Comment by rcarmo

I'm very late to the party here, but as a smartphone product manager at Vodafone I had a front-row seat to the entire arc--which actually started with many telcos being angry at Nokia for their arrogance and near-monopoly, before the iPhone came out.

Nokia never really had a chance--the N-series was a mess of patched software, they had no real Linux alternative, and their supply chain was fragmented six ways from Sunday because they churned out dozens of SKUs.

Then everyone went into denial because they couldn't believe Apple would be successful by going outside established norms (like refusing to customize the homescreen or packaging for telcos, etc.).

A few telcos tried to respond by picking their own champion smartphone (Verizon did that in the US). I ended up having to talk my CMO out of going all out on promoting the Blackberry Storm (which was a dud of epic proportions).

I later became the product manager for the iPhone as well, and that was an amazing roller coaster I will eventually write about (it's been around 17 years, so I think I'll get to it sometime soon).

But I would recommend folk interested in the intervening years to read Operation Elop: https://asokan.org/operation-elop/

I also had a front row seat to that...