than hiring a new team. And it is not just about knowledge but also culture and enthusiasm.

Can you not see how the clean slate approach where you leave behind all of the Linux/Qt/Symbian baggage could be appealing ?

It's not dissimilar from what happen with Apple's failed Copland project where a new team came in (NeXT), took control of a new OS/apps strategy and ultimately saved the company.

forgottenpaswrd• 14 years ago

"Is this the common wisdom these days? Experienced software developers who are good at C++/Qt can't learn themselves to use C#/.NET? They have to be trained? And that's impossible to do?"

1) Yes, common wisdom. 2) Experienced devs can learn anything if they want easily, what happens if they don't want to?. 3) Yes, a little 4) No is not.

It is more complex than than. Employees are people, and people are complex.

First there is a philosophical issue. The best c,c++, Qt programmers love Unix, and that's one of the reasons they work there. If you want to force them into Windows and .NET those people will take the door. It is not really difficult for them to find another job that needs c, c++ if they are great.

I know it sounds ridiculous from some mindsets who believe everything in life is money and he who pays is the master that could slave their serfs(suit's mentality) but geeks tend to be the more idealistic people I know.

Once the best programmers(best programmers could automate things and be more than 10x efficient than standard ones) are gone the entire system collapses.

raverbashing• 14 years ago

Yes

The issues were: (from the gravepine)

Old Symbian team kept beating the Symbian drum and heading towards the cliff

At the same time, Linux team developing Maemo, viewed by the rest of the company as "the linux kids and their toys"

Linux team trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle of several Linux services (and since most of them are not focused on mobile, and some are just crap but it's the only solution) it takes a lot of time

Not to mention "ok, let's merge with Intel and rewrite a crapload of stuff" then "ok, let's buy Qt and rewrite a boatload of stuff with Qt" (not sure how those are ordered, still)

Meanwhile Android just built the bare minimum, discarding lots of Linux infrastructure and came ahead

So when Stephen Elop got there, sorry, boat had already sank

mcbridematt• 14 years ago

I agree. They seem to have reinvented Maemo/MeeGo on every release. You can't really have an ecosystem around that.

I don't believe being (yet another) Android OEM would have done them any good either. Microsoft was the way to go.

fpgeek2• 14 years ago

Of course the blame is Elop's. Putting all of Nokia's chips on Windows Phone was stupid no matter how it turned out. Lowering Nokia's risk by doing an Android phone or two was a no-brainer. The smarter play was doubling down on Qt. Not just Symbian, Meego and the desktop - we know they could have added Android (demonstrated), iOS (community projects existed and still do) and Windows Phone.

And don't say Microsoft wouldn't allow it. Windows Phone was irrelevant and Nokia was Microsoft's few chances to change that. And more than that, Microsoft needed access to Nokia's patents (to keep up the pressure on Android, among other things). Nokia was in the driver's seat and could have written their terms. Instead, they let Microsoft effectively acquire them for peanuts. If Nokia had only kept their options open and jumped on what worked, today's mess was entirely preventable.

berntb• 14 years ago

>> Putting all of Nokia's chips on Windows Phone was stupid no matter how it turned out.

I agree, but hopefully/probably Nokia got something in the deal making, for shutting down a Linux based competing system.

brudgers2• 14 years ago

Elop's strategic move was to get Nokia out of the Operating Systems business where they were clearly losing - and likely to continue to lose over the short, medium and long terms - and to focus on their core competencies which are those of manufacturing and logistics.

The switch to Windows Phone was tactical in that sense. The strategic aspect of the switch was that Microsoft offered a long term partnership, allowed them to liquidate maps, and could provide a clear technology roadmap for their product line.

Nokia's software was good and competent, but they simply don't have access to the mountains of UX data needed to develop the next generation of OS's to compete on the touch screen.

recoiledsnake4• 14 years ago

>Lowering Nokia's risk by doing an Android phone or two was a no-brainer

Have you looked at Android OEM's financials lately? Samsung is the only one making any profit, HTC is barely ekeing out one, LG, Sony, Motorola etc. are running in losses.

And bringing out an Android phone would cut off the $1B/yr lifeline platform support from Microsoft, which Nokia knew it would need in the painful transition. Nokia did approach Google for a similar deal, but Google told them to take a hike. Also, they're licensing maps etc. to Microsoft for a huge amount too.

Also, people seem to be ignoring that Nokia's signature cash cow feature phone business is collapsing because of ultracheap Chinese clones and white label phones being dumped into the market. Nokia trying to start their own ecosystem with QT would've been foolish in the face of entrenched competition.

I don't understand the notion that QT is some magical technology that's so much leaps and bounds ahead of other GUI APIs like iOS, Android, WinRT etc that developer would automatically flock to it. QT is definitely nice though.

In short, Nokia knew that they were going to go through extremely tough times for a couple of years regardless of what they pick, and they chose a partner with deep pockets($60B cash in the bank) rather than going solo.

lebski88• 14 years ago

> They are unquestionably a Microsoft shop now

This is only true on the phones themselves. Nokia are mostly Java based on the server side.

somepony2• 14 years ago

Sad to hear. :( I hope they will continue their work without payment.

netvarun• 14 years ago

It seems that Nokia funded a lot of the development behind QT. How is this going to affect the development of KDE?

somepony2• 14 years ago

Lots of maintainers were Nokia guys: http://qt-project.org/wiki/Maintainers

sho_hn8• 14 years ago

This is a complicated question, and at this time it's impossible to answer it without heading into the realm of speculation. I'm going to try anyway, to at least put some of the facts out there that many outside the direct community may not be aware of.

First of, the Qt Project, that is the sum of all contributors within Nokia and without and so also including KDE, is currently busy putting together the next major generation of the technology, Qt 5. But our ongoing 4.x release series is still based on Qt 4, which Nokia's developers have not been targeting for a while now. Instead, commercial support of Qt 4 has passed to Digia some time ago, and they have been putting out new point releases since. So in the short term, this will not affect upcoming releases of KDE's platform, workspaces and applications.

In the longer term, the loss of the Nokia-employed workforce would obviously hurt the Qt Project considerably. Hopefully, however, this loss would not actually be quite that complete: It's unclear at this point whether Nokia might try to sell Qt, which could preserve the workforce entirely in the best case scenario. Alternatively, many of the developers who spent much or all of their professional careers working and loving Qt would likely band together and go on in some way, or find new homes at any of the Qt-focussed software development consultancies out there, which might also band together with us and others in the community to form a new home for the project in Nokia's absence.

For the cynics and skeptics in the audience, it also always pays to remind everyone that for the worst case, the community does have a poison pill in place: http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...

moondowner• 14 years ago

"The KDE Free Qt Foundation is an organization with the purpose of securing the availability of the Qt toolkit

    for the development of Free Software and
    in particular for the development of KDE software.

http://www.kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation.p...

I think they will manage somehow...

mlitwiniuk• 14 years ago

It's very sad, but after signing partnership with M$ what did they expect?

zokier• 14 years ago

I don't think this is all that sad. I think it is good to see that Nokia is focused on its new main strategy, and at least attempting to save itself.

Consider the alternative; continuing internal struggles between the Windows and Symbian/Qt teams, funding all sorts of frivolous projects while strapped for cash. With Windows Nokia has a chance of surviving (although it doesn't look all that brigh right now), but without focus and determination death is certain.

abrahamsen• 14 years ago

Any chance the team will stick together and recreate Troll Tech? Kind of like the Ximian/Mono team formed Xamarin after being fired from Novel?

forgotusername• 14 years ago

There's little need, Qt bootstrapped a new community-lead process a few months back, the project is independent of Nokia already (and there is sufficient critical mass in the user base to keep the project alive).

As for major new development, well, what is lost is a matter of opinion. Already with Qt5 the focus is no longer on native widgets (it's vaguely shocking how the project's path while at Nokia has got so distorted and diverged from the story that made Qt a success).

mkl• 14 years ago

It is a long way from independent as yet. By far the majority of the code still seems to be coming from Nokia. See here, for example (a few months out of date, not sure how much has changed): http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/12/22/qt-5-%E2%80%93-a-look-ba...

azakai• 14 years ago

> Any chance the team will stick together and recreate Troll Tech? Kind of like the Ximian/Mono team formed Xamarin after being fired from Novel?

The Mono team did not recreate what they had in Novell.

1. Mono in Novell put a lot of work on building Mono as a general platform. Xamarin is focused on where the money is: Mono for Android and iOS.

2. Mono in Novell was developed to form part of the SUSE Linux desktop. Xamarin does not do Linux, and in fact the devs themselves have apparently mostly personally switched to OS X.

3. Practically all Mono work at Novell was open source. Most of the work at Xamarin is closed source, the business model is to sell software for iOS and Android.

There's nothing wrong with either model, but just pointing out, they didn't just recreate the same thing outside of Novell. The two situations are hugely different, so it isn't surprising they are not that similar.

mariusmg• 14 years ago

Did Nokia even made money from QT ? Because it seems to me it paid 700 devs (the article mentions 10000 !!! people laid off) + Accenture (for Symbian development) without really making any real money from this.

mbq• 14 years ago

I think it will be beneficial for Qt; for a few recent years Nokia is a sort of anti-Midas -- whatever they hold or touch turns into junk (Symbian buried, phone Meego wasted, computer Meego demolished...). Plus it is a chance for Qt to finally end with this commercial burden dangling since TrollTech.

paulbjensen2• 14 years ago

To give context: http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/nokia-acquires-trolltech-fo...

4 1/2 years later, Nokia is pulling the trigger on it.

My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?

And to compare to an equivalent business, Novell tried to shutter down Mono, thankfully the people behind it forged a new company out of it, called Xamarin.

I keep seeing cases of companies being acquired, only to then be semi-destroyed or shut down later on. Sometimes you get the impression the the acquirers only want to buy others just to shut them down and stop them becoming a threat.

For example, look at what Google did to Jaiku, or Slide, or Dodgeball.

Why can they not follow the example of HP and Agilent? Agilent was spun out of HP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies

I'm coming to the view that when you start up a business, if you care about what you've built more than you care about money, and what you've built is profitable, then you shouldn't sell to a big company, because chances are they will destroy it.

sho_hn8• 14 years ago

Let's be clear, though: Nokia also did a lot of good for Qt. They significantly grew the number of people paid to work on it, and by moving to the LGPL license they significantly grew the community.

They also turned it into a proper open source project. There was no public repository history under Trolltech. Nor did Qt under Trolltech have a working contribution process; now tens of thousands of contributions have flown into Qt from the outside. There's even review rights and write access for non-employees, and maintainers that are non-employees.

Qt today has a much better chance of surviving Nokia than it had a chance of surviving Trolltech back in the day.

paulbjensen2• 14 years ago

Fair enough. I'm just concerned in that trying to downsize to save money, Nokia has missed the opportunity to take what was a profitable business (Trolltech's 2007 numbers (in NOK): 174m Rev, 46.5m Profit, 26.7% Net Profit Margin, 227 employees), and salvage it by spinning it back out into a separate business.

In dollar terms, Trolltech in 2007 was doing $30m Rev and making $8m profit. Obviously that's 5 years ago and I don't know what the current fundamentals are, but it would be interesting to know if that business within Nokia was doing more revenue or less, and what it's costs were.

If I were a former TrollTech employee, I would suggest taking a leaf out of Xamarin's book: http://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/xamarin-mono/

Someone• 14 years ago

"My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?"

Because they think it will bring in less than what it costs them to sell it?

You cannot just put a "on sale" sticker on part of a company and sell it. It will take an effort to find a buyer, and one (likely a larger one) to define what the sale will contain (patents? Copyrights? What source code? Which employment contracts? Pension rights? Etc.

CrLf• 14 years ago

This is unfortunate for what it means for future Qt development (which is uncertain).

I only used Qt briefly, but it was the only time I actually had fun programming in C++.

HorizonXP7• 14 years ago

RIM has contracted KDAB to port Qt 4.8 and Qt 5 to the BlackBerry PlayBook and BlackBerry 10. I think we'll see RIM react to this announcement by hiring more developers. We've already seen that happen, see the postings below.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:QAwzH5I...

http://qt-project.org/forums/viewthread/17584

Tichy• 14 years ago

How much longer will RIM exist?

wheels• 14 years ago

The title is incorrect -- the original was, "Leadership, Strategy and Qt". Nokia has not at this point fired the Qt team. They fired the folks in the Ulm office. Those are not the guys that formerly worked for Trolltech (in Oslo, Brisbane and Berlin). While there's naturally some uncertainty about what their futures will hold, the axe hasn't totally fallen yet.

Edit: To be clear, I my intent wasn't to question Mirko, but to point out that the title here was added on HN; it wasn't the title he used and I didn't read his post as saying the entire Qt team was fired.

sho_hn8• 14 years ago

This is actually my understanding as well, which is leaving me quite a bit confused about Mirko's post. I trust him, however, and he's currently attending the Qt Contributor Summit while I am not, so he may be more up-to-date. But the total number of Qt staff employed by Nokia is certainly above 100, too.

pg• 14 years ago

I reverted the title; sorry it took us so long.

mirkoboehm2• 14 years ago

Thanks, the server is slowly recovering again. :-) Mirko.

Derbasti• 14 years ago

I would wager that Qt's chances of survival are greater than Nokia's. With Nokia's current Microsoftian strategy, the earlier they part ways, the better for Qt.

simplexion• 14 years ago

Why defend Elop? He is a big reason Nokia is failing. They could have had something great with Meego. The N9 was selling well even though Elop was trying to destroy it. Why else would he fail to disclose sales of the N9? The N9 may have outsold the Lumias in Q4 last year even with this lack of support. I can't understand how anyone can defend a CEO who takes a company with a few mature operating systems and goes to his old employers company and uses their juvenile product instead? What the fuck, people?

p_o_l_o_s• 14 years ago

The positive side: Nokia made Qt LGPL. Full stop.

Thanks and goodbye, but thanks!

stewie24• 14 years ago

That's so sad. In fact, in my opinion, Qt was the most valuable thing of the entire Nokia.

Google should buy Qt. if Android was based on Qt/c++, not java, then Android would be the perfect platform!

stewie24• 14 years ago

or maybe canonical should buy Qt.

keithpeter• 14 years ago

Unlikely...

Shuttleworth announced ending Canonical support for KDE (Kubuntu carries on as a full flavour). The one developer that Canonical paid has since I believe taken a job elsewhere.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/canonical-ending-sup...

Unity2d is being phased out in future versions of Ubuntu

http://askubuntu.com/questions/134346/why-is-unity-2d-being-...

Canonical is a very small company. Rounding error compared to Nokia.

Macha2• 14 years ago

> if Android was based on Qt/c++, not java, then Android would be the perfect platform!

No, it wouldn't. It's significantly easier for bad developers to make mistakes in C++ than in Java (one of Java's few advantages). Manual memory management alone would account for a significant increase in crashy apps. And while afaik, iOS has manual memory management, it also has Apple's App Store review process to at least ensure apps don't crash from a segfault every second launch, or similar issues.

zura• 14 years ago

In mobile platforms, be it iOS or Android, the main problem is the SDK/API itself, not the actual language. For me, Qt is much more pleasant to work with than over-engineered Android platform.

stewie24• 14 years ago

who cares about bad developers. Do their apps sell?

Plus, I'd rather figure out a segfault bug than improve a laggy java program.

HorizonXP7• 14 years ago

I think it's more likely that RIM will pick up the slack. Whether they actually buy it is a different story.

invaderzim• 14 years ago

you can read the news there.. since the main site is down.

http://planetkde.org/

mirkoboehm2• 14 years ago

Hi! This headline is wrong, and out of context. I made the post more clear in that regard. Also, our server broke down under the requests, so please be patient :-)

Cheers, Mirko.

dakimov• 14 years ago

I perceive Qt's ownership by Nokia as negative, as Qt in fact is the only crossplatform UI framework for C++ that is up to date with the current industry demands in the field of UI, graphics and animation, and Nokia of course ignored the platforms of their competitors. Instead I would like to see Qt as a crossplatform framework for all the important mobile and desktop platforms, then I could use it for my projects. So I hope Qt will go on as completely free software not belonging to any particular capitalist.

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I've read quite a few comments about what happens to Qt next. Short answer is, well no one knows. Long answer is that it's all open source, there's a lot of people using it for commercial products (myself included) who are committed to it.

Will the pace of progress slow down? Sure, you're going to be losing a lot of developers all in one go, who made the majority of the commits. Is it game over? Well, no, it will end up community lead by the very smart cookies in the community.

It's hugely sad Nokia has gotten rid of it, but if they hadn't it wouldn't have made any sense. They don't use it and they'll struggle to find uses for it now unless they ported it to Windows Phone 8, but that's a whole other level of interesting fantasy.

Leadership, Strategy and Qt

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