Nokia is still rolling out Qt and they estimate by end of year it will be market of .5 billion phones. So Ovi + Qt is a very real market for at least the next few years. Meanwhile Microsoft transition hasn't even begun.
Where are you getting the 50M/month number from? The latest number reported by Google (Eric Schmidt at a MWC keynote this week) was 350k a day, which would be about 10 million a month.
(Though you are right in that given the kind of growth the smartphone market is going through, installed base is quickly going to be irrelevant and what matters is new sales).
New sales will only matter up to a certain point. Once the market is saturated you can't tell if a new sale is someone newly adopting your platform, or just someone that is moving from one phone to another while remaining on your platform.
you can't tell if a new sale is someone newly adopting your platform, or just someone that is moving from one phone to another while remaining on your platform
I'm sure Google or Apple can tell, since activating Android or iOS involves linking it with Google or iTunes account.
But new sales are usually numbers in terms of new phones that people bought, not numbers on how many of them just activated their phone for the first time. Buying your phone is a sale. Activating your iOS or Google account is not.
It is pretty much chaos within Nokia at the moment. Nobody knows exactly what the Microsoft deal is bringing in. The cities of Oulu and Tampere in Finland are standing still, waiting (probably for months, still) who is going to get fired and who will be retrained from Symbian/QT into Windows devs.
I would guess middle management has to continue implementing old plans until they get some more instructions on Elop's new stretegy.
It's too bad that the future of Qt is so uncertain right now, Qt Quick/QML was actually shaping up to be a decent toolset.
It is still quite immature right now: they really need to put together a standardized UI component set ala UIKit, and the documentation is sorely lacking, but there is a lot of potential in QML that I would hate to see wasted.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 29.2 ms ] threadThat market is getting hammered and does not even have a toe-hold yet..
(Though you are right in that given the kind of growth the smartphone market is going through, installed base is quickly going to be irrelevant and what matters is new sales).
I'm sure Google or Apple can tell, since activating Android or iOS involves linking it with Google or iTunes account.
I would guess middle management has to continue implementing old plans until they get some more instructions on Elop's new stretegy.
It is still quite immature right now: they really need to put together a standardized UI component set ala UIKit, and the documentation is sorely lacking, but there is a lot of potential in QML that I would hate to see wasted.
I'm not holding my breath.