Fellow Maemo and MeeGo developers. Dear Nokia lovers.
Lot’s of things have already been said around the internet, both apocalyptic and joyful, about this agreement between Microsoft and Nokia. But mostly people somehow felt “betrayed” or something like that.
Let me ask you a question: would you like to see your favourite company dead? I really doubt it. But you still want Nokia to devlop only their own products, without realising actual states of them right now.
1. Symbian. This is a long story, this OS has both pros and contras, but it has one only downside that ruins the whole story – right now Symbian is the syninim to “Old”. You can argue with that as much as you want, but it’s true. And it’s suicidal for marketing to have “old” OS onboard. You just won’t be able to sell it to ordinary people, who just watch the ads and listen to their quasi-geeky friends.
2. MeeGo. MeeGo is a great and abitious start, but it needs money and work to make it useable for casual user. Meanwhile Nokia needs to sell something, anything. Maybe you’d suggest just not to develop any high end smartphones untill MeeGo is ready, but that not sounds like a great plan for #1 phone manufacturer, eh.
So, Nokia needs to sell devices and it needs to sell it right now. I don’t know why the developement of symbian is taking so long, but right now it’s clear that Symbian is being developed much slower than competitors. And that will make a gap between them even wider.
Android is really the worst choice possibe and the reason has already been discussed thousand times.So there was pretty much one option – WP7
As for connection between Mr Elop’s past in Microsoft and current actions – I see pretty clear sense in it. He needs to do something right now, today, with no “dating” period for him and his future possible partners. So he started to work with people that he already knows well enough to do business. If I’m starving to death and have nothing to eat at home – I won’t be riding to some unknown grocery across the city.
And right now Nokia has only 3 things to eat at home: haribo bears, very old donut and half baked wedding cake.
So please, don’t feel betrayed when your favourite company is trying to breathe in to continue their marvelous work. Nokia still does the best hardware on the market, it searches for breakthroughs in every direction, it tries to do something with this difficult situation in software. Nokia does, Nokia will do.
Thank you.
Maemo UI improvements blog. 
