"Nokia is a hardware company that hates software"

Nokia's problem -- and I've heard this same story from at least half a

dozen former and present Nokia employees who read DF -- is that their

handset business is fundamentally based around hardware teams. When

they decide to make a phone, they put together a hardware team for

that model, and that team makes all decisions. That's why they have no

cohesive software strategy. Nokia sees software as one component in a

hardware-based view of the industry. Here's a description from an

email sent to me by a former Nokia software engineer:

Here's the problem: Hardware Rules at Nokia. The software is

written by the software groups inside of Nokia, and it is then given

to the hardware group, which gets to decide what software goes

on the device, and the environment in which it runs. All schedules

are driven by the hardware timelines. It was not uncommon for us

to give them code that ran perfectly by their own test, only to have

them do things like reduce the available memory for the software

to 25% the specified allocation, and then point the finger back at

software when things failed in the field.

In addition, I read their "competitive analysis" of the iPhone. It was

a short powerpoint deck that proceeded to lay out all of the reasons

why Nokia did not have to change what they were doing at all. They

even included "developer annoyance at the App Store submission

process" as a reason why the iPhone would ultimately fail (this was

around the time that the 3GS was released, so they had no excuse).

Bottom Line: Nokia is a hardware company that hates software.