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Comment by rospaya | Hacker News Reader

Ah. Nokia used to spend more on R&D than Microsoft and Apple combined, and this was in the iPhone days. I've seen terrific innovations from Nokia that were never monetized and were never implemented in a product, phones created just to experiment or show that you're the first that later went nowhere.

It was very sad to see Nokia fail.

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That does not appear to be accurate.

Nokia in 2006, near their peak, spent about $5.x billion on R&D per their annual report. The R&D figures are similar for 2005/07/08.

Microsoft spent $6.5 billion on R&D in 2006 (and that was close to their average from 2002-2007). By 2009, Microsoft was spending $9 billion per year (now up to $11+ billion).

Exactly. And nothing that impressive came out of Nokia's R&D -- this camera product included.

Well wasn't Bluetooth LE by Nokia? [1] I still have their treasure tags[2]. Those things are amazing. On a single coin cell battery, those things last for over a year.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy

[2] http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/mobile/accessory/ws-2/

Yes, but built upon the Bluetooth standard (already existing). And not exactly life changing...

BLE has no correlation with the previous bluetooth standards. Which is why you need a BLE compatible dongle and device.

> And not exactly life changing...

Ya Good luck designing a ultra low power multi use protocol that runs on a single coin cell over an entire year, as your next weekend hack. /s

> I've seen terrific innovations from Nokia that were never monetized and were never implemented in a product

Do you have any examples? I can't remember having ever heard anything innovative from Nokia, and I'm interested what this might be.

Stuff like this:

http://gizmodo.com/319318/nokias-haptikos-technology-makes-p...

Can we call this the Xerox PARC syndrome?

PARC syndrome should definitely be a thing if it isn't already.

That said I think it only covers a subset of what went wrong at Nokia, and that was only the first half, before a whole different set of things went wrong under Elop

Not really.

For one, Xerox PARC innovations DID change the world, even if they didn't appear in Xerox products.

Second, I think the parent is much overstating the "innovations" that Nokia did. Nothing like Xerox PARC at all...

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