Comment by paulbjensen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulbjensen | Hacker News Reader

To give context: http://techcrunch.com/2008/01/28/nokia-acquires-trolltech-fo...

4 1/2 years later, Nokia is pulling the trigger on it.

My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?

And to compare to an equivalent business, Novell tried to shutter down Mono, thankfully the people behind it forged a new company out of it, called Xamarin.

I keep seeing cases of companies being acquired, only to then be semi-destroyed or shut down later on. Sometimes you get the impression the the acquirers only want to buy others just to shut them down and stop them becoming a threat.

For example, look at what Google did to Jaiku, or Slide, or Dodgeball.

Why can they not follow the example of HP and Agilent? Agilent was spun out of HP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agilent_Technologies

I'm coming to the view that when you start up a business, if you care about what you've built more than you care about money, and what you've built is profitable, then you shouldn't sell to a big company, because chances are they will destroy it.

Let's be clear, though: Nokia also did a lot of good for Qt. They significantly grew the number of people paid to work on it, and by moving to the LGPL license they significantly grew the community.

They also turned it into a proper open source project. There was no public repository history under Trolltech. Nor did Qt under Trolltech have a working contribution process; now tens of thousands of contributions have flown into Qt from the outside. There's even review rights and write access for non-employees, and maintainers that are non-employees.

Qt today has a much better chance of surviving Nokia than it had a chance of surviving Trolltech back in the day.

Fair enough. I'm just concerned in that trying to downsize to save money, Nokia has missed the opportunity to take what was a profitable business (Trolltech's 2007 numbers (in NOK): 174m Rev, 46.5m Profit, 26.7% Net Profit Margin, 227 employees), and salvage it by spinning it back out into a separate business.

In dollar terms, Trolltech in 2007 was doing $30m Rev and making $8m profit. Obviously that's 5 years ago and I don't know what the current fundamentals are, but it would be interesting to know if that business within Nokia was doing more revenue or less, and what it's costs were.

If I were a former TrollTech employee, I would suggest taking a leaf out of Xamarin's book: http://gigaom.com/2011/12/12/xamarin-mono/

> salvage it by spinning it back out into a separate business.

That's assuming a newly spun-out neo-Trolltech could be profitable again using the same business model as before, which isn't the case. Trolltech's business model was to sell Qt licenses to folks making closed-source software with it, who couldn't or wouldn't deal with the GPL-and-similar licensing of the open source version. This business model mostly died with the move to LGPL: There hardly any money left to be made selling Qt licenses now.

That leaves Qt-related consulting/development work, which companies like KDAB, basysKom, FrogLogic and others are doing.

"My question is this, if Trolltech wasn't part of Nokia's strategy anymore, why not just spin it out?"

Because they think it will bring in less than what it costs them to sell it?

You cannot just put a "on sale" sticker on part of a company and sell it. It will take an effort to find a buyer, and one (likely a larger one) to define what the sale will contain (patents? Copyrights? What source code? Which employment contracts? Pension rights? Etc.

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