Adam Leach
Nokia acquires Trolltech
Nokia announced yesterday that it intends to acquire the Norwegian software company Trolltech. Trolltech is the provider of Qt - a cross-platform application framework and development tool. Its Qt technology is used widely by application vendors such as Adobe and Google. It is also used widely in the open source community and is the basis for the KDE desktop. Qt is used by, among others, Motorola as a basis of its Linux platform. It also develops Qtopia - an embedded Linux application platform.According to Nokia it will acquire all of Trolltech's software assets and personnel and Trolltech's products will become a pivotal part of Nokia's software strategy. Nokia has stated that it does not intend to make any immediate changes to Trolltech's products, services or its business model.Comment: This announcement is great news for the Trolls (the backing of Nokia gives it the scope to drive adoption of Qt & Qtopia), a good move for Nokia (Trolltech technology gives it an excellent platform for cross-platform development in line with its Internet services strategy), bad news for Symbian (the edition of Qt into Nokia's portfolio weakness Nokia's dependency on Symbian OS) and even worse news for Motorola (Nokia now owns a key technology used as the basis of Motorola's Linux platform). From the perspective of Nokia's push into Internet services via its Ovi (www.ovi.com) initiative the acquisition of Trolltech makes perfect sense. Trolltech has proven technology in cross-platform development and there is a good synergy here for Nokia. It will enable Nokia to unify application development across its existing mobile platforms as well as allowing portability across PC environments.The deal will affect a number of constituents inside and outside of Nokia, let's take a look at its potential impact.-
Motorola: The Trolltech acquisition leaves Motorola in an awkward position. It recently announced that it would continue to use Qt as a basis for all its Linux devices. This leaves Motorola beholden to Nokia for a key part of its technology strategy a situation it was eager to avoid.
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LiMo and Google's OHA: Trolltech has recently announced its membership of the LiMo Foundation. Until the acquisition it looked unlikely that Nokia was going to participate in the group, now Nokia has effectively joined through the back door. Nokia's membership will certainly help the foundation, especially now in light of increasing competition from Google's OHA (Open Handset Alliance).
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Symbian: The support of Qt by S60 will be the first environment that will allow developers to write full applications (including UI) without using the native Symbian-based application framework. With this in place Nokia has the option to migrate its S60 application to Qt and benefit from increased portability and less dependency on Symbian OS. This increases the likelihood that in the long term Symbian will have to compete against Linux-based platforms within its existing customer base.
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Series 40: Series 40 is Nokia's mass market phone platform and to date has not supported native application development, adoption of Qt will drastically increase the addressable market for Qt-based applications and for the first time will give a credible alternative to writing Java applications. It also raises the competitiveness of Series 40 against its internal rival S60, this could lead to a slower replacement of Series 40 by S60, and this will negatively impact new business opportunities for Symbian.
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S60: S60 is Nokia's flagship mobile software platform, based on Symbian OS, it is the basis of its high tier mobile phones (e.g. N-series) as well as an increasing number of it mid-tier offerings. Nokia has supported multi-runtime strategy for S60 for sometime. Developers can currently write applications in Flash, Java and C (using Open C). Adding the Qt framework to S60 will be consistent with that strategy and like Open C, supporting Qt allows developers who have open source applications targeted at Linux to run on S60-based devices. This will increase the number of applications and services which can run on the devices.
