Nokia has no clue how to do that. Microsoft has a slightly better clue, but only certain parts - the Kinect team and the Mac BU. That's it.

If you want to take advantage of an eager community, you need to have clear separation of community and corporation and then you have to have very clear communication to that eager community.

Some of the communication from Nokia was as clear as mud and trickled out just as fast.

MeeGo was worse. I had to go from here (comfy home, formerly ITT) to MeeGo.com (new look, new feel, new drama) and it just didn't keep me there because of the harder set of rules of what could be said, should be said and the drones running the place (Yeah, I said drones, they were either support MeeGo or gtfoh) and I couldn't support it when I wanted factual answers instead of opinion.

Companies need to learn how to strike while things are hot. I've been a part of the Adobe Flash community for almost 11 years. The people are very active - forums, twitter, jaiku, blogs, newsgroups, conferences, events, books, white papers, one-on-one interaction, IM's, forward facing betas - and Nokia got some of that, but their communication left so much to be desired.

And their marketing plain sucked too.