That's why big ships have little ships on board. I don't know what exactly part of "beta" makes Nokia run for the hills.

Google has betas. Half of what they do is Beta for a year, open to public. Every single one of their service has some sort of beta something open to general public.

Microsoft has opened their future OS to anyone with a connection to the Internet for over a year with great success. W7 is by far the best shaped, least full-of-holes thing ever to leave the gates of Gates.

I won't even bring up the OSS community.

When you become too big to turn, you launch the smaller ships to the water. What Nokia needs is a small, exceptionally good team of programmers that work closely (not too close, though) with the users and have the ability to launch small patches, independent packages and applications, fill holes and keep the boat nimble. Some of the bugs up there require a single line of code and would break nothing else.

The most voted ever brainstorm, the most requested ever enhancement, what we have all been waiting for is modular updates and a crack in the monolithic firmware concept of theirs.

When fighting other industry behemoths, you need big guns. Corporate policy, changes to support structure, scaffolding. Right now, they are fighting bugs and a cannon a fly does not swat. Nokia needs to launch fighters.

Will it? I think not. Not only they show no desire to increase agility, I doubt they even know how.