[toyg]

Their software has not "always" been lacking. T9 for example was a wonderful innovation, and looked magical at the time. They were destroying the competition back in the 90s thanks to great UI work on very limited devices.

They've lost the plot when they started to ignore the limitations of Symbian, probably because they had invested so much on it very early in the game and so it had gained almost 100% mindshare among their engineers. Then the iPhone came out and the leadership lacked courage to tell engineers that Linux was the future and they should all retrain RIGHT FUCKING NOW; instead there was a lot of internal politicking, keeping Maemo at bay and trying to put lipstick on the Symbian-UI pig.

Some of those layoffs are deserved, in a way, since resistance to change was coming from below as much as from above. Shame that it took an idiotic leader making the worst possible choices to make people see the error of their ways.

[Gravityloss]

T9 was copied from Benefon, a smaller Finnish mobile company. Some of my friends had their phones. EDIT: Or at least they brought phones with that earlier to the market. Wikipedia claims it was invented by "Tegic".

[laconian]

Tegic Communications, which is now a subsidiary of Nuance.

They still sell T9 even today.

[toyg]

Being good at developing new stuff == being good at copying new stuff and quickly delivering to mainstream markets. See also: Apple, Inc; Microsoft, Inc; etc etc etc.