From the title, I thought this article was going to be about how Hannibal won an incredible number of victories in the Second Punic War, but Carthage still lost the war and had to take devasting terms of surrender.

It's about how Rome was defeated at Cannae due their overconfidence and inability to adapt, but doesn't examine how Rome ended up winning in the end. It is interesting how dependent on framing case studies are.

Symbian's Operating System really was superior. After all it was fully multitasking and all operating system calls were asynchronous. And it was written in C++ so the inside of the operating system was object oriented and easy to understand.

The failure was that Nokia made 20 products at a time where Apple made 1.

The effort to support the huge amount of variation was enormous and the low spec hardware made the software extremely difficult to get working at acceptable performance. So instead of 1 bug fixed once you'd have 20 sets of partially different bugs. The decision to save money by using low spec hardware also negatively affected the way application level software was designed and made it extremely effortful.

Building it took days and they insisted on using the RVCT compilers which though better than GCC were much slower. If they'd had enough RAM on the phone and enough performance to start with then it would not have been necessary to cripple development like this to eke out performance.

This is all about Nokia's matrix organisation which they created to optimise the model that was working for them - lots of phones at different price points. Apple made it obvious that this was unnecessary. One expensive phone that made people happy was better.

There were other aspects to their failure which they did try to fix - such as having an app store and addressing user experience issues. They just couldn't do it effectively because they insisted on building many phone models.

> Rome's eventual strategy—the Fabian strategy of delay, harassment, and avoiding direct confrontation—wasn't intuitive to Romans. It felt wrong.

My understanding of the story is Fabius was running the Roman strategy before Cannae and had identified all the lessons of that battle in advance. It was clear that in a pitched battle Hannibal was going to do extremely well. It is a fascinating historical example about how being right is not enough in politics, but Fabius got a unique opportunity to demonstrate that he told them so. It was clearly foreseeable and foreseen, so the entire problem the Romans had was that their leadership operating foolishly.

> The mighty armies of Carthage? Sent packing in the First Punic War.

The first Punic War was won by the Romans by beating the mighty NAVIES of Carthage at sea. Carthage was historically a sea power. And the Romans did it by adopting new ideas and tactics.

I used to talk about this at IBM, though mostly couched in the phrase "we have become an organization optimized for a business environment that no longer exists."

And if you came within 50 yards of an ROTC department in the 1980s, the staff there would drag you into a discussion of Cannae. It was one of the first battles young officers are taught. Like religious scripture, you can find something in the records to support just about any lesson (though obviously military instead of moral.)

It's good to see this tradition persist.