I agree with all your points except for the one about Meego. All reviews I've read of the N9 when it was released half a year after your experience with it were positive. All praised the innovative design and the fluidity of the device while it was running on dated hardware.
Would Nokia have been saved by choosing Meego over WP7? We'll never know and I think that's a shame.
Well, as I said to another commenter, my observation wasn't "MeeGo was poop," it was "MeeGo wasn't ready."
I'll admit that when the Windows Phone rumors started -- which was right after I'd been laid off from Nokia, as the product I was working on was being transformed into something that no longer needed the server-side components I was developing -- I dismissed them out of hand. (And got some level of unintended fame by calling them "loony" on my blog, and having that picked up by BGR. I'm surprised Nokia didn't hire me back at that point just so they could fire me again.) While I think MeeGo was fairly unusable at that point, it seemed to me that in 6-8 months with serious work it could have been awesome. And, apparently, in the shipping N9 it was.
The specific "what if" question I've thought of that parallels yours is whether they could have gotten, say, two MeeGo devices out in 2011, and three more in 2012, which would have put them in roughly the same place they're in with Windows Phone, but with an OS that was entirely theirs and with what might well have been a larger ecosystem. The MeeGo team had only predicted being able to get three devices out by the end of 2012; maybe if they'd been convincingly optimistic things might have gone differently.
This is exactly The Thing; N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere. Yet, Nokia tried to kill it and in fact still tries to, because it does not sit well with their earlier strategy(Symbian) nor with the current one(Windows Phone).
Nokia was brought down by the internal issues between divisions, Symbian people fought against Maemo/MeeGo people and executives threw plans and requirements around at such pace that whatever got nearly finished had to be scrapped and the whole process began again. Add in other strategy decisions, issues with hardware(LTE not available, no-go for North American market) and fierce competition and it's not really surprising they've gone down at the pace they had.
Well, luckily there are people who still believe on what MeeGo and N9 were built upon...
> N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere.
Idolized? Yes. Is it enough to make people purchase the phone? Not at all.
If a fancy UI and eye-candy animations were enough to be successful, webOS would be the leader of tablets, and I'd be using BeOS to write this.
What Elop realized was that Nokia was, indeed, sitting on a "burning platform". And MeeGo wasn't the lifeboat they needed.
MeeGo was fancy, but too incipient as a platform to compete against iOS/Android. No developers, no industry support, no technical expertise within the company to develop it (plus the political fights with Symbian). It'd be a long, slow, expensive and bumpy road ahead. It'd cost him 3-4 years of development time, and the the board and investors would crush him well before he could deliver on the plan.
Symbian was completely f-ed up, broken to its core, so this was never an option (and it's laughable to read "Symbian was winning" as put by the OP). A much better review was also posted on HN today - "Symbian, a post-mortem" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648843.
So the only real options were between Microsoft or Google. Android offered no differentiation against Samsung/HTC -- and no insurance against patent lawsuits. And I guess Microsoft offering a pile of cash probably helped to sweeten the deal.
Will Elop be fired? Well, it wouldn't surprise me. The odds are against him, as they were since the day he joined. But I highly doubt it'll make things any better for Nokia.
Well, you seem to forget that Meego and the N9 were built on Qt. And you cannot say about Qt that " No developers, no industry support, no technical expertise within the company to develop it".
To continue your idea, n9 was stable at launch and with v1.3 it is pretty solid for a platform that was effectively abandoned.
If Nokia had continued to invest in performance optimizations, bug fixes and new hardware it would fight shoulder to shoulder with the Android and iOS of today.
The OS would be ready to fight on features, but not on audience- that's the problem. Anyone launching a new platform in today's mobile landscape needs to have significant aces up their sleeve. Though there's no guarantee of success, Microsoft pairing up their desktop and mobile offerings is one such way to increase your chances of breaking the market.
Nokia had no such benefits. It's very uncertain how they would manage to persuade people to make apps for their devices, and for customers to buy the phones.
Would Nokia have been saved by choosing Meego over WP7? We'll never know and I think that's a shame.