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Ex-Nokia Staff To Build MeeGo-based Smartphones
Snirt writes "A group of ex-Nokia staff and MeeGo enthusiasts has formed Jolla (Finnish for 'dinghy'), a mobile startup with the aim of bringing new MeeGo devices to the market. According to its LinkedIn page, Jolla consists of directors and core professionals from Nokia's MeeGo N9 organization, together with some of the best minds working on MeeGo in the communities."
No worries, I doubt there will be a product named MeeGo. In fact, it isn't even using MeeGo, but Mer, which spun off from MeeGo when it became obvious that Nokia was going to walk away and Intel was off to pursue other things.
Jolla will probably name it something else exclusive to them. All that matters is by going with Mer (or as they've been saying, MeeGo) you know one thing: Qt.
There's only a few actual connections.
Intel: Moblin -> MeeGo -> (huge disconnect, much package shedding) -> Mer
Nokia: Maemo -> Harmattan
Samsung: Tizen
the company was not bleeding money. they had a profit instead and it was also growing. However it was expected that the symbian based revenue and profits (it made profits) would be down some time around next year (2013). Elop could have delayed the current crash by two years at the very least by just doing nothing.
So yes, something needed to be done, but there was no hurry, and surely no need to actively kill symbian and all phones that were already being produced and focus only on something that came several months later.
The in house OSes are currently the only chance Nokia has of not being dismantled. If Elop took the time to evaluate the strategy maybe he could have had a backup plan. It seems instead that he wanted to put Nokia in a place where it was either success with windows or bankruptcy with windows, and the "staying alive with our own OS" was not really an option for him. Now it is clear that the path will be bankruptcy with windows.