
What sealed Nokia's fate? - macco
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/02/16/nokia_had_choices_but_couldnt_take_them/
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CountSessine
Was it really bureaucracy?

Nokia didn't seem to have any trouble producing nice looking, well engineered
hardware. My N95 was probably the best cell phone I've ever owned. What it
really looks like to me is that they were a hardware company whose upper-
management didn't understand software very well.

My N95 ran Symbian S60 3rd edition. At some point Nokia decided that they
wanted to protect S60 users from malware, and that they were going to do it by
requiring all applications to be cryptographically signed. Unlike Apple and
Google, Nokia didn't want to shoulder the burden of running their own
authentication infrastructure. Instead, the 'Symbian Signed' policy required
applications to be signed with a TLS/SSL certificate. Those are typically
pretty expensive. If you wanted anyone to use your little free S60 utility for
auto-rotating the screen or setting location-aware themes, you had to stump up
for a $700 TLS certificate to sign it. Guess what happened to the free-
software ecosystem on S60.

Later, Nokia had what seemed to be a pretty good start on a Linux-based OS
called Maemo. What the article doesn't say is that Nokia inexplicably joined
forces with Intel and sent Maemo on a long and probably pointless integration
detour with Intel's mobile Linux solution, Moblin.

Given that Nokia probably wasn't going to start making smart decisions wrt
software anytime soon, getting software from someone else was better than
being squeezed out of the smartphone business altogether.

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macco
I think the bureaucracy is right, because Nokia wasn't able to make focused
decision. Actually I think this is a classical management problem. Control
132000 people.

