Burning platforms memo essential
The burning platforms memo in 2011 february was absolutely essential. Platform change is so difficult thing to execute, that it caused a gap in Nokia's ability to produce phones. Half year with no new phones shipped is a huge catastrophy to a market which constantly expects millions of phones arriving from a factory. They definitely needed drop in demand to deal with the gap. Windows phone shipments still has not ramped up to produce enough phones, and it's been years trying to do it.
Everything you see in the marketplace has been designed half year beforhand, and I expect burning platforms memo to be no different. Switching platforms under constant demand of new devices is not an easy task, Drop in demand was necessary part of the process. Elop took the blame for killing the phone business. Real problem was that they couldnt produce _any_ phones during platform transition process. Moving from millions of phones to no phones available is a big change.
Windows phone devices are completely different from old symbian phones. Almost every aspect of it changed -- different kind of cpu, the whole phone internals has been redesigned, and the software stack is completely changed. It's amazing they managed to do it in such small distruption in the production process. And the windows phone quality was amazingly good, compared to the fact that they started from scratch. Fresh start is definitely something they needed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
