[pavlov]

Nokia had exactly this kind of CTO office during the 2005 - 2012 years when they lost the entire smartphone market.

The CTO fiddled with greenfield projects that had no path to products while the house burned down.

The best that can be said about it is that inventions outside of the product helped beef up Nokia’s patent portfolio, which played a role in the company surviving the post-phone years and transforming into a pure network company. But they lost a trillion-dollar opportunity and shrunk into an average B2B enterprise.

[Yiin]

well you say that, but blackberry did exactly what you're saying Nokia should have done and we see how much that helped. Truth is iPhone was so far ahead technologically, no other company had a chance. At least Nokia still exists today, which can't be said about majority of other mobile phone manufacturers of that era.

[distances]

Yes, but it wasn't iPhone that ate their markets, it was Android. Nokia and Blackberry were both at the top because they had their own operating systems, and while they were losing the high end market to iPhone, they would've kept the middle and low end markets where the volume was.

Android changed all that, all of the sudden all their competitors got a good OS for free. Commoditize your complement, Google took their markets.