That his letter pointed out a real problem never seemed controversial. The shocking part was tying themselves to MS without a reasonable backup plan.
They thought they couldn't build hardware good enough to compete with other Android makers, but somehow convinced themselves that the solution to that was to put their less competitive hardware onto a less competitive platform.
This is not true. In fact if you actually go back and read the articles on it, one of the strengths was how responsive it was on hardware that was much weaker then what android needed. It has its problems but you are literally taking it's strength and pretending it was a flaw 0_o
> That his letter pointed out a real problem never seemed controversial.
Only in retrospect. At the time, the internet was full of people who thought Symbian was Just Fine. And they had sales figures of millions of (mostly 12-key) "smartphones[0]" to prove it. And then this shifted to "Lost Causeism" when whatever MooMooMo platform never got off the ground.
[0] Okay, I had one of these and you could check your email or do a google search, but obviously the iphone it was not.
They thought they couldn't build hardware good enough to compete with other Android makers, but somehow convinced themselves that the solution to that was to put their less competitive hardware onto a less competitive platform.