Richard: It's not unusual for new leadership to bring in big changes, how are you planning to change Forum Nokia?

Tom: I've inherited a mature and highly capable organization, therefore the changes we will make in 2008 should be seen as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

One of the first changes has been to move the Download Client, the on-device content catalog application, and MOSH into mainstream business units within Nokia. While these were innovations delivered by Forum Nokia, they are not core to our mission.

As a result, I see us reestablishing the roots of Forum Nokia and focusing on developer relations: making sure that we are providing full 360 degree support to the developer communities that are important to us, such as those building for the S60 platform. We will also expand our efforts to fuel innovation in those communities and ensure we are showcasing the maturity and power of the S60 platform, which is light years better than the competition.

At the same time we are aware that the competitive landscape is getting more crowded. This means that, from a Forum Nokia perspective, it's important we get out to the developer communities as early and as often as we can. So, this year, you will see many more grass-roots local events and face-to-face interactions through our outreach programs. For example, we will be getting in front of the traditional Web development communities now that these developers can port applications to Web Run-Time on S60.

In addition, we will be ensuring that the Forum Nokia programs, from a technical services, go to market, and business development perspective, are optimized and serving the broadest developer community. To do this we have a big initiative underway to reincarnate the Forum Nokia Web environment. This is very important, as the site dominates how we interact with developers. We are looking to make the site more interactive and dynamic. Greater use of rich media and providing easier ways to find content are some of the changes underway. In addition, we want to find ways to make it straightforward for developers to connect with one another and exchange information and ideas.

Richard: Forum Nokia has recently started supporting Maemo, Nokia's Linux platform. How do you see that playing with Series 40 and S60?

Tom: The foray into Linux with the Maemo platform and the Internet tablet business is still in its early days and how it will eventually interact with the other platforms is still playing out. There is certainly a set of value-added service and applications that can come from the third-party developer community and we have started to engage the broader Linux developer community in a targeted way: cherry picking those applications that fit into the Internet tablet use case scenarios.

However I would agree that there is not a clear message to S60 developers on how they could play in the Maemo sandbox or indeed if it is relevant, given that size of the platform and the number of devices. It is not yet for developers looking for a commercially relevant platform, except perhaps in isolated cases where we have targeted use cases around that form factor: in life sciences and healthcare as well as casual Internet browsing at home. So there are a couple of applications that make a better experience, but nothing on the scale or relevance to developers of the S60 platform.

Richard: What about S60 for Linux developers and the whole Open C initiative?

Tom: Open C is certainly the cleanest option, until we get to an architecture that allows more of a write once, deploy many approach and I don't know when that silver bullet may come. Open C is certainly an opportunity for Maemo developers to get onto S60, however the Maemo community is relatively small.

Richard: Tom, let's discuss Trolltech and its Qt technology. Nokia has always been advocating strongly on behalf of Symbian. Does the Trolltech acquisition represent a change to Nokia's OS strategy?

Tom: Nokia's investment does not change Nokia's strategy towards Symbian or Symbian OS based products, as Trolltech is not an operating system. Trolltech technology can be integrated in different operating systems.

The acquisition will not substantially affect how we use our Series 30, Series 40, S60 on Symbian OS, and Maemo platform base as the technology we are acquiring is not tied to any specific operating system or device type. Instead, it will allow Nokia and external developers to build, maintain and evolve applications and services that work across our device portfolio and for the desktop, independent of the software platform used.

Richard: What about tools, are they still an important part of the Forum Nokia offering?

Tom: Absolutely. We will be continuing to evolve the Carbide tools story and our broader portfolio of tools. Coupled with this, Forum Nokia will be at the front line in educating and training for developers to ensure the experience of developing for S60 is as optimal as possible.

Richard: You mentioned at the start of our discussion that you saw the changes in Forum Nokia as more evolutionary than revolutionary. The Forum Nokia Web site however is perhaps not the easiest developer site to quickly find information on. Are the changes you mentioned for the site evolutionary or revolutionary?

Tom: They will be revolutionary. I certainly share your opinion that for the Forum Nokia Web site we have not set the bar very high, so even some moderate changes will take the site light years beyond where it is today. But we plan to do much better than that. Phase one of the roll-out has already started in some areas like the new Communities section and the discussion board. The more fundamental changes will take place in June followed by a second set of major changes in the third quarter. With these changes there will be a complete site redesign: improving search and navigation, improving the information architecture, adding the ability to comb demographic data and a skills map to help our community members find a developer or distribution channel in their area to solve a technical or go to market challenge.

Overall I expect Forum Nokia members to see a big improvement in the way they arrive at Forum Nokia and then find key pieces of information that are relevant to them, whether that be technical, use-case, or business related information.

Richard: Is this likely to mean changes to the three value-add programs offered by Forum Nokia, Champion, Launchpad. and PRO?

Tom: Very possibly. Separately from the Web site renewal I have a team evaluating the value delivered to those developers by these three programs. They are looking at whether there is a better program structure or even if no program structure might serve developers best. This work will result in a recommendation that could be anything from no change to abolishing the stratified program structure altogether.

Richard: In terms of developer recruitment, what do you see as the most important, simply increasing the pool of S60 developers or making the existing developers more productive?

Tom: I think they are both very, very important. The renewal of Forum Nokia is about serving the existing developer communities more effectively. Our regional Forum Nokia developer relations teams will be recruiting new communities and individual developers. So, as I have already mentioned, we will be reaching out to traditional Web developers particularly now that Web Run-Time will be coming to more devices during the first half of the year. But, as the competitive landscape becomes more crowded, we will be focusing on moving developers to Symbian and S60 first, as well as bringing them over from competitive platforms such as Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and iPhone.

Richard: Clearly there will be different strategies for these different communities. For Web developers it is very much about start up, but as the S60 developer community is already strong will there be any recruitment targeted to "missing" applications for the platform?

Tom: It's a little bit of both. We certainly need to grow the community at large - period -just to maintain our trajectory and overall health of the program. At the same time we will be undertaking targeted recruitment and this will tend to be regional, to fulfill the needs of the operators that Nokia serves. Here I think the Forum Nokia Web site renewal will help a lot by lowering the barrier to entry and breaking down the perception that Symbian C++ as a difficult environment to work with.

We certainly don't have that challenge with Web developers. Here it's about finding innovation in the market place and making sure it happens first on our run time and not someone else.

Richard: One of the challenges in bringing developers over to S60 has always seemed to be about justifying the economics. However, there don't seem to be the numbers available to prove the business case. Can you do anything about that?

Tom: There is no doubt about it, we can certainly do a better job at technology marketing and making the community aware of the eye-balls we can put on an application or service. However, we realize it's sometimes not enough to simply highlight the S60 market share. The value proposition needs to be tighter and we will be doing many more case studies to show that S60 is the one commercially relevant mobile platform. We have a lot of work to do, but it is a particularly important challenge for 2008.