The length of your texts is completely irrelevant because in 99% of cases they are completely meaningless, anyway. And almost always such hostile and plainly boorish. You might just as well write 20 random characters (as it is the minimum to submit a post), and it would bring to this discussion just about the same amount of useful information as the above. So kindly buzz off.
Sadly, in the smartphone department they never understood hardware, either. As I tried to point out, throughout their entire involvement with smartphones they made such an unbelievable number of utterly wrong decisions when it comes to both software and hardware that they literally created themselves the space on the market for the iPhone and Android. Of course I mean the top management, not the ingenious engineers and designers, who were really brilliant and created hundreds of great projects, best of which got instantly discarded.
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Yes, Sir.
I think this article covers both points in quite a detail.
EDIT: I think Nokia could have done quite well for a longer period of time. It was pretty much Elop’s absurdly stupid burning platform memo that completely destroyed any possibility of selling current and new Symbian phones. Nokia could have sold Symbian phones with success for couple of more years like they intended to do. Ollila was furious towards Elop since he made the memo without approving it through the board.
Well, when making the memo Elop knew it that the first Lumia models from Nokia could start shipping only in some ~15 months, which means that undermining Symbian sales with such statements at that time would leave Nokia with absolutely nothing to sell in the upcoming 1,5 years. Yet he did it. So there is no other valid explanation than that he did it consciously and intentionally. Which instantly made Nokia start losing money as Symbian sales instantly collapsed after his memo, and the first Lumias came out only in late 2012. Result? Microsoft then bought Nokia for less than what they paid for Skype. Mission accomplished.
But the famous “burning platform” memo wasn’t the only destructive work that Elop did. The very first thing he did was to delay the launch of the great Nokia N8. Millions of units manufactured and ready for shipment were waiting months until late autumn. Then, similarly, he delayed the equally great Nokia E7 so that it missed whole Christmas and New Year season and came out only in February 2011 (at the exact time of his memo, which further undermined E7’s and N8’s sales). He also cancelled the MeeGo partnership with Intel (in such a way that Intel issued an official statement saying that they felt offended and cheated), killed the Meltemi project (cut-down version of Harmattan for feature-phones) and then told Google to “piss their pants to keep warmth”, clearly to kill all possible alternatives. So his role and intentions are completely clear.
But the real question is: who let that trojan horse in and gave him full control over the company. Those people must have been either insane or bribed, as everyone in the industry knew how the company Sendo was finished off only a few years earlier in Microsoft’s previous attempt to acquire a smartphone manufacturer. Jorma Ollila should have used his brain before he allowed to infect the company with such a trojan, and not then “be furious” about results of his own mistakes.
As for the article, it is quite incorrect in many places. Sentences like “Already in 2005 and 2006 it was obvious for some people that Symbian is an old and outdated platform. Adding an effective touchscreen user interface to Symbian would have been challenging” are nonsense, because Symbian (and even its predecessor EPOC) had full native touch UIs from the very beginning, long before Nokia acquired it. The Ericsson R380 (the first device ever shipped as “smartphone”) based on Symbian Emerald reference design, already had a touch UI in 1999. UIQ smartphones from Sony Ericsson and Motorola (and then also other manufacturers like e.g. BenQ) had a fantastic UIQ UI based on Symbian Pearl reference design already in 2001-2002. It was Nokia who by 2005-2006 finished off all existing Symbian touch UIs (by cancelling their own Hildon / Series 90 Symbian platforms and at the same time forcing Sony Ericsson to kill the UIQ platform and switch to Nokia’s S60), not vice versa.
That single mistake alone, i.e. killing existing Symbian touch-enabled platforms and keeping the only one without touch, only to then spend years on laboriously and awkwardly implementing touch support on it, which resulted in something as cumbersome and ugly as S60 5th Edition in 2009, was probably Nokia’s biggest mistake in their whole smartphone history. The touch UI of the Symbian Anna/Belle that they finally managed to introduce in 2010, was quite on par with what the Symbian UIQ touch UI offered in 2001. Nine years completely wasted in that department only to get back to what they could have had already a decade earlier.
Google for some screenshots of the UI of Nokia 7700 or 7710 and notice how similar it was to the UI of Maemo tablets, e.g. the Nokia 770 or the N800. That’s because it was the same Hildon UI, first made for Symbian already in 2003 (and very quickly canceled), and only then ported to Linux. With full touch support. So sentences like that about “adding touch support to Symbian in 2005 would have been challenging” are wrong, because Symbian had effective touch UIs many years earlier, actually before anyone else.
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Good article. Except that it really takes stressing that those weren’t Elop’s “mistakes” or “bad decisions”. It was a plan that he carefully put into life, aimed at rapidly shrinking the value of Nokia and bringing it to a state in which buying it by Microsoft would be the only option for it, and buying it CHEAPLY. Way cheaper than something as tiny (compared to Nokia from 2010) as Skype, and even that not really paid because there was a huge debt that M$ deducted from the payment. A debt for unpaid Windows Phone licences for Lumias manufactured but not sold… YES, Elop’s Nokia was paying Microsoft licence fees for every Windows Phone device they MADE, and NOT SOLD. As the article states, the totally not promoted N9 alone was selling better than all the Lumias combined, millions of which were catching dust in warehouses, rapidly increasing Nokia’s debts…
Elop not only delayed shipments of the N8 and E7 by months (to skip seasons of best sales), but when he couldn’t delay the launch of the E7 any longer, he made his “burning platform” memo on the very day that the E7 finally started shipping (February 7, 2011) which obviously instantly killed its sales. This single thing alone proves that all his actions were carefully planned and intentional.
Not many people know or remember that not much earlier M$ finished off Sendo company (British smartphone maker) in a very similar way. First an agreement to exclusively manufacture Windows smartphones, then blocking Sendo access to the OS, leaving the company with nothing to sell. They didn’t manage to acquire Sendo who went to court and eventually forced M$ to settle an agreement with them and even return some money, but the harm was too big and it didn’t save Sendo anyway, which soon went bankrupt.
The leaders of Nokia knew it very well and they also knew that Microsoft was still desperately hunting for a smartphone maker to acquire and what kind of methods they were using for that. So letting Elop in wasn’t just a “mistake”. It must have had its price.
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At least that’s something I predicted long before it got real 
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Very good prediction, indeed!
My predictions were the same and at the same time. Can’t quote them, though, as the forum that I was using sadly doesn’t exist anymore.
Yes, but HMD is a completely different company.
I would love to see a Jolla x HMD collaboration.
Also it would be nice if Sony would provide some contribution to SFOS.
i had the same on my mind that time.
The only wrong guessing I made, I thought they’ll keep Symbian alive longer.
That’s why I bought the Nokia 808 instead of a device never sold officially in.Germany and where the end was settled before it came out.
The 808 is still functional along with my N8, N97, N95 and N73.
at the end, I have 2 Jolla phones, tablet, and 5 Sailfish X devices and I use SFOS since the beginning as daily drivers and I don’t miss anything
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IIRC Collabora’s work was built on for the Documents app, and you can actually view a spreadsheet in it, but that’s it.
The Android app is quite a bit more developed and allows you to edit cells and change sheets (though I couldn’t figure out how to delete them), but it is still awkward. Maybe using KBM would improve matters.
Anyway I wonder if it would be possible to view there sources to either build a SF version or using their improvements on Gnumeric.