A hugely entertaining read by Tim Ocock (formerly of Symbian) over on Tech Crunch Europe this morning. Ocock’s well placed to comment on “The Successful Failures” of Symbian, as he straddled engineering and management during his time at the company. Starting at the birth of Symbian, right through to his current advice to Nokia and the Symbian Foundation (ditch S40, support your developers with useful API’s and tools, and spend time educating the market and the Analysts), this is one to read over lunch."

Ocock seems to see the launch of the Apple iPhone as a pivotal moment for the Symbian ecosystem:

...The Symbian definition of a smartphone was a phone with PDA functions. The browser was always a second class citizen, a third party component – Opera by default in the early days, but freely replaced with a licensee’s preferred option. Perhaps where Symbian started slipping in quality was the need, caused by the appearance of iPhone, to compete in the internet phone space too, a space Symbian thought it was in and thought it was winning without realising iPhone was something altogether different. With neither enough time nor talent to make a competitive internet phone, that was enough of a distraction to let even those things that Symbian did well, slip too.

More at Tech Crunch Europe.