I was there at the time and until the end.
That cartoon meme with the dog sitting with a cup of coffee or whatever and telling himself "This is fine", while everything is on fire, is probably the best way to describe how things felt at nokia back then.
This PDF does not read like "this is fine". I find the initial analysis in here to be on point. Of course it does not print "we are doomed" in bold letters on the front page, but management should have taken the points raised in this presentation very seriously. Do you know if Nokia appointed a "head of UI e.g. not tied to BG or platform" back then?
I'm really curious! In hindsight, we can always point to when a pivot should have happened earlier, but on the other hand, we all know orgs that have pivoted too early or to a trend they shouldn't have, and then suffered.
Do you remember any specifics arguments or conflicts about strategy?
Me too. Once the 'Burning Platform' memo was released on the intranet everyone stopped giving a fuck, and were hanging around waiting for redundancy payments.
Soon after Jo Harlow came to give a presentation that was held in The Oval cricket ground. I remember a couple of her statements drew subdued laughter from those attending. I felt a little sorry for her.
Can you explain why every good phone that Nokia released during the period was killed instantly?
To this day I've not seen a phone that felt more responsive than the Nokia N9, which also looked amazing. Yet it was killed pretty much the second it was released.