[geeks] Nokia is getting the Rick Belluzzo treatment...

[vintagecoder at aol.com]

Jonathan Patschke wrote:

> I fail to believe that Nokia's abrupt change in UI direction was
> necessary.  Yes, the iPhone is a very nice product, but it's not
> something that's as usable for me as my Nokia.  Surely there's room at
> the top for something that looks nothing like an iPhone, yet that's
> nearly all that's being built.

snip

I agree with this post. Nokia's missteps were many and happened over a very
long time. I saw this coming years ago and when I said it on various forums
I was shouted down. This was a typical marketing train wreck that didn't
have to happen. Nokia went from shipping unremarkable but pretty functional
solutions on hardware with just enough oomph to get the job done to
operating way out of their league trying to be iPhone contenders. For what?

The missed the mark with Symbian touch interface and released dozens of
firmware updates and still couldn't get it right. They shipped devices
with bad SD cards that caused data loss, device lockups, and many pissed
off customers and did nothing about it. They screwed people over by
including different combinations of accessories in different countries
even though they're known as a global corporation. Then they open sourced
Symbian and everybody yelled "hooray" but me. I knew that meant Symbian was
a dead man walking. Then they dumped all those people and hooked up with MS
to support of all things, WinMo.

The underlying problems were too great to deal with. Nokia is a hardware
company, they clearly don't know how to do software. S60v3 was the pinnacle
of what Symbian could be, and it was good, stable, and retro. It was too
old fashioned but it had a loyal following. They had a perfectly good
business handset (E71) and they messed it up trying to upgrade the
hardware. They just couldn't stop fixing things that weren't broken
whenever they fixed something else that was. Quality went downhill for good
looks that didn't last. Executives never seem to learn. It's the
product, stupid!

And they just couldn't go further under the weight of their OS. Symbian is
huge, over 40 million lines of C++ code. It's way too big for what it does.
The way it's managed was certain death, every vendor had their own
customizations adding to those 30 million lines. There was no way to test
anything coherently and the end-user product showed that. Nokia refused to
reign everybody in. They couldn't manage the software complexity like they
could deal with hardware. Hardware and software aren't the same thing.
Nokia doesn't get it.

I fear the same thing is happening to BlackBerry. There is nothing wrong
with a really functional product that isn't glamorous. I need stuff that
works. I wouldn't own an iAnything if you gave it to me or touch one with a
ten foot pole. BlackBerry thinks they need to sell media phones to
Apple fanboys. That will never happen. Apple consumers don't buy
devices because of features or technology, they buy them because
they're Apple. Hell, iPhone couldn't even multitask until about a year
ago. People are getting lost chasing the wrong rainbows.


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