Too true - although I'm of the opinion that if SGI had ported their IRIX tools to Linux earlier and remained a *NIX company, they may have had a gentler fall to obsolescence and perhaps even survived as a relevant company. The abrupt switch to a commodity software platform and relying on hardware as a differentiator was horribly misguided. No one was going to pay $5,000 for an SGI machine when they could buy a $2500 Dell that ran the exact same software. By the time SGI tried to embrace Linux, it was far too late...

I think Nokia abandoning Qt is the real issue here. If they were going to maintain their own mobile development platform that ran on Windows Mobile, Symbian and MeeGo - that /could/ have been a winning strategy.

Qt has been modular since ver 4, so you don't have to include the GUI components if you don't want to. The API is clean, elegant and consistent, plus the documentation is great. I don't have anything bad to say about ACE or Boost - they're both high quality toolkits - but if I had to choose just one toolkit to use for the rest of my life, it'd be Qt, hands down.

Why would a company need to market their products if they had a monopoly? Marketing budgets typically go up when competition increases.