Nokia pioneered (essentially) the strategy that Google is using with Android. After all, Series 60 sure looks a lot like Android in terms of positioning, roll o

Nokia pioneered (essentially) the strategy that Google is using with Android. After all, Series 60 sure looks a lot like Android in terms of positioning, roll out, and ecosystem. It was a winning strategy for Nokia that saw their Symbian based software on hundreds of devices from many different manufacturers. Nokia's issue isn't strategic, it's a huge problem with execution. Series-60 succeeded as much as it did in spite of itself. I was personally involved in (as an outside company) several S60 projects that simply failed. The number of manufacturers who took a run at making a S60 phone is a really impressive list. The number who succeeded at it, is far less so. I've been confident in predicting widespread for success with Android largely because I see the parallels between S60 and what Android is doing. The difference is that Google appears to have the talent to actually execute on the vision. They're pushing a quality product forward with the agility to compete favorably with Apple, RIM, and everyone else. If Nokia fails it will be a failure of a broken engineering culture. The lack of apps on their platform can be placed firmly at the feet of their development platform. My failed startup involved an attempt to build a S60 app. It took my partner and I 6 months to get the thing built (it wasn't a large or particularly complicated app) thanks to all of the idiosyncrasies of that platform. This despite having spent the previous 5 years working with S60 on a much larger and more complicated project (which was also a nightmare). To succeed in the mobile space you need a strong platform, with strong UI concepts, and strong developer tools that help them get their job done quickly. Apple and Google both have that, Nokia does not.