[shrubble]

The real issue is that Microsoft's "engineering culture" looked down on the use of co-processor chips and wanted to do everything on a big CPU.

Even in 2012 with the Pureview 808, Nokia had a pixel processing chip that could handle 1 billion pixel a second, with low power usage. Microsoft's inept driver architecture made it difficult to use, so later Microsoft versions of the Lumia phones actually had lower specs and power usage issues.

Elop was very likely Rick Belluzzo of SGI writ large; a mediocre thinker, a big-company bureaucrat who never cared about tech...