Well, I'd say the opposite happened: Nokia kept the profitable businesses (IP, network equiment, navigation) and transferred everything not worth keeping to Microsoft. And even got money in return. Pretty smart move.
So was Symbian for a long time. Granted, the language around ramping down Symbian was much more drastic (but only for an internal audience), but there was no move to stop making Symbian phones outright.
A classic case of innovator's dilemma I'm afraid.
When something cut off at the knees by the CEO is outselling his pet project five to one you know that the CEO is not working for the company that he's supposed to be running.
Which is very close to what Apple did with the iPad and Mac. Sometimes you have to be able to move past a dead end by drastic measures.
PS: Symbian (or to be precise, S60) was crap. Crap to use, crap to develop, and crap to develop for (I did all three). Good riddance.
However, in 2009 and in 2010, Nokia was growing its sales...
Not true for the smartphone segment (which is what the burning platform memo addresses):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Wide_Smartphone_Sales_Share.png (based on Garner data, similar graphs which go back far enough are easily found)
The decline started already in 2007, and Android started surpassing Symbian during 2010. The burning platform memo was from early 2011.
Psion Organizer: 1984
Mobile development started well before Apple and Android.
... of which none did deliver or were stillborn. The cross platformness of Qt was compromised from the start with two competing UI frameworks libdui for Harmattan and Orbit for Symbian. This is a good article about that mess. And from what we know about Meltemi, it would have been a third, incompatible framework.
Nokia did achieve only the minimum target for Symbian, and that is to retrofit Qt 4.8 to Symbian 9.2/^3.
Before anybody blames Elop for this, 90% of it happened before his time.
Like Apple, currently shopping around for another chip manufacturer after Samsung raised prices, (to earn back billion dollar fine which will most likely be overturned on appeal).
Nice story, but not true.
I'm glad to see your comment already at +5 - it's spot on, couldn't have written it better. Qualcomm is the achilles heel for Nokia, and making a change to any other chipset vendor will be really hard. The ramp down of Nokia's production of own chipsets produced by TI is by the way another severely limiting factor for Nokia to continue to deliver any Symbian based devices (not that there would be a big market for them now).
Nokia's failed chipset strategy during the last five years is monumental, and deadly when combined with the Qualcomm lawsuit outcome.
For instance, it was used in Maemo - but then replaced with something GTK-based.
You got that the wrong way around. Maemo used GTK until the Fremantle release, but switched to Qt for Harmattan.
... or Fiasko.
They had the
Uhm, they still have S40 and are still selling quite a bunch of S40 based phones (especially the Asha series).
Nope, you couldn't target S40 with Qt.
maybe having a resume that has software jobs continuously from the 80's thru the present is considered a give-away of your age and its immediately circular-binned by HR and most hiring mgrs?
Possibly... might be better to just list the last ten years.
It was called N950, and was killed into "developers only" after Elop came.
No, it was killed before he came, around Summer 2010.
Right: NewtonOS 2.0, ca. 1995:
http://manuals.info.apple.com/Apple_Support_Area/Manuals/newton/NewtonProgrammerRef20.PDF
Chapters 18 and 19, routing and transports.
This was a company internal presentation, not for journalists. If you watch the whole video, it becomes clear that this was not a controlled leak, there are other references to ongoing work which I seriously doubt Elop wants to have out in public.
Elliptic paraboloids for sale.
