*The "burning platform."
(...)
"Meanwhile on that knowhow. What a rich deep resource pool was shifted to Accenture in the move! Whatever you may think of Nokia smartphones and Symbian of late, it was this smartphones software group which did most of the heavy lifting and inventing, seeing an improbable, unlikely future, and made it happen. Remember, Nokia sold touch screen smartphones long before there was an iPhone. Nokia created the world's first pure gaming smartphone half a decade before the iPhone emerged as the world's favorite pocket gaming device (Nokia did that with its own app store too long before Apple launched its app store) and the world's first consumer-oriented smartphone. Obviously on the enterprise side, long before there was a Blackberry, there was the Communicator, as Nokia invented the smartphone itself, and then early in the previous decade, Nokia was the first phone maker to split its smartphone business into divisions, one focusing on enterprise smartphones and their apps.
"Nokia was the first phone maker to audaciously claim that what they offered for the pocket was a true computer - something today in the iPhone era, all PC makers agree is true. And while Symbian was indeed an old operating system, it was designed for phones or pocketable devices, it worked very well with smartphone also of modest performance specs, and did have most of those things that were missing from the early iPhones, and also missing from many rival operating systems early on, like multitasking, folder views, Microsoft Office suite compatibility, while being the most compatible system around supporting just about everything including Adobe Flash of course.
"Symbian is an old and obsolescent operating system, that is true. But it was kept alive with continuous updates where all of its contemporary operating systems had been killed along the way. Symbian had always been developed with backwards compatibility (an expensive option, but one much better for developers and end-users than deciding to not have it, like Microsoft did last year when they announced that the new smartphone operating system Phone 7 would not be compatible with Microsoft's legacy OS of nearly ten years, Windows Mobile). And Symbian was being developed always to supply multiple handset makers, another factor that added costs (compared to say Apple or RIM or HP/Palm whose operating system only needs to power smartphones for one maker, addressing one specific customer segment). Where many complained that Symbian was out of date, in reality, it was the operating system of choice by Japan's NTT DoCoMo, powering their smartphones/featurephones which by most measures are the most advanced phones on the planet. So there was (and still is) life left in that operating system, inspite of its age.
"That Symbian had survived this long and still remained viable - and the latest iteration, Symbian S^3 is quite user-friendly even as a touch-screen OS - is testament to the hard work and dedication of the Symbian development staff, led increasingly by Nokia. That Nokia itself had achieved one massive milestone after another in the true inventions and innovations of smartphones (even if to modest successes in some cases, where Nokia's invention was clearly ahead of its time - this is no crime, look at Apple's Newton, which while failing the market, is still seen as the first modern PDA).
"The smartphone environment and the operating systems and app stores we use today are all richer and better because of the pioneering work done by Nokia and its smartphone developers. Much of that staff, in particular on the side of the software and OS skills, has now shifted to Accenture...." (((A "platform" is people. In this case, burned people.)))
