bear in mind that seeing why something failed (or is failing) is pretty easy after the fact, ridiculously hard to do before the fact. that said, i think many pe

bear in mind that seeing why something failed (or is failing) is pretty easy after the fact, ridiculously hard to do before the fact. that said, i think many people saw the handwriting on the wall before "the fall", even at nokia. so, why did they continue to slip and become irrelevant in the smartphone ecosystem? inertia. plain and simple. not market inertia - although that plays a part - but internal inertia. and nokia had around a decade of inertia, some of it is technical debt that gets harder to pay off, some of it comes from big customers and partners you acquired. but underestimate the weight of that at your peril. every business has stakeholders, internal and external. when you recognize a significant shift must be made, these stakeholders still have to be satisfied. you have teams of people - customers, partners, business units - invested in the way things are. to make changes to your core technology and violate the expectations of those stakeholders is insanely difficult to pull off. RIM is going through this, as well. one cannot simply "just adopt android (or windows mobile)" and be done with it. you have to see contracts and expectations (e.g. core applications and solutions) through with those stakeholders. clayton christensen did a great job of elaborating on this in "the innovator's dilemma", everyone should study it. this is a ruthless market with fickle customers - developers, end users (witness the crash of motorolla in about one year!), everyone you need to win over - and an insanely fast cycle, much faster than your platform and hardware development cycle. today's darlings will be tomorrow's road kill, they always are in this business.