Playing Catch-Up, Nokia and H.P. Try to Innovate

By STEVE LOHR
NYT

In technology markets, playing catch-up is a bruising, costly and often futile game, even for corporate giants.

Nokia and Hewlett-Packard, in different ways, both provided vivid evidence of that challenge on Wednesday.

In a memo to Nokia employees, Stephen Elop, the new chief executive, compared its predicament in trying to catch up to Apple and Google in smartphones to that of a man, in a story, who was standing on a burning oil rig at sea.

“The man was standing upon a ‘burning platform,’ and he needed to make a choice,” Mr. Elop wrote in the memo, which was widely circulated on the Internet. “He decided to jump.”

(More here.)