ChangeLightBulbWindowHandleExfor Blind Catalan-speaking SpaniardA response to mistralzonline on "Why is that?"

My friend Alex Romanov, in a recent post at his blog, asked why Nokia is not supporting a synchronization tool for his Mac, while he could easily find such a free tool on the web.

The answer for this question is found in the known article by Eric Lippert, “How many Microsoft employees does it take to change a lightbulb?”, making the math of how much resources are needed for a formal release of a simple thing. And since it takes a lot, you need not get off your course. Which can easily happen.

To summarize, the answer is: Focus.
Choose your lightbulbs!

I was once responsible of a State Machine module for a communication component. With the State Machine module we were providing also a nice editor tool, based on Microsoft Visio. The users liked the Visio editor which made life easier for them. We even thought of adding debug options to this editor to allow the users to run in debug mode in within our Visio tool. At some point I decided to stop the development and support of this tool and instructed all users to start writing their state machines in the raw XML that the module itself received as input. It happened when I realized that we are spending too much time on this nice utility. Every new feature in the State Machine module required a parallel development for the Visio tool. Too much support effort was invested in negotiating features with the users and bugs with the testing team, training and support, keeping up with the Visio versions and more. I realized that we do not have enough resources to support all of this (the resource was in fact one person, supporting by himself both the State Machine module and the Visio tool…, it was, by the way, the man behind mistralzonline from above, so he should know!). Focus is the word. When we realized that we cannot do it all at the required level of quality, we had to cut. And it’s better to cut the utility Visio tool rather than the module itself.


When Nokia decides not to provide the tool for synchronizing one of their models with Mac, it’s because they believe that with the resources they would put in it, they cannot decently do a good job. It’s not only development, it’s the entire life cycle, including support for users who get stuck (and do it better than google, a post on the horrible google support will follow soon).

Now, Nokia has the option of managing a community or at least pointing to the available solutions on the web. After all, there was such a free tool out there. It is interesting to note that not many commercial companies officially manage such a development community or point at available supporting tools related with their product. Sun does have the java.net, but it’s more like an open source arena.

Why is that?

Because for Nokia, pointing at a tool, even if accompanied with the common disclaimer waiving any liability or guarantee, still means taking responsibility. If the tool infringes privacy, causes loss of data or just simply doesn’t work right, the furious public will come to Nokia. To take such a responsibility Nokia would have to thoroughly test the tool, which brings us back to square one. This is why they choose to refrain and let you pick it up by yourself, which as appears you can do quite well.