I've already got Nils slamming me privately because I dared to
mention Qtopia, but let me provide some perspective as a company who
was very successful with Qtopia and the Sharp Zaurus and what Sharp
and Trolltech did both right and wrong that Nokia could learn from (I
don't care if they use Qtopia at this stage, I just honestly think it
would have been faster and cheaper than going the route they did, but
I am not privy to the information that went in to making that decision).
Now by the time the Zaurus was commercially available, my company
already had a dozen products running on it, maybe more, and there was
a big and healthy open source movement that was also producing
software, I don't remember how many apps, but it was a good amount
and grew very rapidly.
What was done right:
Sharp actually located about 50 companies and individual developers
(of which we were part) about 6 months before the release of the
device, flew us all to San Jose, gave us a limo ride to the hotel,
put us up with food and lodging, gave us a day seminar on the device
and gave us devices. They hired some people that were specifically
meant to interface with the developers and actually were almost
always available in IRC for immediate chat and feedback.
They worked with Handango to create a web site where commercial and
free applications could be hosted. I don't care for the site much,
but at least it was a central repository that Sharp would point to.
Trolltech hired a liaison to work directly with the embedded
community and keep the line of communication open.
What was not done right:
Sharp in Japan wouldn't trust Sharp Americas decisions and really
pulled the rug out from under them. One example was that while they
got the device in places like Best Buy they never sent anyone out to
the stores to educate the sales people, so consequently they steered
people away from the device.
Sharp Americas support team kept getting gutted and the contact
people in Japan kept changing till the point that you could no longer
get information and it basically killed off any interaction between
Sharp and the developers to the point that I was actually told by
Sharp that they didn't want third party developers to do anything for
the device.
Sharp Japan making major changes to the OS and backend engine without
telling any of the 3rd party developers and we only found out after
the devices were released and then documentation was thin or non-existent.
Confusing licensing - the Opie and OZ initiatives were really pushed
by one of the people at Sharp US to try and commercialize his own
embedded system, the problem was with the licensing because if you
strictly followed the license, then a commercial application could
not be legally sold for a device running Opie and OZ (I don't want to
get mired in this again, I spent a lot of time working on this with
lawyers at the time, and this was the end result). It was confusing
to the point that Trolltech couldn't even explain it.
Those are some bullet points of what we went through. We still sell
a good amount of software for the Zaurus and Archos every single day,
even with these issues. My point here is not advocacy for one
windowing toolkit over another, it is to illustrate what works and
doesn't work in this environment. I'd be more than happy to have a
really detailed conversation with Nokia on this and share more
details of my experience.
At 10:51 AM 4/19/2006, Kasper Souren wrote:
The product is on the market for less than half a year. There are
already tens of usable free software applications ported or created.
That's pretty impressive for the first 'open product' of such a big
company. I'm not complaining. I'm a pretty satisfied customer _and_
developer myself.
Just a little thank you to all the Nokia folks who made this possible...
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Regards,
Shawn Gordon
President
theKompany.com
www.thekompany.com
www.mindawn.com
949-713-3276
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