[nirnira]

I understand the nostalgia, but I don't understand the melancholy. Why should you feel sad for a company that was so inept? We should be celebrating the fact that a company that failed to adapt and produce products that people really wanted was trampled by more nimble competition.

After all, if you look at the phones Nokia put out over the last ten years, it's clear they had no clue what they were doing. Instead of really focussing on a few good ideas, they just kept throwing shit at the wall to see what would stick, adding bizarre features and more buttons and releasing phone after awkward useless phone after phone. All the while the big innovation was just turning the phone into a simple frame for the canvas, a big screen on which to run a flexible, updateable OS - then supporting and building a community around a single phone line.

And when that innovation came, they scrambled to cover their asses, but it just wasn't in their company DNA to show that level of focus. Instead you could sense that they were upset at having to buckle down and "get serious" - like someone took away their toys.

They were the consummate manufacturers of Homer Car phones. Their phones were pre-Cambrian experimental bodyforms. Well guess what, 99% of those random bodyforms were junk.