I wonder how you all react to this comment contributed this evening by a MIR reader on this post:
My wife was a speaker today at the Symbian conference. She mentioned that the whole thing seemed dead and pointless. Symbian has already lost the PR war. It’s haemorrhaging developers and will shortly loose the App war. Nokia is to blame. With the exception of the unreleased N900 they have delivered nothing substantially new since the amazing N95. They are guilty of a gross failure of imagination.
She was in the wrong place. She should have stepped outside the speaker hall (empty and rather pointless, yes) and got chatting to the thousands of developers in the main stand area – there was more buzz there this year than any other Symbian show I can remember.
Here's the scenario. You are running Nokia, you currently sell more symbian devices on an annual basis than just about every type of handset that is made. You have to make a decision to change the platform and risk loosing all of your sells, or take a conservative route and keep doing the same, making small incremental improvements knowing that 90% of your user base will come back for more of the same. What would you do?
Now think of the VW golf, or the Toyota Corolla. Easy to make the exciting decision from the outside, bit more difficult inside the boardroom.