I don't disagree but when you say this "proves" that point I'm not sure that's true. You can just as easily hire people that can "hit the high notes" and fail

I don't disagree but when you say this "proves" that point I'm not sure that's true. You can just as easily hire people that can "hit the high notes" and fail because of mismanagement. The best example of this is Apple's Copland (a.k.a. System 8) Operating System. To quote Wikipedia... At WWDC '96, Apple's new CEO, Gil Amelio, used the keynote to talk almost exclusively about Copland, now known as System 8. He repeatedly stated that it was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers at the end of summer with a full release planned for late fall. (Source: http://tinyurl.com/2lrwzd http://tinyurl.com/2lrwzd) So even with the entirety of Apple's engineering resources devoted to it this project still collapsed. As far as we know Nokia could be in the same boat with a bunch of high note hitters being held down by poor management.