Musings from the World of Consulting

Berkshire gets serious about Commercial Insurance

Mon, 13 May 2013 10:00:30 -0500

Berkshire gets serious about Commercial Insurance :

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has poached four senior executives from American International Group Inc., grabbing people with experience insuring large and unusual risks.

Just as rates begin to harden, Berkshire indicates its intent to enter Commercial Insurance market. The shadow of additional capacity may temper some of the hardening while the market share of the current leaders diminishing somewhat.

In the E&S space, it is likely that Lloyd’s and AIG (through its Lexington subsidiary) will loose marketshare. In addition, market entry in the E&S space is a lot easier than the admitted market - from an operations and technology perspective. It will not be surprising to see products with a modicum of distribution to be in place as early as 2014.

Admitted market is going to be more challenging given the average premium size is much smaller and the regulatory oversight slowing launch of products. Nonetheless, it is clear that Insurance continues to be a focus of Berkshire and one where it seeks to replicate its reinsurance underwriting success.

Love the 2 by 2 for classifying those that provide feedback...

Thu, 09 May 2013 21:01:36 -0500

Love the 2 by 2 for classifying those that provide feedback

annfriedman:

In my ongoing quest for the perfect framework for understanding haters, I created The Disapproval Matrix**. (With a deep bow to its inspiration.) This is one way to separate haterade from productive feedback. Here’s how the quadrants break down:

Critics: These are smart people who know something about your field. They are taking a hard look at your work and are not loving it. You’ll probably want to listen to what they have to say, and make some adjustments to your work based on their thoughtful comments.

Lovers: These people are invested in you and are also giving you negative but rational feedback because they want you to improve. Listen to them, too.

Frenemies: Ooooh, this quadrant is tricky. These people really know how to hurt you, because they know you personally or know your work pretty well. But at the end of the day, their criticism is not actually about your work—it’s about you personally. And they aren’t actually interested in a productive conversation that will result in you becoming better at what you do. They just wanna undermine you. Dishonorable mention goes to The Hater Within, aka the irrational voice inside you that says you suck, which usually falls into this quadrant. Tell all of these fools to sit down and shut up.

Haters: This is your garden-variety, often anonymous troll who wants to tear down everything about you for no rational reason. Folks in this quadrant are easy to write off because they’re counterproductive and you don’t even know them. Ignore! Engaging won’t make you any better at what you do. And then rest easy, because having haters is proof your work is finding a wide audience and is sparking conversation. Own it.

The general rule of thumb? When you receive negative feedback that falls into one of the top two quadrants—from experts or people who care about you who are engaging with and rationally critiquing your work—you should probably take their comments to heart. When you receive negative feedback that falls into the bottom two quadrants, you should just let it roll off your back and just keep doin’ you. If you need to amp yourself up about it, may I suggest this #BYEHATER playlist on Spotify? You’re welcome.

** I presented The Disapproval Matrix to the fine folks at MoxieCon in Chicago yesterday, and they seemed to find it useful, so I figured I’d share with the class. It was originally inspired by a question my friend Channing Kennedy submitted to my #Realtalk column at the Columbia Journalism Review.

Light reading to start the week off mr-dalliard: Time travel...

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 09:49:00 -0500

Light reading to start the week off

mr-dalliard:

Time travel in movies

Would it make sense for square to become more of a payment network?

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:58:46 -0600

As Square comes to terms with the complexity inherent with rapid growth over the past two years, it is not surprising that it may be viewed by some of the regulatory bodies as beginning to resemble a MSB. Some regulators are beginning to view it in the same light as PayPal, potentially due to the funds that it probably keeps as part of the merchant payment processing.

At some point, it may have to either acquire a bank or apply to setup a subsidiary with a banking license, rather than attempt to convince the patchwork of state regulators that it is not a MSB and eventually at some level the federal regulators that it does not need to comply with various statutes such as BSA / AML.

If that is the case, it may as well look into acquiring complementary payment network like GreenDot. Not only would it get the underlying banking infrastructure, it would have the synergies arising from owning the end to end value chain for what can be an emerging portion of payments (via pre-paid GreenDot cards). GreenDot can get other potential distribution channels, though it may be a stretch for Square merchants to offer GreenDot cards. They seem to be the quintessential ‘ma and pa’ shops seeking a hassle free approach to taking credit cards at the point of sale. Nonetheless, given the currently depressed valuation of pre-paid card providers, it may be an opportune time for someone like Square to acquire one to round its portfolio while addressing regulatory needs.

searchengineland: When it comes to getting general news and...

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 18:03:46 -0600

searchengineland:

When it comes to getting general news and information, consumers worldwide put as much trust in search engines as they do in traditional media — and more in both than they do in social media.

Not surprising that the search engines are more trusted than social media. After all, a search aggregates all the traditional sources to provide a composite of current affairs. Makes it obvious what are outliers in terms of opinion and reporting (if one cared enough).

Fast Company: Here are 10 tips for making the most of your days off:1. Do make a...

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 16:17:27 -0600

Fast Company: Here are 10 tips for making the most of your days off:1. Do make a...:

Pretty good list - would have been even better before the holidays :/

fastcompany:

Here are 10 tips for making the most of your days off:

1. Do make a plan. We’re all busy. When we hit the weekend, we think we want to do “nothing.” But it’s impossible to truly do nothing. Instead, you’ll do unconsciously chosen somethings, and you’ll hit Sunday wondering where the time…

How to choose the right tool for the job: awe.sm’s language journey | awe.sm: the blog

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 10:00:46 -0600

How to choose the right tool for the job: awe.sm’s language journey | awe.sm: the blog:

Good article, with a funny visual on how different coders view each other.

Also, somewhat heartening to see that Java is making a comeback in the startup world. It is still quite the power language with innovation in terms of libraries continuing to happen. Case in point is the reference to Dropwizard that awe.sm is leveraging to enable their web services.

“Creativity is not an ability but a way of...

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 11:30:26 -0600

“Creativity is not an ability but a way of operating” - Quite a fascinating and entertaining talk on how people can be more creative.

John Cleese on Creativity

is.R(): Beautiful network diagrams with ggplot2

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:00:42 -0600

is.R(): Beautiful network diagrams with ggplot2:

is-r:

I don’t usually like describing my own work as “beautiful,” but with your permission I will make an exception today. There have been some requests for scripts illustrating the plotting of network diagrams with ggplot2, and today (for the winter solstice) we’re bringing you a really…

For those seeking to plot network graphs [in R], this post notes how more visually stunning plots can be achieved.

Is the next wave of IT spend driven by CMOs?

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 10:00:39 -0600

Is the next wave of IT spend driven by CMOs?:

Oracle’s recent acquisition indicative that it is starting to take Gartner’s prediction that in the near future CMOs will be the largest source of discretionary IT spend starting to react to the SF.com. Though hardly new, this acquisition also limits other enterprise players (e.g., IBM and SAP) from making similar forays.

There are not many firms that are mature - given that SF.com closed its acquisition of Radian6. It is going to be interesting how SF.com fares in terms of growth now that Oracle is going to be actively canvassing CMOs. One may not be surprised that Oracle will integrate the latest acquisition (though superficially) in the next 12 months with its complementary offerings (thinking Siebel CRM) and attempt to stem the competitive pressures in existing accounts.

It is no surprise the SF.com has been actively eliciting converts from Siebel’s customer base, and though the economics of cloud computing can be countered, its capabilities in what Forrester calls ‘Enterprise Listening Platforms’ has been harder to negate.

2013 will be an interesting year, as social media, mobile platform support and customer driven collaboration begin to be integrated in legacy platforms. Just as eCommerce was once treated as a stand-alone organizational entity by many brick and mortars, social media will become embedded in traditional marketing and communication channels.

Come February, Some Tweets Will Get A Wee Bit Shorter By...

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 09:56:07 -0600

Come February, Some Tweets Will Get A Wee Bit Shorter
By Christina Chaey, fastcompany.com

Twitter missives with links in them are getting two characters axed off. Will it matter for you?
Twitter just announced that in February it will shorten the number of characters you can use in tweets containing URLs to 118 characters…

Changes to Twitter’s URL shortner reduces tweet length by two characters

fastcompany: Click the image for close-ups of this handy...

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 17:32:00 -0500

fastcompany:

Click the image for close-ups of this handy flowchart, to help guide you through the end of the world.

Interesting…

Orange colored fountain on Flickr.Fall time in Chicago - in time...

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 12:54:43 -0500

Orange colored fountain on Flickr.

Fall time in Chicago - in time for Halloween.

Practical approach, not dazzle, needed on mobile BI applications

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 10:55:28 -0500

Practical approach, not dazzle, needed on mobile BI applications:

Another citation on why integrated architecture is crucial in preserving investments made today around Mobile Business Intelligence.

Though, there were other aspects of the interview that did not make it in. Specifically, the user experience around use of interactive applications on today’s tablets and mobile devices has some ways to go to support day in day out interaction.

Things like the lag on the touchscreen is still in the order of 200 - 300 milliseconds which makes it difficult to consistently and repeatedly manipulate graphical objects / perspectives in an effective manner. Though the occasional use of Mint may be okay and fun once in while, when one is using a BI application to review and manipulate sales figures on an intra day basis, the lag becomes much more noticeable and annoying.

Also, current BI applications are geared as stand-alone apps - targeting executive leadership for the ‘dashboard’ type of reporting needs. For ongoing analytics and data that can be used for one’s day to day job (ergo, operations), enterprises still need to integrate those with their core applications. Though most of these have not been ported to mobile devices, once they do over the next few years, the true impact of having information at hand will be felt.

ROI through sound Risk Management Practices

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 09:49:38 -0500

ROI through sound Risk Management Practices:

Got cited by an article around risk management and overall IT value management.

Good article on what it takes for an invention to be considered...

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 20:01:30 -0500

Good article on what it takes for an invention to be considered innovative…

fastcompany:

SRI International, the brains behind Apple’s Siri, has launched a dozen consumer products since its digital assistant got famous. We venture inside SRI’s labs to find out why you haven’t you heard of any of them.

Years before the Apple-loving world met Siri in 2010, Norman Winarsky was playing with SRI International’s then prototype virtual personal assistant among fellow passengers on board a delayed flight.

“I was sitting on the plane waiting for the flight to take off, and I asked Siri, ‘How long will flight 927 be delayed?’ And Siri came back to me and said the flight would be delayed 15 minutes,” recalls Winarsky, who was the SRI executive on the spin-off company’s board before it was sold to Apple. “The guy next to me looked at me and said ‘Wow, I’ve never seen anything like that … why are you in coach?’”

Siri: What’s The Difference Between Invention And Innovation?

The focus of Plan X appears to be the build out of the cyber...

Sat, 01 Sep 2012 11:52:44 -0500

The focus of Plan X appears to be the build out of the cyber warfare capabilities…

fastcompany:

On September 27, DARPA will hold a workshop to flesh out the government cyberwar strategy called “Plan X.” The one day workshop consists of a general access session for government employees and contractors, along with a Secret-clearance and above closed session to draw a roadmap for the future of America’s cyberwar forces.

While the next great virus won’t be proposed at the Plan X workshop, the Defense Department’s cyberarmy infrastructure development plans (and the sweet government contracts that go with it) will. According to the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, Plan X has received $110 million in funding for the next five years.

Inside DARPA’s “Plan X” For Cyberwar

Team McDonald’s with their very own Ronald driving the...

Sun, 22 Jul 2012 18:36:18 -0500

Team McDonald’s with their very own Ronald driving the pace on Flickr.

Chicago’s Chinatown’s annual Dragon Boat Race.

Pleasure Seeker, Study Bug or Home Hub – which type of web user are you?

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 09:49:24 -0500

Brought to you by BT Digital TV

Nokia's Downward Spiral

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 21:22:42 -0500

mobilesoftware:

A few weeks after the fateful Feb ‘11 announcements I wrote about “What Happened to Nokia”, it got picked up by some fairly big tech news sites and 10s of thousands of people read (or at least visited, it was a pretty long blog) what I had to say.

Now that the Windows Phone strategy is not working out as well as planned and yet more cuts have killed off Nokia’s next generation platform for the low end (codenamed Meltemi, think bada competitor but much better), I’m writing some final thoughts on the topic and then moving on. I say final because I really don’t expect Nokia to be very relevant for a whole lot longer, certainly not returning to their former glory. The data collected by Asymco is pretty compelling in this instance.

Tomi Ahonen has recently posted an incredibly long public assault on Stephen Elop’s management. I think he goes too far in blaming Elop for everything, Nokia was in a pretty bad shape before he arrived. However, he has made a bad situation much worse and I think the conclusion is essentially correct, Elop and most of the board need sacking for almost completely destroying the company.

The “Burning Platforms”

So, my take on the famous “burning platforms” memo and February 11th announcements with another year or so of hindsight is fairly simple. First, Q1 2011 the whole industry, apart from Apple, saw a major drop in demand, or at least demand growth (see the graph here). Elop in his relatively new Nokia CEO role knew they needed to shift smartphone platforms to regain competitiveness. He had access to Nokia’s forward sales pipeline for the quarter but not the rest of the industry and he panicked, assuming the drop in demand for Nokia products against a strong industry growth trend was due to their inferior product range. He did a deal to get enough cash from Microsoft to keep the business running while they transitioned and made some fairly hefty concessions to get it (for example, he’d have to be as mad as Tomi makes out not to sell the N9 in advanced markets in competition with the Lumia 800 unless the Microsoft deal explicitly forbade it). This could make sense of the total lack of detail evident when the deal was announced and the very poor bargain Nokia appears to have achieved given Microsoft had already tried and failed partnerships with the other major OEMs.

And Strategy Announcements

Clearly, from the various sales projection charts that were shown on February 11th, the Nokia board had agreed a strategy that involved the phasing out of Symbian over several years as it gradually drifted down the value chain, while Windows Phone ramped up, was optimised for lower price points and localised for more countries. Telling the world that this is what they expected wasn’t the most brilliant business strategy - simply committing to improve and support Symbian (as they were doing anyway) and making the updates available to every current buyer would have made much more sense, the phasing out would have happened naturally. The plan most likely included continuing to build out the developer ecosystem around Qt and as Symbian was phased out it seamlessly transitioned over to Meltemi with lots of local content for the developing/emerging markets where that platform would primarily compete. Meltemi would not have run on cheaper hardware than Symbian but being Linux-based it would have increased their agility at the low-end - much shorter time to market (due to simpler development environment and pre-existing hardware adaptation layer) - and allowed them to ditch the immense cost of maintaining Symbian/S60 & also S40, which was shifting down into a market where Shanzhai was making it hard to make profit.

Original Plan Not Bad

The plan was not actually a bad one. The disconnect in development environment between mid-low end and high end devices might have been an issue but with Symbian/Meltemi not selling at the high end, appealing to local developers to create solutions for the markets where devices were sold would probably create a more appealing long tail than attracting the 1000s of gold and glory hunting startups in Silicon Valley solving first world problems - they could pay the porting costs for the big name apps that didn’t care enough about reach to do it anyway.

So, what went wrong? Management and comms. When Elop started he’ll have wanted to do what most turnaround CEOs do, get as much future bad news out of the way early so everything bad is attributed to the previous management any recovery is all his doing. How to go about that - same way most arse-covering CEOs do - hired some management consultants to assess the situation and tell him what to do. Probably some US-based ones with their slightly warped view of the “smartphone market”. I put that in quotes because it’s a pretty meaningless term now - I’ll have to explain that in a follow up post. For these purposes it’s enough to say that Symbian was not really competing in the same “smartphone market” as the iPhone and high end Android devices. As most Symbian developers would have been able to tell you, outside a relatively small core of early adopters who bought Symbian devices for their advanced feature set, the bulk of Symbian devices sold were not used as smartphones in the iPhone sense. Much as Nokia wanted it not to be true, the iPhone (at least by the 3GS) really launched a whole new product category for which they did not yet have a competitive response. Your competitors are not who you think they are, they’re who your customers think they are*.

Viewed in the market for iPhones and flagship Android devices, Symbian was horribly uncompetitive. Nokia clearly had a serious problem and could not sell Symbian devices in that market with the great margins they once enjoyed. However, viewed against the competitors where the vast majority of Symbian devices were selling at the time - mid-low end Android devices, bada, teen-focussed BlackBerry and high end feature phones - Symbian was still fairly competitive. With a decent UI overhaul (as it eventually got with Belle) it would have been extremely competitive in that space, particularly since every device came with free SatNav, complete with offline support and turn-by-turn voice guidance in countless countries (things Android is still catching up with). Nokia’s profits would continue to take a beating without a credible high end offering as that’s where the bulk of the industry profits are, but they could have continued to run a profitable business with what they had and given themselves a few years to rebuild a credible offering at the high end.

Comms Catastrophe

So new partnership with Microsoft to rebuild at the high end and make the most of existing assets, unless… the CEO decides to tell the entire industry that the Symbian line of products is no good and will be killed off, before any replacements are in sight. This simultaneously does massive damage to the operator and retail channels, the early adopter consumer interest and the developer community - all of which Nokia badly needed. Did Stephen Elop really think that an internal written memo of that nature would not leak? I doubt it, but if he did, he’s an idiot and should be fired. Being generous and assuming there were a lot of safeguards and the memo really should never have leaked, or there were well-intentioned reasons for leaking it - what about it’s content? With it’s slightly warped view of Nokia’s true situation at the time (which was pretty bad but not jump in the ocean or we’re all going to die bad) the only possible reason for such a message to the staff is to motivate them to change.

Psychologically Incompetent

The organisational change psychology involved here is to make the staff feel they’ve reached a crisis point and HAVE to change NOW. This is flawed and outdated thinking in change psychology. Indeed, shortly before Elop started in his new turnaround CEO role, a New York Times No.1 bestseller was released, “Switch - How to change things when change is hard”. Wired called it “A Fantastic Book” and I think it must have come up on Mr. Elop’s radar - shame he didn’t pick up a copy. Allow me to quote a few relevant sections here (from pages 119-123):

Speaking of the perceived need for crisis, let’s talk about the “burning platform,” a familiar phrase from the organizational change literature. It refers to a horrific accident that happened in 1988 on the Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea.

Skipping the details of the accident…

Out of this human tragedy has emerged a rather ridiculous business cliche. When executives talk about the need for a “burning platform,” they mean, basically, that they need a way to scare their employees into changing. To create a burning platform is to paint such a gloomy picture of the current state of things that employees can’t help but jump into the fiery sea. (And by “jump into the fiery sea,” what we mean is that they change their organizational practices. Which suggests that this use of “burning platform” might well be the dictionary definition of hyperbole.)

So this is an exaggeration designed to evoke strongly motivating negative emotions - slightly disappointing that dear Mr. Elop (or more likely his management consultants) couldn’t come up with something more imaginative than the canonical analogy to fit the situation but much more disappointing that he was eliciting entirely the wrong emotions:

There’s no question that negative emotions are motivating … But what, exactly, are these emotions motivating?

(buy the book if you want the psychological explanation)

Bottom line: If you need a quick and specific action, then negative emotions might help. But most of the time when change is needed, it’s not a stone-in-the-shoe situation. The quest to reduce greenhouse gases is not a stone-in-the-shoe situation, and neither is Target’s mission to become the “upscale retailer,” or someone’s desire to improve his or her marriage.

And neither is Nokia’s need to respond to the competitive threat posed by Apple and Google/Samsung…

These situations require creativity and flexibility and ingenuity. And, unfortunately, a burning platform won’t get you that.

So what is the answer, in a nutshell:

To solve more ambiguous problems, we need to encourage open minds, creativity and hope.

Great Way To Kill Productivity

For the 1000s of staff reading that memo who would be continuing to work on Symbian, where execution of the new UI was absolutely critical to the company’s continued income in the short term, how does that do anything but anger and demotivate. It seems the MeeGo leadership cleverly managed to turn the anger around into determination to show what they could do and prove the CEO wrong. They executed a(nother) new UI from scratch in 6 months and beat the Lumia 800 to market**. However a high end smartphone, declared a one off before launch and not sold in the most developed markets was always doomed - no apps and a lack of affluent customers (even so, it’s sold similar numbers to the Lumia devices despite a microscopic fraction of the marketing budget and near identical industrial design).

With the Symbian/S60 engineers demoralised and then transferred across to Accenture, Symbian UI updates were inevitably delayed further, and of course the networks had little incentive to approve updates quickly, since they were for the most part no longer stocking many Symbian devices anyway. That said, the update situation there is still significantly better than Android, where despite the updates being released for ages, most users are still running Gingerbread from back in 2010 and new devices are still sold running that version.

If Only The Windows Plan Was Working

All of this might have been swept under the carpet IF the Windows Phone devices had taken off as hoped. Microsoft attempted to buy market share with an unprecedented marketing assault and some hefty sales incentives to channel partners. This appears to have failed. On the developer side it’s also becoming very clear that you can’t really buy a developer ecosystem either. Once you start paying people to build apps for your platform, word soon gets out. Even popular apps that might have been thinking about porting anyway will now wait until someone comes and offers them some money. Vast numbers of Microsoft desktop developers not wanting to get left behind by the mobile revolution jump on Windows Phone bandwagon in order to avoid learning new languages and technologies, or because they’ve just been drinking the Microsoft kool-aid for too long. Unfortunately, the real mobile entrepreneurs with the great ideas are market driven and looking for cash (iOS) or reach (Android, iOS or both). For a late to market offer like WP7, they can wait to see if it ever gets decent sales. Small startups will even turn down free porting cash for platforms they don’t see as generating a near term return as it’s small change in their big plans and a major distraction that costs management time.

Now one potential advantage that Windows Phone could have had was games (and games are the most important app category for consumers) - there’s the Xbox link up and potentially simpler porting for all those top titles from the console. Unfortunately WP7.x doesn’t allow native code (because they were about to replace the underlying OS fundamentally) and thus it’s very expensive/impractical for many of those games to port over. WP8 will fix this BUT… the current phones don’t get an upgrade***. This is going to hurt the Lumia range further in the retail channels. Most consumers may not have heard about this, but no-one in the sales channel wants their customers coming back in 6-9 months saying, “how come my Windows Phone doesn’t run all the latest games Microsoft is showing off on the TV”. That leave’s Nokia with what now looks like a very last roll of the dice on WP8 success and already massive damage to their brand.

Now There Are No Alternatives

To add insult to injury, with the developer interest in Symbian/MeeGo mostly killed off by the memo and subsequent announcements Nokia had to fund a lot of application development. That’s something they now can’t afford again with Meltemi, so that had to die too, to preserve enough cash to keep the Windows Phone effort running. This leaves Nokia with no credible story at the low end, so revenues there will continue to decline. This is a logical choice 10% of the high end market is potentially worth more than 30% of the low end.

How far the mighty have fallen, it looks most likely we’re heading towards this situation I speculated on in my previous post:

If Nokia is left with a sub-profitable smartphone business and Microsoft is doing well out of it they can either subsidise further, or buy Nokia and strip out the other parts of the business.

Except, now I’d replace “and Microsoft is doing well out of it” with “and Microsoft is out of other options”, plus there’s less and less of the rest of Nokia to strip out with each new announcement yet still little reason for Microsoft to buy them rather than subsidise unless it becomes worth it for the patents, manufacturing and distribution vs building out their own in a “no-one wants to use Windows Phone anymore” situation.

Is It All Elop’s Fault

Did Stephen Elop cause all of this, no. Nokia were already in a lot of trouble. Did he make it much worse, yes. The aftershocks of February 11th are still playing out. Some have been pointing out that Nokia was already losing market share rapidly before February 11th. That’s true, but the were also still growing unit volumes - only losing market share because they were growing much slower than the market. After February 11th their unit sales were in free-fall. This is the difference between having time to make a turnaround while falling behind competitors and heading towards bankruptcy very fast. However, having previously tried and failed to rebuild for a couple of years there’s far from any guarantee another couple of years would have helped.

Is he the worst CEO ever - I seriously doubt it. However by deciding to take the easier way out, throwing everything away and counting on Microsoft to solve the software side, rather than fixing a broken software development organisation, then making a catastrophic comms error, he has given himself a really good chance of going down in history as one of the most value destructive CEOs ever. Either that or he really is a Microsoft trojan and really brilliant strategist - one small comms misfire and lots of sincere looking effort to make things work turns the world’s largest device maker into a Microsoft captive OEM for the rest of its history. However, in cases of potential conspiracy, 99 times out of 100, the truth is far more cock-up than conspiracy.

* I read wise words to that effect somewhere recently and can’t find them again to attribute the source. If I stole your thought, please comment and I’ll link to the original.

** And some of this same team have formed a new company, Jolla, to continue making MeeGo-based smartphones. I think there’s a market for geek/hacker phones that’s big enough to support a small company but their ambitions are bigger so I hope they’re going to support Android apps - if not I can’t see it working.

*** So Nokia moves from a platform (Symbian) with a new UI layer (Qt) that enables a transition to a real competitive OS solution (Linux/MeeGo) keeping some level of app compatibility, to a platform (Window CE) with a new UI layer (Metro/.NET) that enables a transition to a real competitive OS solution (Windows 8)… just a year behind on that plan… oh, the irony.