“Yesterday I did my last look at the past, about how the decision was made by Nokia to terminate its smartphone OS platforms etc. That is all water under the bridge. There is no going back. Time to look into the future. And while my instant reaction on Twitter may have been a bit hasty and negative about Nokia-Microsoft partnership for smartphones, I have now done my first full, comprehensive analysis of its near term potential. And I am sorry to tell you, I was too optimistic over the weekend. It is far worse. I will go through every relevant part and analyze it. So lets look at 2011 and beyond, for Nokisoft Microkia.”
I would have to agree with with one commenter from that analysis:
“But I really do wish that Symbian would be just pushed down to feature phone level, then Nokia would kill S40. considering that prices of hardware gradually falls, it’s possible to produce a Symbian “dumbphone” under $100 by the end of the year.”
Also, what would happen to Ovi, since Nokia will be running Marketplace instead?
Aside from no multitasking and no native apps, S40 isn’t that primitive – have you seen the Nokia C3, for instance? It stacks up quite well with wifi and opera mini (and it’s unbelievably cheap)
And I agree. But isn’t S40 more or less feels like a stripped down version of Symbian anyway?
And it isn’t like featurephones aren’t going to stop selling, so what does Nokia have to lose?
TBH, I think it’d be a great idea shift Symbian down into feature phones, which would give the full Symbian experience, rather than just part of it.
Obviusly Ovi will continue to go strong, Nokia has 200 million symbian devices in the market and they count on selling 150 million more. Recent numbers from Nokia shows lots of downloads from Ovi, so abandoning it does not make any economic sense. It would be like throwing away “free” money.
That makes perfect sense and I do not know why Nokia isn’t doing that.
Windows Phone 7 requires a large high-res screen and a fast processor. So it can only be used in mid to high-end smartphones.
In addition, Nokia’s Windows phone devices aren’t going to be ready for around a year.
So, they could continue to develop Symbian towards the lower-end, that would allow them to continue selling Symbian phones, and slowly transition that towards the low-end.
So, Symbian phones would be low to mid range, while Windows phones would be mid to high-end, allowing Nokia to compete against Android and iPhone at all price ranges, and prevent their current customers from abandoning Symbian for Android while Nokia gets it’s act together.
By announcing EOL for Symbian, they are basically discouraging users from purchasing any Nokia smart phones.
How do you know that? I’ve seen leaked photographs of Nokia devices running WP7 on either Ars or Engagdget just yesterday or the day before. Unless these are mock-ups, your assertion there doesn’t hold.
Yes, but not all users given the rate at which people change phones. But even more importantly is (as several people commented on the Qt blog article that reiterated Nokia’s support after the February 11th announcement) that they are effectively sending most developers away.
Edited 2011-02-16 13:02 UTC
Nokia said that they had made the final decision to go with Windows Mobile just a few days ago. Even if they started soon after Elop joined Nokia, it still takes 12 to 18 months to go from planning to release for something as complex as a cell phone.
The designs on Ars or Engadget are only renders that Nokia displayed in a presetation.
Users who buy the high end phones aren’t likely to buy a phone that is obsolete. So they may be able to continue to sell low to mid range smartphones, but won’t be able to sell many high-end phones in the next one year.
Nokia was very popular in India. But now I haven’t seen a single one of my friends or acquaintances with a high-end Nokia. A few iPhones and Androids sure, but Nokia has already been relegated to the low-end. That’s only going to get worse now.
And yes, developers don’t have much reason to invest any more time in developing apps for Symbian.
Well I do have to say this: you made some pretty gutsy predictions about what will and won’t happen. They seem reasonable and frankly enforced my opinion that we should probably be buying stock in samsung.
The biggest unknown here is how the general market perceives cell phones. I understand the dynamic has been changing from “which carrier do I want” more over to “which handset do I want”, but how does the average joe purchase his phone and has that been changing.
The question about what the sales guy in the carrier store will push is an interesting one. Nokia seems to have no power here. However don’t underestimate Microsoft in this area. If they play it right it could vault the alliance, at which point I would expect a knife to appear in nokia’s back.
Umm, the Microsoft brand has like zero credibility with consumers outside the US and near-zero credibility inside it. It is generally something they buy because they have no other choice. Kinect-xbox is about the only thing I have heard people say they actually enjoy buying.
Witness for example the Microsoft retail store experiment. An informal survey of the consumer patterns at the Mall of America in Minneapolis-St.Paul where there are facing competing Apple and Microsoft stores reveals how badly Microsoft brand is among buying consumers.
I have no idea what they could do to “vault” anything except to exploit their cash reserves and I think even that would not help them. Like Google found before them, the carriers are not some small little group of OEMs on which they can place and make demands. The WP7 reboot of the mobile OS is their last gasp at relevancy and so far it has not lived up to expectations, by any metric.
Given Microsoft’s product history I’m sure by the third revision of the OS it might be something to consider but anyone who tells you WP7 is “great” or “worth buying” is selling you hype.
Apart from enterprise apps where you can leverage existing .net skills, services and code, it is a complete pita to develop for and from an end-user perspective offers little real advantage other than to appear different to peers by not owning an Android, iPhone or BB.
Really? I don’t get that vibe in my country. What I hear from my peers is that the Windows Phone 7 is that it is missing some features but they’re coming and aside from that there just needs to be some more apps.
If anyone thinks that this wont improve, particularly also in the hardware stakes with Nokia on board, they’re kidding themselves.
I know it’s all hip and bandwaggonish to bag Microsoft out, particularly around this place, but Microsoft have made it pretty clear they’re serious in the smartphone space and considering their resources and new partnerships with Nokia, people better start believing it.
I think you are confusing MS with Apple.
MS is very well regarded in Australia
However Apple is considered overpriced junk only bought by wankers and morons.
That guy already went on a diatribe….er I mean analysis on why this deal would never happen. He writes books about the mobile industry and yet was unable to see the potential benefits of this team up. It looks like he edited that original blog post actually. This guy sucks.
That’s why although I had noticed this blog post, I’ve decided not to link it on my side. This guy has lost some credibility around here for now, in my opinion
But heh, thankfully for the variety of expressed opinions, we’re more than one editor around here.
Edited 2011-02-15 18:07 UTC
No analyst is right 100% of the time but this is the same guy that gave his lengthy “professional analysis” on why the burning platform memo is a hoax. He is also removing comments from previous posts that questioned his opinion.
He was really wrong in the conclusion but his reasons for stating why he believed it was a hoax are not entirely inaccurate.
Yeah, but at least he is justifying the reasons for the removal. Also many of the comments were redirected to other more on-topic posts.
Why are you defending him? Do you get a cut of his book sales? The guy is obviously fluffing himself.
Say whatever you want but this guy has been all over the map in his analysis and is hoping we forget about previous articles.
Quantity does not ensure credibility.
What’s your problem dude? You have a personal hate/love relationship with this guy?
It is pretty much standard fare that analysts are off the mark. No point in getting flamed up about it, its not like they’re Nostradamus.
Nobody with a brain sees the benefits of this team up. Nokia shares lost 24% of their value in a week. Developpers are walking away fealing cheated, previous customers are left with a zombie symbian, partners were treated like… like Microsoft treats its partners (Elop is truly a microsoftie, isn’t he?).
The platform was burning, they jumped and now they are just freezing to death.
Nokia lost 24% only because they didn’t immediately get rid of all their developers.
Nokia is run like a commune not a hard-nosed business.
Edited 2011-02-16 08:24 UTC
Oh yeah, If they would have fired all their developers, that would really have helped their valuation..! <irony markers around this>
Most windows 7 phone reviewers really liked it. Microsoft and Nokia have the retail channels, marketing budgets, brand value and a phone that will in all likelihood satisfy user expectations.
The only thing in my view that could derail this is the continuing evolution of Android with more powerful and cheaper hardware. I don^aEURTMt know what the windows tax on these devices will be, but in the long term this might make all the difference in sale or no sale.
Very little difference in user satisfaction over time and most of your favourite third party apps available across all the platforms will make price the main factor. Can Nokia compete on these margins?
If Nokia can play economy of scale and offer these Windows phones at competitive prices it will sell, but in the long term it will be hard to compete if they can^aEURTMt.
All in all Nokia should build a Windows 7 phone, but they have the production capacity to build an Android or Meego phone as well.
Forget about the “we don’t want to be another Android phone”, “we want brand differentiation” because in the end brand allegiance will shift if the price it better and functionality the same.
As a money machine, Microsoft will do to Nokia what it did to Novell.
See where open source is supported. Take a good look at the technology, find the patents.
Eventually open source will lose financial backing, destroy profits for those who support open source and the only one left is Microsoft.
If Intel isn’t selling enough chips, this partnership is bound to change and make it worthwhile for Intel to give up supporting MeeGo and go MS/Nokia.
All profits up.
Not sure about patent buyouts for Nokia by MS supported patent troll, but it will probably happen too.
Who will support QT then?
If you aren’t seeing the pattern yet, you need an Oracle check.
These guys are strip miners with “newer and better” future talk.
Cut the bullshit. Nokia is not a small fish. Nokia has more employees than Apple and Microsoft combined. I don’t think Americans get just how large and monumental Nokia really is. They don’t just do phones – they do A LOT more, including all the hardcore backend technologies to all sorts of wireless (and wired) stuff.
Thinking that Microsoft can kill Nokia through a glorified OEM deal is utterly, utterly idiotic, and clearly shows you know NOTHING about Nokia.
That actually makes it more pathetic. Nokia had more employees than Apple and Microsoft combined, but Q4 2010, Apple made about 5 times the profit Nokia did ($4+ billion versus $677 million for Nokia)
Nokia has 132,000 employees. They should have no more than 10,000.
Once Elop is done with the restructuring, there won’t be much left of Nokia. Their smartphone business will just become another box pusher.
Nokia’s hardcore backend technologies are also struggling to remain profitable against competition from Chinese companies.
The fact that Nokia has so many employees doesn’t make them stronger, it makes them more vulnerable, since they spend a lot more every month that Apple or Microsoft, but make a lot less money.
A company with smaller expenses can be profitable even with a small income. But a few bad quarters could be disastrous for Nokia.
It is true, I do not know a lot about Nokia.
SBC to acquire AT&T for $16 billion
January 31, 2005, 4:09pm PST
Hardcore patents too, I would imagine.
And yet, it does seam plausible.
Anheuser-Busch bought out by InBev
July 14, 2008 by bentlyr
The King of Beers will now be answering to InBev. After months of stern resistance, Anheuser-Busch voted to accept InBev^aEURTMs $52 billion bid. InBev, a Belgian company known for making Beck^aEURTMs, Bass, Stella Artois, Hoogarden, and Leffe (just to name a few) has now combined with the American brewery to make the largest in the world.
World economy I guess.
But my concern is about open source and its support.
This is another attack and all else is ancillary.
Death by a thousand cuts is fairly serious.
Indeed, this article was quite biased and over-the-top. Its predictions about the near term might have some truth to them, but the dismal long-term predictions are pure bias, nothing more.
And about that short-term outlook, let’s imagine what might have happened near-term had Nokia not done this deal. They’d have been stuck devoting half their resources to maintaining Symbian–a huge investment considering it was a (let’s face it) dying platform–and their only hope for the future of the high-end space would have been MeeGo, which, let’s face it, was a huge wild card. Even if they had executed MeeGo perfectly (the odds of which are far from certain), the market is so competitive right now that the MeeGo platform would be in last place for at least a year after the first phone came out.
So despite the way things seem, Nokia are actually playing it safe, by realizing that Symbian is a bad investment and MeeGo a huge risk factor. They also have a PR story they can tell the world that doesn’t seem like more of the same butchery. Some would argue that it’s a new kind of butchery, but at least it is getting Nokia press, and as they say “there is no such thing as bad publicity”.
Now, don’t get me wrong–I have long been on the pro-Symbian/Maemo/MeeGo/Qt-platform boat, and I’m not retracting my previous opinions. Where Nokia went wrong, though, is that they executed their strategy much too late, and moved much too slowly, to the point where Symbian now has no choice but to die off and MeeGo is an unknown quantity.
First of all, it’s been obvious for years that Symbian was suffering from the same ailment as Windows Mobile, in that it was bogged down by legacy support. It’s been clear for a long time that a fresh start was needed. But they kept developing the old S60 userland based on the old APIs further and further because it allowed them to put out “smart”phones with low CPU requirements, while investing relatively little development resources. Turns out, EH! wrong answer. When it comes to brand perception, user experience always trumps price, and the user experience sucked. By the time this message actually reached Nokia, though, it was already too late. They scrambled to fix the UI but doing so on top of the old S60 APIs was kind of like skinning Mac OS 9 to make it look more like Mac OS X. Completely missing the point.
Meanwhile, there was Maemo. For a long time, I never believed Maemo would be anything but a hobbyist platform; I was certain that Nokia would take the necessary steps to modernize Symbian *any day now*. As it turned out, I was wrong, and Maemo shaped up to be a great platform, and Symbian just stagnated. So OK! Go Maemo! Maemo could have been their savior. Maemo on the N900 was a perfectly decent OS. But then Nokia decided they needed to rewrite *the whole userland* in Qt *prior to bringing out the next phone*. Had they not done this, they could have probably brought out one or two more generations of Hildon-based phones by now, and gradually Qt-ified the userland, instead of doing it all at once and delaying that one phone into eternity.
So what’s the lesson? I think there are two: First, if a code-base (S60) stagnates to the point where it takes more effort to keep up with the competition than it does to start over, then quite simply, it’s time to start over. Second, if you already have a system that’s able to keep up with the competition (Maemo), and it is feasible to transition to a new technology gradually, then *do it gradually*.
So, as disappointing as the MS deal is, Nokia brought it upon themselves by virtue of their mis-management.
Now there’s just one unanswered question that still bugs the hell out of me: What is going to happen to Qt?
If Nokia was poor in executing Maemo/Meego, how is it going to be an improvement over Windows Phone? Just because they outsourced the OS to MS, does not mean it is a now a zero effort to push a modern top notch smartphone. Instead, it’ll in fact take more effort on Nokia’s part because they have no Windows Phone integration expertise and are starting from scratch. Not to mention the tremendous effort it would take to move their current Ovi services to MS platform (Ovi store, Maps, etc).
Well, they’ve already stated that Ovi store on WP7 is effectively dead (they call it “integrated” into MS’s store, but I can’t see how that means anything at all given that none of the apps can be carried over). As for Ovi maps, again they are supposed to “integrate” it into WP7, but again I have no clue how they can achieve this given the inability to use existing code in the front-end. My guess is that they will carry over some services from the Ovi Maps back-end but use the current Bing Maps as the basis for the front end (shouldn’t be too hard as both Ovi Maps and Bing Maps use Nokia-owned Navteq tech on the backend).
The phones themselves will indeed take a year, but look how fast the other manufacturers were able to develop their WP7 phones–MS didn’t even fix the minimum hardware specs until months before the actual release! These days, so much of the hardware is integrated into SoCs that there probably won’t be all that many custom drivers necessary on Nokia’s side…. So most of the work will be in customization, and that can be done as a gradual process…
Edited 2011-02-16 18:45 UTC
From what you described later in your post, I would say Nokia went wrong by failing to put its focus somewhere intelligent (almost wrote “smart”!) and **keeping** it there.
I don’t see much justification for Nokia to keep Qt under its wing. What I see as the most probable option is a community fork. It’s been in the air lately…
A community fork without any corporate backing will inevitably mean death for Qt long-term. KDE 4 is more or less a failure on the desktop (thanks to an over-emphasis on technology over user experience), and open-source volunteers alone cannot keep the development of Qt progressing at a reasonable clip. Qt needs real funding and a real revenue model. If Nokia dumps support of Qt, without selling it to someone else or spinning it off, that will be the end of it… Of course, IMHO they’d be idiots to do that, when they could make more money with the spin-off, but they very well might be idiots. Or Ballmer might pay them off to act like idiots……
Couldn’t agree more. The weird thing is that the Qt situation gets me lost in my reasoning when compared with OpenOffice forking into LibreOffice and Hudson forking into Jenkins (both **just** because the “community” doesn’t like the “corporate backing”) because it’s obvious to me Qt needs that very corporate backing. I doubt the only justification to these opposing situations and lines of reasoning is how different Oracle is from Nokia.
The primary difference is that Oracle is still fully supporting the original projects, and the forks are more a form of protest over politics than anything else, whereas in the case of Nokia it’s not clear that Qt will be supported long-term. Also, I don’t know about Jenkins, but at least with LibreOffice there’s Novell and a couple others (Red Hat?) that are providing corporate backing for the fork. Who would provide similar backing for a Qt fork? Intel? Google? It’s pretty uncertain….
Edited 2011-02-17 21:33 UTC
I haven’t read all of his post yet (it’s very long ) but what I have read so far seems to make alot of sense.
Nokia outright dropping Symbian with no migration path to Windows Phone 7 was/is a bad decision that will have negative consequences for Nokia as a company.
They abandoned all the developers, users, customers who rely on Symbian, Ovi, Qt. It doesn’t surprise me that Nokia would make such a douche decision. They drop support for their individual products, screwing their customers all the time.
If the deal with Microsoft had come along they’d probably be doing the same crap with MeeGo (even though they promised a some sort of transition).
Edited 2011-02-15 23:59 UTC
Which is something I have a hard time understanding: given the number of models they release, and how fickle users are, why don’t manufacturers, for their own sake, strive for some kind of common grounds wrt features, APIs, ports, connectors, etc?
I can see the “early deprecation” motive behind their decisions, i.e. they want to sell newer models, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as that would rather push me away towards their competitors (who, I know, adopt those same practices but consumers vote with their wallet).
Didn^A't Nokia receive funds from the EU to develop QT, etc?
This ex-Nokia blogger/consultant certainly doesn^A't give me confidence in him personally on a general level, given his BS reaction covering up his previous take on the not-fake ^A'fake Nokia memo^A', but he raises alot of good points.
Why is there NO word about Nokia^A's NokiaSiemens network division?
Clearly, cutting off the ^A'upside^A' for QT (develop for Symbian and MeeGo with minimal additional effort) makes developing for QT/Symbian alot less attractive, which leads to it^A's decline. The software platform is relatively easily re-configured for different price-points, see rumors of Apple^A's planned cheapPhone, yet Nokia is throwing away everything they^A've been crowing on.
And it^A's not like WM7 has a robust app/developer community. Are Nokia WM7 phones going to be competing better app-wise against Apple, or Anroid? No, Nokia would have many more app^A's available for MeeGo phone launch than are available on WM7. Whether or not QT-Symbian compatable apps fully leverage MeeGo doesn^A't matter… Apple knows this, and why they first pushed WebKit apps because that^A's all they had ready, and later made sure their iPad tabled seamlessly could use iPhone apps.
Honestly, I think the partnerships Nokia needs to push are getting QT recognized as the premier open framework, which means HP, RIM, and even pushing it to Android OEMs. That^A's the fasted way to grow the QT platform, and clearly the issue is about software platforms…. Why abandon one with decent current share and decent growth prospects (I don^A't even see why apps can^A't bundle their own subset of QT to deploy on Apple), for WM7 which has no momentum? Because Nokia^A's own momentum will make WM7 succeed? Why not with QT then?
At least their tanking stock price since the announcement might make it easier for this Plan B crowd to get a bigger voice. It just doesn^A't make sense to hold Nokia stock when they just want to re-sell WM7, while ignoring fixing their least profitable sectors (network gear and low-end phones)… Chinese manufactures can better play the game Nokia is playing, and now can even licence OviMaps!
Many analysts (himself included) could not picture that Nokia would even consider making Windows Phones. At most some were expecting that Nokia might push out some Windows Phones exclusive to the US market and gauge it from there. Nobody expected that Nokia would take a huge dump on their Symbian (and potential Maemo/Meego) market by announcing it’s death and go Windows Phone exclusive. No analyst (even stoned out of their minds) would think Elop would take such an unwarranted gamble. Its not like Symbian phones aren’t selling at all.
I’m not an analyst, but it made sense to me.
The Symbian platform as well as the ecosystem Nokia formed under it wasn’t competitive where it needed to be. It needed to die.
It never would have been any good in my view without serious overhauling, at which point you have to wonder if adopting another makes more sense.
The smartphone market is becoming less about the OS behind it and more about the ecosystem encapsulating the delivery of service.
It’s not WM7, it’s WP7.
Microsoft is king in handling developer communities. Anyone saying otherwise is a patented liar. I hate how the world is shackled to them, I hate the price tags of their products which make them not affordable to me, they may be ruthless in their relationships with competitors or clueless with the market, they may be whatever you want to call them in whatever field you choose, but it’s another story with developers.
Moreover, it’s not like you need the app/developer community ready and waiting when the platform is released. Apple had no community. Android (Google) didn’t either. Heck, even RIM, despite being there long before Apple’s phone came out, had nothing that would be called a “developer community” by current standards; did they have an application store five years ago?
I think a community, be it of developers or users or device makers (barring Apple obviously), needs some time and a certain number of sales to gain momentum in addition to tools. And Microsoft’s tools, which I installed just two weeks ago, **seem** not repelling. if devs have been able to put up with the requirements needed for iPhone development, they shouldn’t cringe at the WP7 toolchain just because it’s pushed by Microsoft.
And last, Microsoft is also (for better or worse) kind of legacy support for developers. As far as I know, and unlike other “mind shifters”, they don’t “drop support” on a whim, they don’t allow this tool at a moment and change agreement or license terms when a tool might be used by competitors. Until they start acting like other actors of the mobile world, I’ll put the support point to their credit. I’m mentioning this because a lack of seemingly long-term (although we all know what “long-term” has come to mean in this market) support is a sure deterrent for developers. It is for me.
So I wouldn’t be surprised if the “developer community” for WP7 were to grow more content and “robust” than other communities.
Because they’re desperate I would guess. How many times have they changed directions?
Let’s say that they differentiate two kind of developers: those that interests Microsoft (working with Microsoft products, buying Microsoft compilers, etc) and… those that not. If you happen to be from the other group, the “Developers, developers, developers!” stops and you see the sabotage that they put in your way of developing.
Microsoft has been convicted several times, in USA and Europe for doing things like these.
Imagine you are a developer and you are building a better browser, just to find that Bill Gates, about “Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers”, gave that order “make sure that Office very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities”.
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX…
I rephrase it: Microsoft is king in handling their developer community. Microsoft is king in handling the developer community within their ecosystem.
I totally agree that Microsoft’s business practices have been more than debatable, suffice it to say “BeOS”. But keeping things on-topic, why would anyone expect them to cater to developers that are out of their field of influence?
Let’s face it, who does!? Nobody! And if any business did, I wouldn’t understand them: a business is not a charity foundation dedicated to making the world a better place.
I’ve been a Borland-only guy for almost a decade, born to the programming world with TASM and Turbo Pascal 3(!), I’ve used Borland C++ until the excellent BC++ 5.02 and really loved OWL (to the point of never touching MFC). These last years, I’ve been more of a Java nerd. I’m currently shifting back to C++, most probably with Qt. I haven’t seen that sabotage. Or did you mean when devs go totally Microsoft-free? I mean, like GCC and GNU/Linux guys? I thought Redmond had no hold at all on them.
Yes, yes, but a much worse thing is a company paying developers to cause problems.
As I wrote in the prior comment, there have been trials about that. I even wrote a link
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX…
and wrote the real case of developers building browsers, but facing… paid sabotages.
Did I disparage MS`s developer community in ALL it`s product lines? No.
I was clearly speaking to ONLY the WP platform, which has very very little market-share/developer share as of now. Since you chose to respond to an invented straw-man rather than my actual statement (yes, my mistake over WM7/WP7), I assume you don`t dispute that. Numbers speak for themselves.
So, sure, WP7 COULD develop a flourishing app-development community. COULD. My point is that Nokia is jumping ship from MeeGo/QT for a platform which ISN`T a sure thing, and in fact has less share than Nokia`s current platform. Yes, COULD HAPPEN, but they aren`t getting anything close to a sure thing by this move. Nokia was earning a profit on it`s smartphones division, if a razor-thin one. Can you say the same thing about Microsoft?
And the thing is, they ARE explicitly continuing with Symbian maintainance, and QT along with that since that is the API for modern Symbian now.
To your last point, I don`t see them as having changed direction all that much. Perhaps you could claim Maemo>MeeGo was a change in direction, but it really just carried forward their existing QT strategy, so I wouldn`t call that a change in direction as much as mucking with the details. And that was their main problem, execution of the plan… Had they continued with the next release of Maemo which was completey possible there really wasn`t any impediment to eventually merging it with Moblin, that would just be Maemo X.y, consumers wouldn`t distinguish it anymore than Apple`s iOS upgrades… But there was no reason to put their platform on hold while waiting for MeeGo, if anything their entire mantra about QT on Symbian+Maemo/later MeeGo makes that clear.
Further, pursuing cooperation by getting other companies to adopt QT as a shared API (on top of their differentiated platform/UI) doesn`t imply any change in what Nokia itself was doing with it`s own products or development, but simply is about getting more inertia behind QT which benefits their platform.
I think the worst part about this for Nokia, is that they’re taking a huge gamble. The risk for Microsoft is minimal. If this goes tits-up, Microsoft still sells through other vendors. If it doesn’t pan out for Nokia, they’ll be decimated, and possibly not survive.