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by pjmlp 3618 days ago
Speaking as former employee, I see the board as the ones where the blame actually lies.

They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.
1 comments
GedByrne 3618 days ago
Has anybody told the story of what happened at Nokia?

I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering.

Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?

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giovannibajo1 3618 days ago
My view on that is that Nokia has always been a hardware company with a weak software culture. They weren't able to write software of the complexity required to compete with iOS, so they acquired Symbian first (yes they did that after iPhone was already in the market) and Qt later. Neither avenue produced something that could compete on the market fast enough, so the board hired Elop to fix it with Windows Mobile.
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pjmlp 3618 days ago
The software culture was great. I really felt like being in a big startup.

However the had so many reboots that scared the developers away.

On one side they went

J2ME -> Symbian C++ / Java -> Symbian C++ with PIPS -> Symbian C++ / Qt -> Symbian is now open source -> Sorry use .NET instead

On the other side the Maemo was Gtk+, but then the team decided to move to C++ and port it to Qt.

These actions angered everyone that was trying to earn their money targeting Nokia devices.

Ah and don't get me started on Symbian C++ with its quirks copied from Win16 days and Palm OS.

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sievebrain 3618 days ago
It's common. Look at Samsung with Tizen, or basically any pre-Android/iOS mobile manufacturer. The skills needed to make software and hardware are very different. Apple is one of the few companies in the world that successfully built combined teams.
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pjmlp 3618 days ago
With Steve Jobs around, one should add.

The Apple without Steve Jobs wasn't that great and it still remains to be seen how they will do now.

After all, for how long can they keep selling new iPhones and Macs only?

Of course, they have the bank full and can afford to make a few errors for the time being.

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pjmlp 3618 days ago
Outsourcing might have had an impact, but it wasn't be biggest culprit, everyone outsources nowadays even Apple.

The Register has a few good stories on it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/21/nokia_hildon_the_gre...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/09/symbian_developers_m...

As you might imagine not everyone wants to disclose what went wrong on public forums.

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