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Why not and won't you have the same problem with kinda all phones? Maybe not with a government ran Chinese one?

Because they ditched/will ditch Symbian and switch to WP?

Hard to fault the shareholders on that. The CEO I can see. Regardless they could both need the money I suppose. Nokias stock haven't had a happy ride. I doubt too many stock holders are happy but there's some morons who still think it's all brilliant.

My gripe is pretty much there. The shareholders for putting Elop where he is, and Elop for messing up with the company so badly in order to give Microsoft the dedicated OEM which they desperately wanted.

Take Nokia before Elop. They have the most diversified phone production in the industry, and manage to still produce stuff of good quality (especially from a robustness point of view. Their phones running s40, Symbian, and Maemo/Meego, can pretty cover the needs of everyone buying a phone, except if they're into capacitive touchscreens. They are in the progress of making software development for all these phones much easier by unifying them under the Qt development framework. One big issue : Symbian is stagnating. Bugs don't get fixed, the touchscreen interface takes ages to be completed, and worse the Symbian team tries to slow down the progress of other branches by messing with the internal politics of the company. Worse yet, absurd signing requirements do not help mobile software development, a growing source of revenue, to rise on the platform.

When you own the world's largest phone company and have a problem with the world's most widespread phone OS, what do you do ? Well, you swallow your pride, spend a month enumerating what exactly is wrong, try to reason the team on the high-priority nature of these fixes, kick the most annoying fellows out and hire better replacements if needed, and then you refactor the parts of the code base which have become unworkable and fix the damn thing -- while keeeping compatibility.

Many major players of the OS market have had to do something like this at some point in the lifetime of their product, where old decisions started to slow down the progress of new ideas. Symbian probably did not even require as much work as Windows or Mac OS, which were both successfully rewritten while keeping good enough compatibility in the process, because the whole kernel design did not have to be thrown away.

And what did Nokia do ? Deprecate one of their most successful OSs, running in the phone industry's most diversified range of hardware, in order to roll out a newborn OS on lots of touchscreen slabs that offer no benefit (except maybe build quality) over any other similar phone out there.

Either they were being incredibly stupid, or someone got a good paycheck from Microsoft for this. I tend to lean towards the latter hypothesis, but either way I can't financially caution that. Maybe once they have lost enough money and become yet another minor WP7 OEM they will realize how much of a bad idea this was, though it will probably be too late at this point.

Edited 2012-03-20 07:53 UTC

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