In my mind, this proves how important it is to hire people that can hit the high notes
The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their
ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful,
satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And
they're not going to make a dent in Apple's market share
because the magical design talent is just not there.
They don't have it.
The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that
the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas
who can hit the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night is
vanishingly small, and you just can't perform The Queen
of the Night without that famous f6.
I don't disagree but when you say this "proves" that point I'm not sure that's true. You can just as easily hire people that can "hit the high notes" and fail because of mismanagement. The best example of this is Apple's Copland (a.k.a. System 8) Operating System. To quote Wikipedia...
At WWDC '96, Apple's new CEO, Gil Amelio, used the keynote to talk almost exclusively about Copland, now known as System 8. He repeatedly stated that it was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers at the end of summer with a full release planned for late fall.
So even with the entirety of Apple's engineering resources devoted to it this project still collapsed. As far as we know Nokia could be in the same boat with a bunch of high note hitters being held down by poor management.
