“It does not work with a big thumb”: How is one of the one who ruled a single excuse within Nokia the entire company

Before the collapse of Nokia, a quiet war played in its engineering ranks – the American teams are pushing for the touch screen, and the Finnish teams cling to the buttons. One of those looking now in Tesla says the signs were clear, but no one wants to see them.

Yun Ta Tsai, a great engineer in Tesla, moved to X to recount a pivotal moment while Nokia fell. As a member of the team that drives a touch screen design, Tsai remembers the internal resistance that the company’s fall. “We have shown even some applications on iPod Touch with some concept experiences,” he wrote, in an attempt to persuade colleagues that slim phones without a button were the future.

But the Finnish engineers refused. “What if the touch screen stops working?” “It does not work with a big thumb.” “Customers will feel insecure without material buttons.” For every reason to move forward, Tsai said that there are “thousands” of the reasons for not.

“The American engineers felt frustrated because they could see on the wall,” Zayi pointed out. He concluded that the real issue was deeper than the design: “It was very difficult for the company to abandon its old crutches.

This mentality extended to the programs. While Apple and Android reshaped the mobile phone scene, NOKIA clung to the SYMBIAN operating system that was outdated, then they gambled on the Windows from Microsoft – an operating system with little support for developers and even less consumers. The decision to avoid Android leaves Nokia cut off from the ecosystem that has operated the high Samsung, HTC and Huawei.

Industry analysts reported the risks frequently. One of the reports warned, “Nokia may have to” take Android) before (IT) cannot do this anymore. “Nokia did not.

What started as a discussion about the thumb size has become a symbol of institutional paralysis. Nokia engineers were unable to agree on the future – and by the time they did, they actually arrived.