You have a point there. Nokia has never been a software company. They have Nokia OS (S40), but that is only a small and "simple" baseband RTOS. Symbian was made by Symbian, and S60 (on top of Symbian) was a complete mess. OVI was a complete mess, even maps was a complete mess. Maemo is the only exception, and although we can argue indefinitely on this board about the merits and potential and the causes, the fact remains that the merits did not live up to it's potential after years of development on several devices.

It was when Nokia decided to take the entire OS/software portfolio in their own hands it started to go down. The Maemo/Symbian roadmap looked nice on paper, but without teams lead by seasoned and absolute top OS architect and programmers, like the ones found at Google and Apple, well the whole roadmap was nothing more than wishful thinking with no base in reality. It is not before Nokia Belle that Symbian finally is almost on the same level as Android was 3-4 years ago regarding UX.

Samsung did a similar blunder with Bada. Bada is a very nice OS from the perspective of the end user. Architecturally however, it is a disaster because it is practically impossible to port apps from iOS/Android without starting from scratch due to namespacing and libraries. A simple rewrite is not enough, a restructuring of the entire code of the app is needed. If Bada became big, this wouldn't really matter, but how will it become big when it has no killer apps? Luckily (for Samsung) they went for Android when WM and Symbian just didn't cut it anymore.

In hindsight it is obvious that the cardinal sin made by Nokia was not going with Android at first chance. Cardinal sin number two was not going with Android at the second chance. Cardinal sin number 3 was going with WP7.X believing it would enable them making competitive devices. Another sin (although not that cardinal as the others) was to kill Maemo. Maemo could live happily as a niche selling 2-3 mill devices a year. Maemo as in a world wide dominating force (as many of you in here like to think), forget it, such thinking will only destroy it, they way it has done.

IMO the battle is still not lost. WP8 built on the NT kernel could be what brings Nokia back because it enables Nokia to go with top HW of choice. Time will show. For now, Android rules because everybody makes juicy devices running it. ICS is juicy all by itself as well.