> By the time Elop took over at Nokia they were already doomed. Yeah, someone in Nokia engineering had made some company destroying miss calculations. It's no

> By the time Elop took over at Nokia they were already doomed. Yeah, someone in Nokia engineering had made some company destroying miss calculations. It's not like the didn't know what they were up against - it was race between engineering teams. And it's not like Nokia the company couldn't fund that race - they were a gorilla in the ring when it came to resources. They even saw the train coming at them, knew what it would do to them, did some awesome things like buy QT in preparation but it was nowhere near enough. Blind freddy could see the pace of development happening on MeeGo and is predecessor (I forget what it was called) was nowhere near fast enough. Given the resources I expected Nokia to be throwing at it, either the team behind it was tiny, or they were tied up in some titanic tide of red tape go-slow goo. It's not like it was an impossible ask. That was back in the days of Android Honeycomb and Gingerbread which were clearly something Google has slapped together in a rush. They were IMO barely usable. iPhone was barely more than a phone + ipod back then, granted with the best UI on the planet interface but even then the gulf between what Android would allow you to do what would be possible in Apple's walled garden was apparent, so there was space in the market for a different mix. > The final iteration of Windows Mobile was excellent, what killed it wasn't marketing but ecosystem. Well in that case it was obvious what happened. I've lost count of how many "throw it away and start again" iterations Microsoft went through. I do recall using one of their earlier attempts when they had very little competition. It was a Win95 interface crammed into tiny resistive touch screen, complete with start button. It was unusable without the stylus they provided. It had an uptime measured in hours - literally far worse than Win95, which was an amazing "achievement". They threw major bits of it away and started again, and again, and again, each time with something that was 100% binary incompatible with the previous version so they never built up a customer and app base. Eventually they ended up on the NT kernel with an amazing GUI toolkit that as you quite rightly say was the best in class by any number of engineering metrics, but by that time the network effects of their competitors building up an enormous customer and applications by keeping compatibility completely annihilated them. Numbskulls.