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As one of the people who fiercely defended Nokia on Hacker News when the iPhone launched, I'm entirely willing to say I was wrong here. I drastically underestim
by quanticle 13y ago
As one of the people who fiercely defended Nokia on Hacker News when the iPhone launched, I'm entirely willing to say I was wrong here. I drastically underestimated how quickly Android powered smartphones would become cheap enough to eat into Nokia's marketshare and profits, and I totally overestimated Nokia's leadership's ability to pivot and deal with the situation.
- pavlov 13y agoI'm in the same boat. I believed that Nokia's market power would let them react quicker and outgun everyone else on price when necessary. I thought that Apple would treat the iPhone like the Mac, relegating it to a profitable high-end niche with 3-5% marketshare. Nokia was killed by their incompetence in software. Symbian was originally a lightweight OS designed for constrained devices... But somewhere along the way it got turned into a "worst of all worlds" operating system with enormous code bloat, useless desktop-style features and several half-hearted touch UI layers all rolled into one big ball of fail. It seemed like nobody at Nokia noticed this. I guess the middle managers were either afraid to pass the bad news up the chain, or more likely, they were totally clueless about the ongoing code gangrene.