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I don't care how less strict corporate laws are, if they were rigging the company to tank so they could sell it at a lower price that would be plain old fraud and larceny, pure and simple.

But if you want to see why Elop HAD to be brought in I do have evidence to back my claims, just look at the history of MeeGo, written with help from insiders at Nokia, to see what a toxic culture Nokia had become. You had the Symbian team actively sabotaging MeeGo because they thought it was a threat to their turf and their "partner" in Intel was likewise crippling the OS to keep the ARM version from coming about before they had an X86 phone.

So they really had no choice, they needed an outsider to come in and do the dirty work of killing Symbian and stopping the money pit that was MeeGo which thanks to the Symbian team and Intel was never gonna be completed in time and by getting a complete OS from MSFT they could concentrate on the hardware costs and trying to make a competitive smartphone. yes it failed but that is what happens when you have a board that refuses to innovate and sits on ass for too long, just look at what happened with palm.

(Sigh) Please read this. Keep close attention to the dates and how each device is named. I hope it will help to remove a lot of confusion from your postings. As someone who was in on the events described, I can attest that the article is mostly correct.

What myth? It's in numerous sources backed up by financials and information from Nokia itself.

Continuation of this discussion would require you to provide the sources.

Oh what total horseshit, the ONLY market Nokia has is in dumbphones where they measure their profits in pennies, they had not one, not two, but THREE internal OS teams all backstabbing and cockblocking each other at EVERY turn, the OS that so many here thought actually had a prayer, the MeeGo? Was was being actively sabotaged from TWO fronts, Intel for fear that the ARM version would get more sales than the X86, and the Symbian team for fear that MeeGo might steal their thunder, and for those that say "Oh android would save them"? Tell that to HTC who despite increased sales is is losing money because that is what happens in a race to the bottom, only the leanest companies that can cut costs to the bone make any green.

So I'm sorry but Nokia was circling the drain long before Elop even walked in the door. the entire management was a mess, they had lost more than half their value in less than 6 years, they had no product that could compete with iOS 2 and Android froyo and gingerbread, and all they had left was dumbphones which thanks to motorola using the mediaTek SoC that allowed a complete dumbphone to be built for less than $5 USD they were fucked with a capital F. The situation at Nokia was an exact copy of what happened at Palm, they sat on ass and stuck with a profitable product without bothering to sink the R&D into a new OS until the world passed them by, Symbian for Nokia and Garnet for Palm.

So pretty much the only choice was to buy a fully complete OS and throw a Hail Mary and with HP paying insane-o money for WebOS (a better fit for Nokia IMHO) there literally wasn't any other OSes to go with, it was that or close the doors and give the money back to the shareholders.

Interesting? For a Wiki link? Really mods? if you want a link friend how about one showing what was REALLY going on with MeeGo which had one internal team screwing it (Symbian team) and one of the largest hardware makers ON THE PLANET actively fucking it for fear that the ARM version would outsell the X86 (Intel, which considering the cripple compiler and bribery of OEMs, is anybody surprised?) so MeeGo was DOA before it ever walked out the door.

So before you put your faith in the Wiki how about looking up what was going on behind the scenes? Start with OSNews, many of their posters are from that part of the world and include many software engineers that actually worked there. They paint a picture of an OS with serious flaws, including requiring to be restarted twice a day or MeeGo would crash thanks to a nasty memory corruption bug they were having hell locking down, and if that weren't enough they had Symbian team cockblocking and headhunting, they had Intel demanding and getting changes which sent the OS back practically to square one several times, and you had PHBs changing the entire UI on a whim causing the entire UI to be tossed at 75% complete.

I'm sorry friend but MeeGo, just like Nokia itself, was fucked. It had NO CHANCE of competing with iPhone 2 and Android 2.x (which is still so popular its used by many of the lower tier OEMs like Huawei) and it sure as hell couldn't compete with Android 4 and iPhone 5. All you'd have had is another Touchpad, which with Nokia profits dropping like a stone would have outright slaughtered the company.

And that isn't what is happening? Keeping much of Nokia's toxic culture and if rumors are true putting that moron Elop, whose "burning platform" memo out Osbourned the Osbourne effect, in charge of MSFT? You might as well put somebody from the Apple or Google board in charge, as they'll be the ones who benefit.

that said Elop did NOT kill that company, like many companies it had a shitty board that sat on ass counting their money until the world passed them by. Just read up on the story of Maemo/MeeGo to see a perfect microcosm of why Nokia was fucked before Elop ever walked through the door. False starts, UIs thrown out at 75% done, backstabbing, everything we have come to expect from a corporate culture that has become toxic was in full bloom at Nokia. they were fucked long before Elop took the big chair, not that he'll do any better at MSFT, in fact he'll probably just stick with Ballmer's game plan which is full of fail and stupid.

N9 was moderately successful, but would Maemo have taken off as a competitor to Android and iOS markets? Hard to say - and Jolla might still give it a shot.

But Maemo was far from ready, Nokias HW partner on Maemo (Intel) was (and still is) far from ready, and the whole thing was a management mess. Yes, it could have been fixed - maybe, but frankly Windows Phone was not that bad choice compared to Maemo at the time. The only thing that made N9 come out at all was because Maemo was axed, and the team got "let's show them" -attitude after the fact.

For a nice (but long) history about Maemo / MeeGo read:

http://taskumuro.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego

Ericsson worked with Verizon to create LTE which could operate with Verizon's legacy CDMA network. By working with the telecoms to create LTE, Ericsson is going to benefit from decades of contracts to provide support and equipment to telecoms worldwide in the adoption of LTE.

Nokia chose to anger the telecoms by backing WiMAX in an alliance with Intel, WiMAX being promoted as a technology that could disintermediate the major carriers. Considering 9/11, this was an EXTREMELY bad time to threaten the US telecoms. Think about it. Nokia did not get access to Intel's fabs. Unfortunately for Nokia, in 2008, it became clear that its fab partner, Texas Instruments, was bowing out of its alliance. One can follow the ugly story of the Nokia-Intel alliance here. By backing the wrong technology, WiMAX instead of LTE, Nokia went from owning the IP for the entire wireless stack to selling it all off. So now Nokia has to go to another party for its wireless chips, in particular, for the upcoming LTE.

Only Nokia was at the same time engaged in an IP battle with Qualcomm, its real mortal rival. Qualcomm possesses the IP for interoperability with CDMA, Verizon's network. And Nokia lost that battle, an unprecedented IP settlement to the tune of a massive instant payment of roughly $2.3 billion USD.

So Nokia by not developing an LTE chipset found itself at the mercy of its mortal enemy, a company that would have been glad to have seen Nokia disappear from the face of the Earth a few years ago, especially as Qualcomm's business of licensing IP could be threatened previously only by the likes of European Nokia. And Nokia made itself into the mortal enemy of the US telecoms by pushing for WiMAX in its alliance with Intel, in the decade following 9/11.

What could have possibly pushed Nokia into making such an alliance with Intel and such a technologically and politically mistaken decision of pursuing WiMAX? I speculate it was all due to a fateful decision by the previous Nokia leadership to (badly) follow the advice of a fellow Finn, none other than Linus Torvalds . (And yes I get the irony that Torvalds was at one time working for a competitor to Intel, that's why Nokia's leadership clearly followed his advice horrendously.) "But it had a "Plan B", and had been considering it for years. In 2002, I'm told, Linus Torvalds convinced Nokia to create a Linux unit."

... of which none did deliver or were stillborn. The cross platformness of Qt was compromised from the start with two competing UI frameworks libdui for Harmattan and Orbit for Symbian. This is a good article about that mess. And from what we know about Meltemi, it would have been a third, incompatible framework.

Nokia did achieve only the minimum target for Symbian, and that is to retrofit Qt 4.8 to Symbian 9.2/^3.

Before anybody blames Elop for this, 90% of it happened before his time.

There has been quite a few ex-engineer discussions here in Finland, especially now that some employee NDA are expiring

Long before Elop Nokia board realised they are screwed in Smartphone market. They hired him with full understanding of his MS history.

For background:

• Although regular phones were the main product for Nokia, they felt they need good presence at smartphones to maintain brand
• Nokia was caught somewhat off-guard with sudden popularity of ecosystem based smartphones (read : iPhone)

All their options were pretty bad:

• Symbian was dying as ecosystem, pretty much partner everyone had left it
• Co-operation with Intel (Moblin/MeeGo/Maemo) wasn't producing expected results (Intel sucked at battery life, QT issues, CDMA etc), ecosystem would have been still small
• Google wouldn't give them any special Android package -> they would be competing against emerging asian brands on HW alone
• Windows phone was pretty much only sensible option, especially since MS desperately needed credible partners

Not sure if Elop's burning platform mail was a clear blunder, or actually required to get Nokia research & development focused (it was technically just internal memo).

You can read more from techiical arcticle based on interviewing Nokia (ex)engineers : http://taskumuro.com/artikkelit/the-story-of-nokia-meego

-Lasse

OK, you didn't read it yet, here you go: The story of MeeGo.

Well yes, it's not maybe a Pulitzer Prize earning writeup. But these people are tech enthusiasts, not journalists, after all. Also, good to bear in mind that the original article was published in Finnish, and translated to English by volunteers. However, I enjoyed the read because it provides very exclusive insight to the story behind MeeGo.

In other words, this article is crap. It's not even an article -- it's a write-up. You see a multi-page write-up and expect some actual information and facts; instead, you get nothing but what could only honestly be called whining:

From TFA

Products were mostly made by subcontracting without a top organization or support from certain sector’s professionals. No one intervened with the process and it resulted in quality problems in finished products. Considering the small resources and the subcontracting, lowest price was always the first priority in choosing components, space requirement was second and poor hardware performance was patched up with software optimizations as well as possible. Cutting expenses from the software developers didn’t particularly motivate anyone, considering the fact that savings were made in material expenses by using poor components, which then meant stress for the next couple of weeks in performance optimization.

Most of the people we interviewed from Nokia said that Nokia used too much subcontracting. Building specific knowledge from scratch inside the company is expensive and time consuming, and the OSSO team’s resources were limited.

There were a lot of problems, it was difficult to keep hold of the quality of the subcontractors’ work and the contracts weren’t supervised properly. The subcontractors could cheat in the contracts by changing the best experts, who were there in the beginning, to less qualified people. Examples given included bad code written in India and the communication problems with the Chinese and the Japanese because of their poor English skills. All this resulted in more additional work and delays for the project managers in Finland, when they had to take measures to repair the errors and poor quality.

Okay, so the development contractors were chosen based on low price. That is one fact.

Okay, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian coders were used. That is another fact.

But beyond that...no other facts. The article alludes to "bad code written in India and the communication problems with the Chinese and the Japanese because of their poor English skills." But what bad code?

It alludes to "project managers in Finland, [taking] measures to repair the errors and poor quality."

Examples of errors? No where to be found.