The first public preview of the software development tool Qt came out in 1995 and was acquired by Nokia in 2008; from 2011 to 2012, after Nokia's full turn to Microsoft, the Qt software business was sold to Digia, a Finnish IT services company ; After being independent from Digita in 2016, Qt company went public in Finland; in 2017, it received an investment of 15 million euros; in 2018, after more than 20 years of persistence, Qt finally ushered in the Internet of Things, especially smart cars, smart manufacturing and other outlets.
As a complete, cross-platform C++ GUI application development framework, Qt not only has a long history, but also has its unique value. C++ is the top ten most popular programming languages in the world, with a history of more than 35 years, supporting application development from servers to desktops to various embedded devices; and Qt's support for C++ has also experienced more than 20 years of development. Widely supports Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac OS, Android, iOS and embedded VxWorks and other operating systems, including European Space Agency, Panasonic, Samsung, EA, AMD, Tableau, Tesla and other customers, well-known software Skype, WPS Office, Autodesk Maya, Linux KDE, etc. are all developed based on Qt. Qt has more than 1 million developers in more than 70 industries such as energy, automotive, medical, military and industrial automation.
In the current era of software development, the biggest advantage of Qt is that it only needs to write code once, it can be compiled and deployed on any operating system and hardware, and it is good at graphical interface development, and now it is extended to mobile and embedded device development. It only needs to write code once, it can be compiled and deployed on any operating system and hardware. It is very valuable for commercial software companies, and Qt is the mainstream GUI development environment under Linux and embedded operating systems. In addition, it has been in the Nokia era. Almost everything is ready for mobile development with Qt.
On April 17, 2018, Juhapekka Niemi, Executive Vice President of Global Sales and Business Development of Qt Company, and Dong Renyuan, General Manager of Qt Company Greater China, shared with the author the golden age of software development that Qt Company is entering on the eve of the Beijing Auto Show.
Software Development Big Bang
More than 20 years ago, two young developers, Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng, were sitting on a park bench in Norway discussing a problem. They wanted to build a single framework that could run on multiple platforms as a user interface for an ultrasound device. That's how Qt started. Connecting an innovative world with one language is the original idea of Qt and the direction it has been sticking to. Today, with the explosion of software development, the value of Qt begins to highlight.
In 2011, when Nokia was busy turning to Microsoft and about to give up Qt, Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape and a famous investor in Silicon Valley, published an article in the Wall Street Journal "Software is eating the world". In the article, Marc pointed out: The computer revolution 60 years ago, the invention of the microprocessor 40 years ago, and the rise of the Internet 20 years ago, all these technologies eventually changed industries through software; The huge market demand for web services, the global economy will be digitized for the first time.
Seven years later, the global digital economy has entered a period of large-scale development. The "Digital China Construction and Development Report (2017)" was released at the first Digital China Construction Summit not long ago. The report pointed out that in 2017, the scale of China's digital economy reached 27.2 trillion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 20.3%, and the proportion of GDP reached 32.9%. The scale of the digital economy ranks second in the world. Whether it is the global or the Chinese market, the phenomenon of software eating the world is happening. Especially with the prosperity of IoT devices, from car dashboards to smart watches to all kinds of robots, touch screen control has become the mainstream way of human-computer interaction.
However, as Marc Andreessen experienced seven years ago, he said at the time: "Every company I've worked for has absolutely lacked talent". Considering that the companies Marc worked for were mainly software and network services, there was a shortage of software development talents at that time, and today it has become a global challenge. Juhapekka Niemi said that with the rapid development of connected devices and IoT devices, the number of graduates engaged in software development is far from enough, and there is a very large lack of software development capabilities. Qt uses a set of cross-platform solutions to solve this problem. Today's Qt can run on 12 operating systems, especially VxWorks, which is commonly used in the industrial and military fields. The supported devices can be as large as ship navigation, or as small as IoT devices without a screen. At the same time, Qt is constantly developing. Provides a large number of class libraries to support native applications. "No competitor's software is as widely used as Qt," stressed Juhapekka Niemi.
Dong Renyuan said that China's digitalization process has opened a golden age for Qt in China. The development of intelligent manufacturing and Industry 4.0 requires the embedding of touch screens in industrial automation equipment, and Qt Company has opened up its software source code to meet the Chinese government's independent and controllable requirements. Industrial control is the main industry of Qt. In fact, it is basically the world of Qt in the field of industrial control. Next, among many industries, Qt is focusing on expanding the automotive industry, and China is an important market for smart cars and connected cars.
Smart cars are the next battleground for software
In Marc's article, special mention is made of software's transformation of automobiles. At the time, he suggested that the trend toward hybrid and electric vehicles would accelerate the shift to software, where electric vehicles are fully computer-controlled. At the time, Google and some major car companies were already developing software-driven driverless cars.
A McKinsey report in early 2018, "Traditional car companies are facing digital disruption of travel", pointed out that the decisive factor in buying a car twenty years ago was the driving experience, but today it has become the in-car experience - for autonomous driving, The needs of in-vehicle interconnection, electrification, and sharing, such as autonomous vehicles, connected parking services, OTA upgrades, network security, etc. In order to better enhance the in-vehicle experience, the automotive industry needs to shift the focus of products from hardware-driven to software-driven. McKinsey predicts that software in cars will account for 30% of vehicles by 2030. The ratio is significantly higher than the current 10%.
In another report from McKinsey in April 2018, China is likely to become the world's largest autonomous driving market in the future, and by 2030, revenue from new car sales and travel services related to autonomous driving will exceed $500 billion. As of now, the development of traditional auto parts and the design and branding of automobiles have been the focus of automakers, but after autonomous driving dominates in the future, a whole set of new technologies and skills will be crucial, and the future autonomous driving value chain will be the latest The three important capabilities are autonomous driving software development, autonomous driving hardware production and autonomous driving system integration.
According to Juhapekka Niemi, the automotive industry is a typical example of digital transformation and digital transformation. Digitization is significantly leading the entire automotive industry towards autonomous driving, creating a business model based on sharing, and enhancing the personalized ride experience such as multi-screen interaction in the car and interaction with mobile devices. In addition, with the popularity of Internet companies building cars, the rapid iterative thinking of Internet products has also been brought into the automotive industry. In terms of dashboards, in-vehicle entertainment systems, and human-vehicle interaction, rapid iteration and rapid market launch are required.
In this process, the software development platform and user interface play a crucial role. Previously, Qt has launched Qt for Application Development for workstation and mobile application development, and Qt for Device Creation for embedded system development. For the automotive industry, Qt has specially launched the Qt Automotive Suite, which has now been upgraded to the Qt Automotive Suite 2.0 version. For graphical user interface design, Qt has launched the 3D graphical interface design tool Qt 3D Studio for the automotive industry, allowing developers to easily design various 3D scenes for cars.
In 2016, the Qt Company found that the development of digital software in automobiles encountered three major challenges: First, there are more and more digital displays in the car, and it is very difficult to develop a unified digital user experience across screens. This is because different Auto manufacturers will have different software development suppliers, and different software developers use different development tools and technologies. Finally, HMI modifications will inevitably be encountered during integration to ensure that all digital screens in the car and The brand uniformity of the instrument panel; second, the reuse rate of the code is very low, and different projects and different manufacturers are developing the code repeatedly, which is especially reflected in the development of the in-vehicle entertainment system, which leads to rapid innovation and differentiation. It is difficult, the development cycle is long and expensive; third, the original on-board systems are tightly coupled together, and functions such as HVAC control, media players, and radios are superimposed on a software stack. It is difficult to split the whole system into small projects for parallel development, and it is also necessary to maintain a huge code base, and a function update needs to rebuild and install the whole system.
Juhapekka Niemi said that more and more car manufacturers have chosen Qt as the software development platform for in-vehicle dashboards and central control. In 2017, Qt is working with major global automakers to develop concept cars based on Qt technology, such as navigation and entertainment systems that can be controlled through the in-car central control or voice. In February 2018, Qt Automotive Suite 2.0 was released, adding a lot of new features, including the newly added Qt 3D Studio, Qt Safe Renderer, etc. In particular, the upgraded Neptune UI human-machine interface design makes the vehicle application load faster and experience better. Okay. After Qt Automotive Suite 2.0, Qt will also provide a new UX user experience design, System UI can manage applications like a mobile phone desktop. This makes the future self-driving car like a walking iPhone, with an ultra-high user experience.
Write the future with Qt
Every year the Qt company conducts user surveys. In the latest 2017 Qt user survey, Qt was applied to software development, enterprise applications, and game development in more than 70 fields and industries, from desktop development to mobile applications to embedded systems and headless devices. Tools, robots, smart homes and factories, test and measurement systems, consumers, automobiles, medical laboratory equipment, security systems, digital TV, etc., have applications of Qt on land, on water, and even in space.
Qt software has commercial version and open source version. Qt company has more than 300 employees in ten countries such as Finland, China, the United States, and Japan to provide customized software functions and professional services for Qt commercial version to ensure the stability and reliability of software development. sex and safety. Qt's more than 1 million developers worldwide are also the technical resources of Qt products. These developers are constantly pointing out the problems, optimization and development direction of the Qt framework, and even directly contributing code. One user wrote in the 2017 Qt User Survey: "I feel like I have a whole team of software engineers working for me!"
Other voices from the 2017 Qt User Survey: "Qt's ability to use a single codebase for multiple platforms excites my customers every time"; "Large automakers are very satisfied with the results delivered by Qt, and they often Will ask 'Is this made by Qt'?" "We can easily migrate the C++ code base that has accumulated for more than 20 years from MFC to Qt, which improves the efficiency of the development process"; "Qt will not lock me into a certain On the technical platform, I have great flexibility"; "Qt provides users with a complete web browser/HTML5 experience"; "Synchronous development on Windows/Mac platform"; "Simple and concise API, using Qt is very useful Fun!"; and so on.
Dong Renyuan said that China is the fastest growing area of Qt's global business. This is due to the fact that China has a large Qt user base, the world's second largest Qt download and the largest software installation. There are many developers familiar with Qt in China. People, many people have been using Qt since their student days. In fact, more than 40% of the Qt downloads in the Chinese market come from students from major universities in China.
In 2017, Qt continued to invest in China, increased sales and service teams, focused on specific industries such as automobiles, industrial automation, and defense technology, and continued to expand channels, recruit technology partners, and build a good ecosystem. Qt is also investing resources to help partners get to market and develop software quickly. Qt is also accelerating its industrial layout, including providing customized solutions for customers such as automobiles and industrial automation. Dong Renyuan said that the solution for skinning and theme changing of digital cockpits developed by Qt is the demand put forward by users in the Chinese market.
As vehicles become electrified, intelligent and networked, the user's digital experience is becoming increasingly important to the automotive industry. The digital experience is not limited to in-vehicle devices. As a new mobile terminal or IOT device, the seamless connection and interaction of the car with other mobile terminal devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, will become more and more important. Connecting different devices to deploy applications on different platforms is the advantage of using Qt for software development. This huge commercial market will undoubtedly become a huge opportunity for Qt companies. In addition, China is vigorously promoting intelligent manufacturing and industrial automation. In an era where software eats everything, Qt, missed by Nokia, will usher in its golden age. (Text / Ningchuan)