About the alliance between Nokia and Microsoft

The news has been published for several days, and the shaking in the industry continues. Many observers, analysts, technical experts, and industry experts are posting their own opinions, this is not a one-sided view. It is generally a result of mixed reputation.

 

My views on this matter coincide with those of another person on the Internet, which is generally optimistic. Of course, there are some slight differences. If you are interested, click here
And then come back.

 

I once said in a previous article that Nokia has a short board in leading and coordinating large software projects, so the maemo project will be merged with moblin in before it is available. In that cooperation, Intel looked at Nokia's manufacturing capabilities and sales channels in the mobile field, hoping to break into the mobile market and build a foothold, nokia wants to seek a helper who can greatly assist in system software development to accelerate the productization process of the meego system. Unfortunately, it is not human. I did not underestimate Intel's software R & D capabilities, but it should be accurate to its long term. With the advent of the iPhone, the user's aesthetic level suddenly became highly anticipated. Therefore, the modern mobile operating system, relatively speaking, what is its underlying layer has become less important. More importantly, it can provide beautiful and exquisite user interfaces and a friendly and convenient user experience. Intel's strength lies almost entirely in the underlying system rather than user interaction. If you have used Intel's software products, you will certainly have some understanding of its capabilities in this regard. From the announcement of cooperation to the present, Intel and Nokia have almost always been at the level of verbal transactions. during several meetings held by Intel, the name of Nokia was hardly mentioned when talking about meego, instead, we often publicize our IA architecture.

 

In this situation, the alliance between Nokia and Microsoft has become a normal choice. Don't talk about Android more. Nokia is not used to discarding the complex as a big brother at the moment. If Android is selected, it will join the competition with motorcycle, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and other manufacturers, in addition to giving google more chips, it is still unknown whether or not Google can gain any benefits, in particular, the current Android platform has already had enough profound technical investment and accumulation. In turn, because Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 is still in its early stages of development, it is clear that Nokia's weight will be heavier, and Nokia will have more initiative in the negotiation, we will have a stronger say in future cooperation.

 

Many people see the decline of Symbian because of this alliance. In fact, this event has little impact on Symbian, but it is just a trigger for Nokia to do something sooner or later. Unlike Microsoft's consortium, Symbian has already been around for a long time. The market has a lot to do with confidence. When Symbian is booming, I have always been angry with it. When it looks like it is about to fade out of the historical stage, I also want to say that it is not completely impossible to turn over. I mentioned a few comments in last year's Symbian's article "why does it fail?" and I think it can at least delay the end of Symbian. I still think so today. In particular, it is not too late to port Dalvik so that it can be directly compatible with Android on the application. Moreover, we are pleasantly surprised to see that a company named myriad has initially implemented Dalvik transplantation on the meego platform, and the company claims that its implementation on other platforms is just around the corner.

 

What really hurts is meego. Although Nokia did not explicitly give up (some news said it has already been listed as a "long-term research project" and I do not know whether it is true), in fact we may think it has died, the temporary delay may be just to use time to calm the complaints of fans. Aside from the possibility of tablet and car-mounted devices, at least on mobile phones. Another pain point is QT. Nokia's expectations for it will be reduced. From the initial expectation that it can serve as a consistent system API interface between maemo/meego and Symbian, to the subsequent transition to a unified application development framework on these platforms, and now, these two systems are all in the out-of-the-box status, and QT is almost useless (for now, no matter whether it is a platform that has been supported before the acquisition; for Qt, I may write another article to discuss it in the near future ).

 

As for Nokia's Windows Phone device, I have a desire to build an s60 Virtual Layer on it so that 90% of existing s60 applications can run on Windows Phone. In terms of compatibility, it has always been Nokia's weakness. Sometimes I wonder if s60 will evolve from version 2 to version 3 (the essence is the evolution of Symbian OS from version 8.x to version 9.0), it will not break the compatibility, the number of applications that can be run is not shrinking for a considerable period of time. Maybe the current Symbian won't suffer. Of course, this desire is rather slim.