The Lumia 800's hardware requirements were largely shaped by rigid requirements that Microsoft set for Windows Phone that were an attempt to avoid the fragmenta

The Lumia 800's hardware requirements were largely shaped by rigid requirements that Microsoft set for Windows Phone that were an attempt to avoid the fragmentation issues that have come to define Android hardware development. So the fact that Lumia 800 hardware was underpowered compared to Galaxy hardware of the time is much more Microsoft's fault than Nokia's fault (except for that PenTile display). Nokia fell because in the beginning, a) Symbian accrued massive technical debt that Nokia management refused to pay down because they could keep cranking out dumbphones for the foreseeable future and so paying down technical debt didn't seem like a good investment decision to management. Why should you have an OS architecture that allows dual-core processors in a cell phone? Nobody will ever need more than a single core processor in their cell phone, any more processing power will obviously use up way too much battery. This leads to: b) The rise of the first smartphones - Palm and Blackberry. Nokia management paid down a minimum of technical debt to get out some Symbian smartphones to compete and stayed ahead of the market because early smartphones were targeted to heavy business users and not consumers. Nokia's continued advantageous market positioning leads to: c) The rise of consumer smartphones - iOS and Android. Nokia management starts to try to adapt and go to engineering and tell them they need a decent competitor yesterday. Nokia engineers tell them the technical debt makes that impossible within any reasonable time frame. They are buoyed by hierarchy figures who predict that Symbian will carve out a niche alongside all the other players and that the sky isn't falling because the sky is never falling. Cell phones are a totally different product from music players, don't you know, and Apple products don't always run away with the market, look how few computers Apple sells! And Android is this unproven, insecure, ugly, rudderless mess with no real enterprise support and too many players pulling it in too many directions. Still, revenue is falling and so Nokia management starts to freak out. This leads to: d) Hiring Stephen Elop from Microsoft, who calls up his old contacts at Microsoft and gets Nokia management the deal of a lifetime: huge amounts of aid to hold off the wolves until they get a flagship out for the immortal IT company throwing everything it has into catching up on mobile with unbeatable integration with products like Office that everyone uses and is deeply dependent on. And the rest is history. Two things killed Nokia: they rested on their laurels when the going was good, and when the going got tough they hitched their cart to a horse which abandoned them along the way. If Symbian was inevitably going to go the way of the dodo, Nokia management should've swallowed their pride and pursued an acquisition by Microsoft. But Nokia was a Finnish national symbol that accounted for far too much of Finnish GDP to ever allow the company to be acquired outright, upper management would've been signing their social death warrants. So in truth, Nokia's death was inevitable.