Best phone and OS according to who? The same folks who cheered on the OpenMoko? As Elop said, the market has turned from a battle of devices into a war of ecosystems. Meego would've ended up like BB10 running on QNX(remember how many folks on here salivated about a QNX based mobile OS?), critically appreciated but with no apps and sales.
Nokia recently became the fourth largest OEM in the US market. http://pocketnow.com/2013/11/01/nokia-smartphone-sales I doubt that given Nokia never really had a brand in the US for smartphones, it could've done so without Microsoft's support.
Meego was good enough that Jolla picked it up, and Intel spun it into Tizen. At the time of the N9 unveiling, it was better than Android.
Speaking of ecosystems, fast forward a few years, if Nokia had indeed attempted to push Meego and failed, Android would have been the logical choice. Now they're settling for scraps with Windows Phone, when they were once THE leader worldwide in smartphones...
Edit - by the way, Nokia was the smartphone market share leader as recently as 2011... In fact, it was during Elop's tenure that Nokia lost most of its market share, although they were on the way out for awhile before then. But had Meego had better traction, it could have been very different. Nokia had an ecosystem, and had mindshare...
But man, they really knocked it out of the park. It was (and still is) the best smartphone UI ever made.
Open source is not a very big selling point to the masses. WebOS was open source and better than Android at the time, had good reviews, but it flopped miserably.
>Speaking of ecosystems, fast forward a few years, if Nokia had indeed attempted to push Meego and failed, Android would have been the logical choice You're assuming that Nokia would not be dead from all the losses in the meantime. Microsoft was pumping $250M into them per quarter to ease the transition. If Nokia went alone, it may not have survived the big transition to Meego.
>and it was only Elop's allegiance to Microsoft which killed it.
No, it was Nokia's board that hired him in the first place and approved all his big decisions.
You do know that a company's board can fire the CEO at any time right? So Elop's allegiance had nothing to do with anything there. Here's a good read. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_24/b42320567...
Oh really?
> Open source is not a very big selling point to the masses.
No, but it enables other manufacturers to hop on board and create an ecosystem. Nokia had Intel and others in their corner...
> WebOS was open source and better than Android at the time, had good reviews, but it flopped miserably.
It wasn't open source until it had already failed. Plus it never felt as though HP really cared all that much about mobile devices, they were a huge monolithic entity making too much money on desktops, servers, etc...
Contrast this with Nokia, the world leader in phones (including smartphones) for quite some time.
Also, at one point Symbian held 70+ percent of smartphone market share, Nokia obviously did know how to create an ecosystem.
> No, it was Nokia's board that hired him in the first place and approved all his big decisions.
Obviously a mistake on their part. Corporate boards don't always make the best decisions, though in theory they should.
(I should know, I was working there).
Also, Meego Harmattan (released with the N9) got pretty stellar reviews all round. See for your self:
http://www.theverge.com/2011/10/22/2506376/nokia-n9-review
http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/22/nokia-n9-review/
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n9-review-659.php
Every review lauds the software, and laments the fact that it was doomed by Elop.
Only thing that killed it was Elop who decided to limit sales to just 23 small countries, and left big markets for their WP launch device, which was horrible at the time (Lumia 800). Of course the whole MeeGo strategy was killed earlier which made the device DOA.. And it still sold 10x more than the Lumia 800.
