Everyone heard the news about Nokia choosing Windows as their base platform. For a Unix-centric company that owns Symbian, Maemo/MeeGo and Qt, whose flagman product (not to mention the long awaited N9) was running Linux, and that was hiring Java/C developers hard in the last year, this news is more like a suicide committed in public. I personally see two explanations of this weirdness. The first one is the huge HTC profit leap which could make Nokia naively think that Windows Phone could do the same to them. This assertion appeared to be beyond investors’ comprehension and Nokia stocks instantly slumped 15%. The second one is more realistic. I don’t know how long it will take Nokia to adopt the Windows platform, but in my understanding it could take years. I don’t think that Nokia can survive that long with no revenues, so there is a good chance that it will be acquired by some bigger fish. There are two obvious (IMHO) candidates – Microsoft and Intel. I don’t think that Intel is interested in Nokia because Nokia has already become a software company and Intel to my knowledge is a kind of a company that has a good history of software project failures making it reach the level of ChipZilla that prohibits it from doing software business. Microsoft is a better candidate for the acquisition (if it’s going to happen, of course). Especially taking into account that Nokia CEO is a former Microsoft executive (often referred to as a Trojan horse, black sheep or a wolf in sheep’s clothing) and that Nokia market price is falling under his direct supervision. I was a Nokia fan at some point and was still hoping to see the N9 on MeeGo, but after they suggested that it would be powered by Intel Atom my hopes were dead and the Microsoft partnership news didn’t attract my attention. But then I thought about Qt and its acquisition by Nokia… Then I remembered the MySQL acquisition by Sun… Then I thought about Qt being the framework for KDE… Then I asked myself can KDE Free Qt Foundation stand the attack of the top US lawyers? Btw, if you think that this blog entry’s title is a joke imagine yourself three years ago using the product called Oracle MySQL. Thanks for your attention, and have a good day 😉 Software Development