With hindsight it's almost funny how the author has managed to write this nonsense with such self-assured tone, but at the time this view was quite prevalent. Working at the time for Symbian, I remember meetings where Apple were openly mocked by senior managers and technical leaders. The only competition that mattered was from Microsoft and Android. The iPhone it was believed, would never be sold beyond the niche high-end market. The most silly, almost insincere, part of these beliefs was the fact that one could walk down the street from our offices and pick up an iPhone at a price fractionally higher than an average Symbian phone (with a contract of course). There were many other reasons for the demise of Symbian as a platform (the leadership was naïve, but had the most inflated egos in the whole of industry due to their earlier success in 'scoring' Nokia), but the bottom line was that they had no idea what consumers wanted. Boring old men still nostalgically carrying their Psion 5s, whom I respected then and respect now for their technical expertise, but not for their business or even technological vision.

A small minority that I was part of tried quite hard to convince our peers that Apple were a serious threat. Everyone laughed at us, we were called Apple fanboys and were never taken seriously. I left soon after in a state of disillusion, but had to watch from the sidelines one of the most promising British 'startups' disintegrate into absolute irrelevance. The managers who ran this company into ground when it was the only one in leadership of that industry should hang their heads in shame. Nothing to take away from great designers at Apple and from the leadership of Steve Jobs, Apple owe a lot to the incompetence of Symbian leadership.