In my mind, this proves how important it is to hire people that can hit the high notes
The Creative Zen team could spend years refining their
ugly iPod knockoffs and never produce as beautiful,
satisfying, and elegant a player as the Apple iPod. And
they're not going to make a dent in Apple's market share
because the magical design talent is just not there.
They don't have it.
The mediocre talent just never hits the high notes that
the top talent hits all the time. The number of divas
who can hit the f6 in Mozart's Queen of the Night is
vanishingly small, and you just can't perform The Queen
of the Night without that famous f6.
I don't disagree but when you say this "proves" that point I'm not sure that's true. You can just as easily hire people that can "hit the high notes" and fail because of mismanagement. The best example of this is Apple's Copland (a.k.a. System 8) Operating System. To quote Wikipedia...
At WWDC '96, Apple's new CEO, Gil Amelio, used the keynote to talk almost exclusively about Copland, now known as System 8. He repeatedly stated that it was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers at the end of summer with a full release planned for late fall.
So even with the entirety of Apple's engineering resources devoted to it this project still collapsed. As far as we know Nokia could be in the same boat with a bunch of high note hitters being held down by poor management.
There's some room for complaining about the "smartphone" classification. Most Symbian-based phones would not qualify as smartphones in the US. I'm on my third, and they're pretty smart, but not having touchscreens really puts them in a separate market segment.
And those phones run Qt, too, which this analysis lumps in with MeeGo. So, if you counted up just the people Nokia has working on touchscreen phones, you might find it about matches the iPhone team.
Which, mind you, is still not a ringing endorsement of Nokia's efficiency. My N86 has some advantages (1) over, say, my wife's Android phone (a Backflip running 2.1), but Android has a lot more room to improve.
(1) Mostly quality of the phone UI, as opposed to computer UI. For example, the N86's voice control works with my headset. On Android, voice dialing requires you pull out the phone and press a button; with Symbian, you can just push the button on the headset. I now consider that essential; if I had to drive without a feature like that, I wouldn't be able to make calls.
>On Android, voice dialing requires you pull out the phone and press a button
That might be a quirk on your particular model of phone or headset, or maybe it was fixed with 2.2. The N1 definitely supports the headset button for voice commands.
That's nice to know, since I'm hoping to get an NS One Of These Days.
(I know it's not the headset, since it's the same one I used to use with my Nokia, and it worked fine. But I could well believe it was a problem with the phone.)
No matter what you say about Nokia, I love them. Here is why:
- Easy designs
- Affordable phones
- user replaceable batteries
- Cheap and fits in with my upgrade cycles
- the N900.
The N900 certainly wasn't cheap. In fact, the fact that I'd have to shell out another few hundred for a replacement smartphone is the only reason I haven't thrown it against a wall. I have it overclocked, and it's still dog slow. :(
A bit of searching didn't tell me what the latest Maemo is supposed to be, but did imply that it was released last October, so I'm sure it would have popped up for install by now.
I was going to submit a comment about how poorly written the article is. Instead I will just mention that this has always been one of Apple's best qualities. They have managed to stay lean and capitalize on the inability of their competitors to do the same.
Might be interesting to look at the total salaries instead of just the headcount. I understand Nokia did quite a lot of cheap outsourcing in the last decade.
I read in an article that I cannot track down right now that Steve Jobs has gathered some of the world's leading experts in aluminum, process engineering, glass - the creative power of Apple lies in its breadth and astonishing depth.