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I feel Toyota is doing huge damage to their reputation by going down this path. There’s a line where “the safe and reliable choice” becomes “old and out of touch”.

Toyota really screwed up in deciding that Hydrogen was the energy of the future. Even when everyone else in the world went with electricity they persisted in their failed vision. It’s a shame that an otherwise great manufacturer should fall victim to such massive hubris but honestly I think their days are numbered as a major vehicle manufacturer.

There’s no chance that hydrogen’s going to be a long term success for them and with all their eggs in the one basket it looks like they’re dead men walking.

Offsetting that dominant buyer inclination were record sales of eco-friendly cars, namely battery-electric vehicles (87,212, +161.1%), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (11,212, +88.8%) and the sought-after traditional hybrid cars, still the most popular alternative-fuel options with 98,439 units sold last year (+20.3%). Of the latter, Toyota alone sold 72,815 petrol-electric cars, representing 74 per cent of hybrid vehicle sales across all brands as well as 31.5 per cent of Toyota’s overall sales.

…com.au/…/vfacts-2023-car-industry-breaks-all-tim…

Toyota sold twice as many vehicles as the next best manufacturer. They dominate the SUV, van, Ute markets. I can’t see them going anywhere soon.

Nokia phones and Kodak cameras were huge once. Then technology advanced and they didn’t.

Microsoft are the main reason Nokia aren’t what they used to be, Kodak have nobody to blame but themselves.

Nokia dragged their feet on smart phones and paid the price. The fact that they went with Microsoft when they did start making smart phones almost certainly didn’t help matters, but they were already way behind at that point.

Eh, even today there’s a market for borderline indestructible phones with buttons, I don’t think they had entirely lost the plot.

I do think they’d have caught up fast if it wasn’t for Microsoft.

@Ilovethebomb @lordriffington There's a guy on the Fediverse named @tomiahonen who's a former Nokia executive.

The short version goes something like this: the first iPhone launched in the US as of 2007, the first Android by 2008.

Nokia responded by making its Symbian operating system touch enabled, and working longer-term on a next generation operating system called MeeGo.

By mid-2011, Nokia launched its first MeeGo phone, called the N9.

Nokia was actually outselling Apple in smartphones, and it had a faster growth rate.

It had great relations with most telcos around the world.

All it had to do was persuade existing Nokia featurephone owners to upgrade to a MeeGo phone and it was set.

Then Nokia hired an ex-Microsoft executive named Stephen Elop. He immediately signed Nokia up to go Windows Phone exclusive and called MeeGo a burning platform.

He openly said that even if N9 was a massive success, there'd be no more MeeGo phones ever.

The first Nokia Windows Phones came at the end of 2011, running Windows Phone 7. It was basically just Windows CE with a touch interface.

Microsoft's true response to iOS and Android was Windows Phone 8, and that didn't come until right at the end of 2012, nearly 2013.

(At this point, the iPhone had been on the market for five years, and Android for four years.)

Why Windows Phone screwed up is a whole 'nother story, but Nokia went all in on what turned out to be a sinking ship, and the rest is history.