> People don't remember but, what actually killed Nokia handsets in one stroke was one memo by their then CEO Stehphen Elop where he basically stated their platform as it is was dead in the water.
That's like saying that declaring the patient has pneumonia killed the patient.
Nokia was treading water, and everyone knew it. Their Symbian phones were plasticky slow devices with a stillborn ecosystem. Their Linux devices were plasticky hacky devices that only geeks loved. They were hooked on the feature-phone pipeline and couldn't decide how to face the smartphone revolution. They had dozens of competing models that splintered their development efforts and made them compete, ineffectually, with each other.
Elop told them the truth, didn't find a way to flip the behemoth around in 6 months, and sold the company. There absolutely is valid debate about selling the company, but people underestimate the difficulty of radically changing such a large company to effectively compete with the new existential threat.
At the time I worked for STMicro, in the division developing the Nomadik line of SoCs for Nokia's smartphones. We were all carefully watching Nokia's numbers and very nervous about their continued assertions that they'd pull it together.
I quit ST in January 2011, knowing (like all my colleagues) that the Titanic was heading for its iceberg. The "Burning Platform" memo came out in February.
That's like saying that declaring the patient has pneumonia killed the patient.
Nokia was treading water, and everyone knew it. Their Symbian phones were plasticky slow devices with a stillborn ecosystem. Their Linux devices were plasticky hacky devices that only geeks loved. They were hooked on the feature-phone pipeline and couldn't decide how to face the smartphone revolution. They had dozens of competing models that splintered their development efforts and made them compete, ineffectually, with each other.
Elop told them the truth, didn't find a way to flip the behemoth around in 6 months, and sold the company. There absolutely is valid debate about selling the company, but people underestimate the difficulty of radically changing such a large company to effectively compete with the new existential threat.