Why Nokia failed: 'Wasted 2k man years' on UIs that didn't work (2011)

I will give you my personal experience. I was working for Nokia, and there was a policy of dogfooding. Every employee use to get latest Nokia phone, of their choice, free for personal use. When I received my mobile, I realised that I was not able to connect to home WiFi with this new phone. Why, because the UI of the phone had placed a hard limit of 63 characters on the passphrase(my landlord had set a 64 character passphrase). Contacted the customer care with this problem, multiple times. No reply. Not only was the UI sub-standard, the people internally had given up and didn't care any longer about the products.

I once has an opportunity to meet a well-known and influential tech personality. He was giving a lecture on OSS. After the talk, I boasted that my company has recently open sourced its OS. He looked at me and asked, "which company"? I told him the name and he said, "Ah, Nokia!" and then pulls out an N95 from his pocket and says, "Nice hardware, but look at the UI. I have to press multiple times on the button to reach a menu, and even then I am not sure where the required menuitem is! I have to search through the menu options multiple times. I visit Nokia often and meet with lot of people there. You meet individual Nokia employees, they are very smart. One of the smartest people I have met. But you put them together, they come up with this type of product." I could understand what he was talking about. I have personally experienced that within the company! People were busy outsmarting each other rather than doing the right thing!