Nokia's dirty secret: The untold story of a production-ready tablet from 2001

http://www.digitoday.fi/vimpaimet/2014/04/16/nokias-dirty-secret-the-untold-story-of-a-production-ready-tablet-from-2001/20145483/66

by rythie • 12 years ago

1 2 12 years ago

digitoday.fi

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Oh enough already of this "X company could've done Y product decades ago" bullshit. The fact remains that:

1) they didn't - so who cares now?

2) they couldn't have done it as good as it was done now, anyway. So again - who cares about ifs and buts?

I feel these stories do nothing than just give the company some positive but completely unwarranted PR. In fact, these stories should be approached from the opposite direction, like "look how stupid this company was for not releasing the 'iPad' 20 years ago", or whatever. I feel that would be a more appropriate direction for these articles.

The truth is, anyone who will study Nokia's history in business schools years later, should only think how stupid Nokia was for either:

1) not going full steam with Maemo, their "modern" mobile OS, years before.

2) not adopting Android back in 2009 or 2010, when Samsung did, and when Nokia still had 2x Samsung's market share in smartphones. If they did, they could've retained their 60+ percent global market share in smartphones.

Doing either of those 2 could've saved them from near bankruptcy/acquisition. But they didn't. Therefore they were stupid (and arrogant) - and that's how history should remember them, if new companies are to learn anything from that.

Approaching this from "look how awesome Nokia was for almost building the iPad more than a decade ago (yet still almost going bankrupt)" is the wrong way to look at it.

rythie• 12 years ago

No one yet has voted up, 1 hour in, so you're in luck :-)

I don't think the article paints Nokia as awesome, I think it further paints them in the way you mentioned - which how I assumed people would interpret it. If anything, it shows a company with lots of innovation from the staff, but a lack of direction from the management (much like Xerox in the early days of desktop computing).

Nokia's dirty secret: The untold story of a production-ready tablet from 2001

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