nortel

Cisco Flip débacle lessons:

• Social Cameras must have wireless connectivity (I like Dave Winer's crazy good Social Camera idea but there's lots of room for innovation here that Cisco, Nokia and many others have missed and that companies like Color, Eye-fi et al are trying)  &
• Magic fairy dust won't turn Enterprise companies like Cisco (or the late lamented mismanaged Nortel) into consumer companies :-)

We will never know for sure. But that's my theory and if you look at the failures of Nokia Software [Symbian, Meego, Qt (sure Qt has made compelling apps like Skype and VLC but nothing mobile and when has anything cross-platform beside HTML, CSS and JS produced compelling experiences? and QML had potential but was beta), etc. ; only Ovi Maps is great, IMHO all other Ovi services and software were failures] it makes sense to believe that.

I choose to believe that there were and are Nokia folks who can do 21st century mobile experiences but they were let down by upper management and leaders (all leaders who were involved in the total Nokia mobile experience prior to February 11  should go in my armchair CEO opinion).

Perhaps Nokia with this WP7 aliance can pull it off. But just like Nortel whose leadership never really moved from their circuit switched and transmission mentality to the Internet mentality, I don't think the Nokia leaders can pull this one off. Love to be proven wrong by a resurgent "non RF, non embedded software" mindset Nokia that somehow manages (after a dark "interregnum" of WP7) to surge forward with something that is truly a compelling and unique mobile experience that I would pay my own money for.

Until then my money will go to other platforms like iPhone, Android and in the future hopefully WebOS.

I worked for over 10 years at Nortel and in 2000 started their first internal blog using Radio Userland. Glad to see that they finally made the leap to public blogging!
FROM John Roese’s Blog » Blog Archive » Introduction to my blog:

QUOTE

It is with great pleasure that I begin my official weblog at Nortel. Because it is my first, I thought I’d take a bit of space to introduce myself and my philosophy and perspective in general as a way to kick off what I hope will be an on-going dialog related to technology, the telecom industry, Nortel and other assorted items of interest that I hope to share with you through this medium.

END QUOTE