My money is on a major backend upgrade gone foobar and somehow foobarring the rollback (if they even considered rollbacki?!?!?!). Either that or their prod is completely hosed somehow (fire etc.) and they've had to switch on their never properly tested, not properly built or scoped DR that was just put in to tick some audit by a non IT person putting a check next to a box.

A break-fix does not take 5 days to resolve, not even a large SAN.

I've seen some rank amateurish behaviour by enterprises with multi million dollar turnovers so its no surprise for a monopolist vendor like Pearson to sit there and watch the money roll in. Unless there is some kind of legal/contractual or PR ramification from downtime mgt just don't get it until it happens.

I agree entirely and I'm in the former boat and have dealt with many times with the latter (global parent company, providers, migrating to mgd services etc.). The difference in the turnaround time for anything (faults or projects/implementations ) is absolutely amazing, and so its the level of competency (theres a lot of room for duds to hide in a large team).

The trick is to find an environment that lets you do the former but has the size/scale that lets you play with the big iron / keep up your skills. From my networking perspective I'd say around 5000-10000 endpoints is the sweet spot.

Sums it up right there: for most people that is not the case.

Games, Adobe, MYOB, drivers for thingys, MS office/exchange stack for work, airplay/itunes (kill it with fire but hey lots of people use that stuff), etc.

Sorry wrong. Google the anandtech benchMark of current medfield in razr i vs kraitkrait. It's competitive NOW and that's without process advantage

Thats a side issue, the main point is that Elop osborned their entire current inventory without being in a position to release any WP phones for nearly a year.
google the osborne effect, its a textbook example of commercial suicide.

It would have been a totally different story had they said 'well we're going WP all in, and hey, here's our new shiny, its in store next week'.

re: differentiation, Pureview, city lens, mapping etc. can easily be used to differentiate on any platform including Android

Thats exactly our point though, they could have gone with WP7, WP8 on the side or as part of a multi-OS strategy without osborning their entire symbian inventory and at one stroke destroying their main cash flow with WP7 still 9 months or so from launch and WP8 18 months.

Nobody is saying (aside from Tomi on the blog who's a bit biased as you can probably tell) that they should have kept going with symbian. Its the execution of the WP strategy that is a total disaster.

Does not change the topic that they left themselves with their pants down in the market for 18 months with this choice. Unbelievable. Had they say not gone WP exclusive then they would have had backup options or been able to do something else in this time.

Its even more unbelievable had they known when they made wp7 decision that it was always a stopgap going to be non-upgradeable to wp8 etc. and if they didn't know then what were their lawyers doing or did MSFT straight up lie about their roadmap (even I know enough about big commercial decision that you don't make a deal like this without some very concrete, contractually backed roadmap agreements).

Way to look at a figure without any context whatsoever

And if unlike most geeks you have the faintest interest in finance, a cursory look at the balance sheet will show you how much of a 'shot in the arm' that billion dollars turned out to be. 1 billion doesn't even begin to cover the losses incurred after the burning platforms memo - and thats just the EXTRA losses (compared to extrapolating the then current rate of losses downwards in a straight effin line).

Why do most geeks bemoan the general population for their technical ignorance, yet will act like a typical consumer moron when it comes to financial topics

"Any one with objective mind will appreciate what Microsoft has done."

Bzzzzt wrong. All Nokia should have focused on is what consumers would appreciate, and they are most certainly not objective minds....

All the arguments about android being too 'me too' conveniently ignore the massive handicaps of WP adoption - low single digit user base, poor carrier / channel relations, MS being MS esp in mobile space.... and also overlook the fact that android would have let Nokia leverage their traditional brand instantly (I don't know if you're American, but in case you are, prior to 2009 or so, Nokia was seen as the IBM of the mobile phone world by the entire world barring the USA and possibly Japan) - something you could trust.

+11111 exactly it
for years and years my entire family bought nothing but nokias. We never even so much as looked at another vendor.

Then my sister and myself got droids, palmed mum off to the altar of steve (less tech support lol) and nobody has even looked at a nokia since. I don't think they even realise Nokia started making 'real smartphones' again (spare me the symbian diatribes, I know the feature lists etc. but I'm talking about common user perception) and nobody is remotely interested in switching platforms

OK I understand your concern even if I'm not anywhere as puritannical. (yeah been down the compile my own kernel from source road before so no need to lecture me, i just value my time more these days and rate the possibility of requiring zombie macguyver hacking as somewhere close to zero).

sorry I mean AT&T (I think! apologies in advance)

You do realise you can just go to HTCDEV.com and unlock bootloader with the code they give you?

Unless you're 'murican and speaking about the Verizon BL locked HTC OneXL in which case you do know thats Verizon's fault not HTC's?

The price difference is well above the cost+profit margin of transportation.
Why is it there are so many Americans who comment on stuff about other countries who automagically assume things that they have zero clue about.

You're commenting on the case with an arrogant uninformed attitude. Other posters who have replied have basically demolished your argument. What in the world made you assume Australia has government mandated import barriers towards overseas IT products? Its the exact opposite: market collusion amongst the big players to extract monopoly rents. Or are you suggesting Australia, er, goes 'commie' and starts regulating the, er, 'free' market? ROFL

Please in future do at least a modicum of research before getting on your soapbox. GET A BRAIN MORANS GO USA