I'm aware that many dislike Elop (and there may be many good reasons), but I'm still in awe of his "burning platform" memo[1].

He lays out the horrible situation they are in: pressured from the top of the market by Android+Apple and at the low end by a huge wave of asian cell phone makers.

Compare his very clear eyed approach to the ongoing and incoherent messages coming out of RIM.

[1] - http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/nokia-ceo-stephen-elop-ra...

Having followed Tomi, and judged by myself, Elop's memo was a killing coup on Nokia, rather than a saving hand. S Elop could not manage properly a transition to a new platform/s and his main decision to switch to Microsoft's again and again unproven/failed platform can be judged ridiculous by a 10 years old child, even, namely Ms platform was sunk already multiple times (here speaks a Windows developer, aka me), HTC/LG/Samsung were already producing the phones, MS's stragegic misalignment with Nokia etc etc etc.

I'm not really disagreeing with you. I'm not particularly bullish on the Nokia+MS partnership, etc.

What I'm objecting to is more the framing and context of the criticism. I think it's a hard case to make that Nokia was doing gangbusters and that since Elop came in that it's suddenly unexpectedly not doing well.

in 2008 nokia was a far superior phone. in europe anyway. they really seem to have had no impact in the usa. my nokias back then had nice useable keyboards, decent cameras that shot video, cameras with flashes. been able to write code on the os in python, and incredible battery life. a good selection of apps.

but phones they made in 2008 suggested problems to me (only supporting 8gb memory, bad design decisions for connectors) and by early-mid 2009 they had caused enough people to ditch nokia for android that the writing was on the wall.

i bought a iphone 3g on prepay and it was meh till ios 3 came along. the people who asked about the iphone i could show them the device and even loan it to them. after using it for a few days none of them wanted it at 1/3 of it's price. battery life was appalling after using nokias till that point. many hated the touchscreen for typing sms as it was slower and less accurate. accidently tapping the weather or any other internet app caused the device to suck data costing money on the prepay device.

so when the 3gs came out and apple blocked googles voip app i bought an android device. have been on android since. but i still have an ancient nokia e61 as emergency backup. last used a few weeks ago when in hospital and got seperated from my chargers. used the e61 which had last been charged last year and had been switched off since then for 3 days no problem.

Yea, the whole point is that Nokia excelled at hardware, could not catch the software side of smartphone wave and jumpled from a burning platform to a sunk ship.

First time I read this lunatic. I am not quite sure how reasonable his opinions are (Skype is avaible on other platforms and not hurting them), but it is entertaining. I have to look what he is writing about the iPhone 2010.