Re: [Sheflug] Nokia and Microsoft: Match Made in the Twilight Zone

[Richard Ibbotson <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tuesday 22 February 2011 23:01:39 Simon Brown wrote:
> At Tue, 22 Feb 2011 17:35:36 +0000,
> 
> Richard Ibbotson wrote:
> > I was thinking something like this but not quite sure which words
> > to use.....
> > 
> > http://www.linuxinsider.com/rsstory/71911.html
> > 
> > "Elop is either a Trojan horse or completely incompetent,"
> > consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack opined. "If the
> > last 30 years of computing history has taught us anything, it's
> > that partnerships with Microsoft tend to turn out really badly
> > for the partner that's not Microsoft." Elop's "bewildering"
> > assertion that the telcos want a third market player, he added,
> > is "just madness."
> 
> The really interesting comment on this is here:
> http://www.rasterman.com/


"  So today Nokia did something "interesting". They became a Windows 
house. More specifically they announced a strategic partnership with 
Microsoft that makes Windows Phone 7 now their primary and premier 
smartphone OS. Symbian seems relegated to being a "franchise OS" 
(given a low key position) and, Nokia's attempts to finally have an OS 
of relevance and innovation, MeeGo, is dropped to the status of a "Toy 
experiment" OS. It is for "trying new ideas". It will not become their 
main focus.   Now What does this mean for Qt? Well Nokia claim Qt will 
have no place in their Windows centric Smartphone universe. Where does 
this leave Linux and Qt? Well... at best as a sideline micro-
amusement, and probably more likely, downsized and put on nothing more 
than life-support.   Now why talk about this? Well I'm here at 
Samsung. I am a principal engineer, so I talk with some level of 
authority in saying that Samsung has been working on its own Linux 
based OS for a while now, with significantly less fanfare than Nokia 
and MeeGo. Not only is is solidly being worked on and not relegated to 
irrelevance, but as part of the work, Enlightenment and EFL have 
become a central focus. Samsung is putting real resources behind EFL 
and using it to make a production-ready OS. The OS not only is Linux 
based, It uses all the other infrastructure from Linux (DBus, Glibc, 
Xorg, and much much much more). It is also going to be Open Source 
(GPL, LGPL etc.) and with Opensource upstream gaining contributions 
back from Samsung.   This is a real effort and not just some research 
experiment. Stay tuned. Things will only improve from here. If you 
were hoping for a slew of MeeGo handsets, then maybe you should also 
keep an eye out for something from Samsung (actual product details not 
available yet - if it be a tablet, handset or TV or anything else for 
that matter). "

I can remember him coming to Sheffield to give a lecture on the 
Enlightenment desktop.  My own Samsung Android phone is really good.