The company and name Nokia inspires comment everywhere. It is a global brand that shows up in every corner of this planet. From the richest to the poorest nations the Nokia label can be seen. Without question, Nokia is the mobile phone manufacturer of the 20th and 21st century, so far.

And yet many people, myself included, have become completely disillusioned with the product that Nokia have been putting out for the past several years. For my part the last half-decent handset they made was the N95, once they'd eventually got that right. It was not without a host of problems with the firmware, although the hardware was pretty good. I never had the N95-8GB but everyone I know who did have one of those considered it the pinnacle of handsets everywhere. Nothing came close! After that, however, things began to unravel for Nokia.

I have been completely underwhelmed by every single handset that Nokia has put out since the N95 and N95-8GB. For me, the laughing stock has to be the N97, Nokia's response to the iPhone of the day whilst disparaging about the Android OS that was becoming apparent. That attitude cost them dearly in the matching stakes of smartphone.

Then one only has to look at the dogs dinner that Nokia have made of Symbian. The jury is out in respect to the latest incarnation of that OS, Symbian ^3. We will have to wait and see if Nokia have managed to turn that around any. The N8 is the first device to sport the new Symbian, its hardware looks impressive, but we all know that the experience is very much greater than any single part.

And so, turning to the article in The Register I find it a very interesting and compelling read. A lot of answers appear that help explain how Nokia turned from such consistent innovation to apparent confusion and chaos.

The full article and associated links to source documentation is posted here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/10/14/nokia_dilbert/

You may have had your fill of Nokia analysis and features, but I'd like to draw your attention to one more - one that's very special. The Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat has published a report based on 15 interviews with senior staff. It reads like the transcript to an Oscar-winning documentary where the narrative thread is held together entirely by the talking heads.

The report is very long on detail and short on opinionising - and for those of you fascinated by technology and bureaucracy, something quite interesting emerges. What we learn is that the company's current predicament was fated in 2003, when a re-organisation split Nokia's all-conquering mobile phones division into three units. The architect was Jorma Ollila, Nokia's most successful ever CEO, and a popular figure - who steered the company from crisis in 1992 to market leadership in mobile phones - and who as chairman oversaw the ousting of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo this year.

In Ollila's reshuffle, Nokia made a transition from an agile, highly reactive product-focused company to one that managed a matrix, or portfolio. The phone division was split into three: Multimedia, Enterprise and Phones, and the divisions were encouraged to compete for staff and resources. The first Nokia made very few products to a very high standard. But after the reshuffle, which took effect on 1 January 2004, the in-fighting became entrenched, and the company being increasingly bureaucratic. The results were pure Dilbert material.
Executive managers interviewed note how the result was a large number of indifferent products.
"About four years ago one of the S40 'phones achieved a major feature milestone and got one lacklustre paragraph in the internal newsletter; by comparison an S60 offering had been reduced from a ridiculously high Field Failure Rate to something just risibly high. But from the pages of congratulatory ****ing you'd have thought that the damn thing had achieved sentience."
But because the flawed key design, with the floating backspace, is part of Nokia's 2010 "design language" for 2010, the flaw is replicated across several devices - including, now, the C3 and E5.
So, can Nokia turn this around? Or will the new CEO be unable to halt and then reverse this decline that has the potential to be terminal?

Have a read of the full article, in context, and see what you think. It is compelling stuff.