Nokia to acquire Trolltech [LWN.net]

Nokia to acquire Trolltech

Posted Jan 28, 2008 13:20 UTC (Mon) by erwbgy (subscriber, #4104)
In reply to: Nokia to acquire Trolltech by jpetso
Parent article: Nokia to acquire Trolltech

I'm not sure how they could slow down the cause of free software by stagnating new developments. What scenarios did you have in mind?

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Nokia to acquire Trolltech

Posted Jan 28, 2008 15:42 UTC (Mon) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

One comes to mind immediately.

Trolltech lived on the desktop. Their revenue streams were a library for 
developers, and their marketing was KDE. When KDE looked good, Qt looked 
good.

Their moves into the portable/phone/handheld market was built on the 
foundation of their desktop business.

Nokia is a phone company. How interested is Nokia in the desktop? What 
was a primary business now becomes not even secondary.

How does KDE advance Nokia? Why would Nokia care about KDE? Words don't 
matter to me, revenue streams do.

Derek (who uses KDE and am wondering)

Nokia to acquire Trolltech

Posted Jan 28, 2008 16:02 UTC (Mon) by michaeljt (subscriber, #39183) [Link]

> How interested is Nokia in the desktop?
...
> Why would Nokia care about KDE?

This is just a thought, not an informed opinion, but since mobile phones are increasingly
desktop-like, and KDE is increasingly multi-platform Nokia might just be interested in KDE.

Nokia to acquire Trolltech

Posted Jan 28, 2008 19:50 UTC (Mon) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

"How does KDE advance Nokia? Why would Nokia care about KDE? Words don't matter to me, revenue streams do."

Since KDE happens to be highly tied to TrollTech's revenue stream today, what makes you think that a company would waste its money buying another company to just intentionally destroy its current revenue stream? While over time this revenue stream could be replaced with another one (and that *may* be the intent), it would seem to be a loss to eliminate an existing one as long as it doesn't interfere with the new one that you think might actually outperform the old one. So, yes, revenues streams are extremely important, and smart/successful businesses don't just pay money to throw them away for some pie in the sky future potential revenue stream.

Nokia to acquire Trolltech

Posted Jan 29, 2008 3:42 UTC (Tue) by dkite (guest, #4577) [Link]

Are you saying that Nokia bought Trolltech so they could get into the 
desktop software business? Somehow that doesn't make sense to me.

Nokia does phones. They have tried to extend the phone, along with the 
rest of the market. Trolltech has some technology that fits that purpose 
and market.

How does KDE fit into that? http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3235 tells 
us that the price isn't high and Trolltech hasn't been enormously 
profitable this last while.

I have this strange need for business arrangements to make sense. If 
there isn't a symbiotic relationship between a business and a free 
software project that makes sense, I take that into consideration.

So for you, how does KDE make sense for Nokia, notwithstanding the 
soothing words?

Derek

Nokia to acquire Trolltech

Posted Jan 29, 2008 10:30 UTC (Tue) by kripkenstein (subscriber, #43281) [Link]

Trolltech is terribly small compared to Nokia, which is one of the largest companies in the
world, in fact. It has more annual revenue than Microsoft.

The acquisition may have nothing to do with Trolltech's revenue stream. Perhaps Nokia believes
that incorporating parts of Qt in its System 40 and S60 will grow those revenue streams by 1%;
that would make this a worthy investment, even if all Trolltech revenue vanishes overnight. If
it raises them by 10%, well, pacts have been made with the devil for far less. All of
Trolltech's current revenue is completely dwarfed by these business interests.

Now, this is just speculation, time will tell. But based on the press releases, Nokia does in
fact intend to continue to push System 40 and S60, with Qt included in some manner (sadly, no
move to Linux...). As this is Nokia's *core* business, I presume that this is the reason for
the acquisition.

The thing to remember is that Trolltech needed money to survive somehow. They built a nice
business model around Qt, and KDE was a big part of that. Nokia has completely different
interests; it can run its Qt division with no revenue whatsoever if it helps out other
departments, like, again, its core business.