And ten billion Microsofties are working on it right now... not ten or fifteen Nokia employees. Microsoft started over from scratch and managed to produce WP7 and the first update. Despite the comments here, WP7 generally got very good reviews and the fellow who runs Nokia Insights called it the most stable phone OS he's ever used. Microsoft also has Zune this and XBox that to tie into WP7 and they'll certainly deliver better desktop integration. Does MeeGo even have an interface yet? Putting your chips on the idea that the world's biggest software producer can churn out an OS quicker than you can is not an unwise bet.

I do not understand the discussion here. Probably because I never tried Meego. Maemo was good enough for me.

Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't Maemo just like Android an user shell on top of Linux? And the same for Meego? I bought an Archos last week, and Android drove me mad until I got a terminal and started exploring the filesystem and I felt a lot more confident from there, just like when I got the xterm on the N900.

Nokia got itself a winner when they put the N900 on the market. Sadly enough they never followed it up, but pulled the rug from under it by starting on Meego when Maemo could have profited by strong support and development.

Ah, well, water under the bridge. Right now, the N900 does everything I expected from it, and even if no more updates and improvements come along, I still expect it to function satisfactory the nezt few years.

Paai

Zune? lol, even ovi music reaches more people than zune, its likely nokia is gonna provide the music stuff for wp7. XBox live? Nice, does Apple need it for lots of quality games? Nope.

What I find curious is how an unknown banking analyst, clueless about MeeGo, was able to conveniently write an open letter to Nokia and Microsoft urging Nokia to adopt WP7 and his thoughts on MeeGo: "Get rid of your own proprietary high-end solution (MEEGO) – it’s the biggest joke in the tech industry right now and will put you even further behind Apple and Google.". This piece was published and all over the web.

In the days before the announcement there was also a piece about Nokia's huge R&D spending that suddenly showed up also out of thin air. There are far too many coincidences in the lead up to this event. He decided to go with WP7 long before the day before the announcement as he has said.

It looks like Elop was simply hired in to make the deal with Microsoft and do the dirtywork firing people in Finland. Judging by that Memo he wrote, he doesn't strike me having too much knowledge about what is going on. Steve Jobs is a true technological visionary, Elop is a bureaucrat. Too bad that Steve Jobs also is an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate.

Hold you conspiracy theories here. Nokia's large R&D spending has been noted a number of times in the financial press in the past, see e.g.
http://www.forbes.com/2009/09/24/pal...ng-rumors.html,
http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...-update2-.html,
http://www.businessweek.com/news/201...-update2-.html

The first link is quite enlightening: Nokia spends over 8bln on R&D, which was several times the entire market value of Palm (2.4bln in 2009, just after WebOS release, eventually purchased by HP for 1.2bln). And Palm developed WebOS pretty much from scratch and shipped an end product in less than one and a half year time.

There was a plausible alternative offered, that was the old strategy. Are you familiar with it? Even if you are, I'll just have to disagree with you.

This will not speed up anything. They probably won't have WP7 devices out any faster than they would've had MeeGo phones. Their market share is going to tank even more now that Symbian is officially a dead end. And they just flushed years worth of work down the drain pretty much when it was finally about to bear fruit.

With this deal they're going to benefit others in the WP7 ecosystem much more than themselves, IMO. Not to mention that even if it "wins" over Google's or Apple's ecosystems, it doesn't still mean Nokia wins. They gave up their chance to be a big player with their own ecosystem and the markets reaction to that was pretty clear. And I believe they really had a chance. They did an unconditional surrender while being second only to Apple in profits and biggest by market share in both overall and smartphones. Now they're just an OEM among others.

I think the Nokia leadership is so obsessed with services that they couldn't even get the OS right. I mean they were talking about that for years. It seems this decision is a continuation of their obsession..

A quick correction, from a person who has used and enjoyed Apple products for years (since the Apple ][+): Steve Jobs is in no way a technological visionary. Nothing that Jobs has ever done in the last twenty years has ever pushed the limits of technology, and in fact, up until the last few years Apple hardware and software have consistently been inferior to similar products in the PC world.

The one and only good thing about Steve Jobs is, as you say, he's "an a**hole and makes devices exclusively for the technological illiterate". Let me rephrase that statement: Steve Jobs is an anal-retentive perfectionist who believes that every technological device should be just as easy and intuitive to use as absolutely possible, and drives his people hard to deliver products following that rule.

Apple is a leader in the technology industry not because it creates visionary products, but because unlike pretty much every other company out there today, it at least has a leader with a goal. Compare that to Nokia, fumbling around with lots of different kinds of phones, lots of different operating systems, lots of divergent goals; honestly, Nokia hardware and software should be beating Apple's even today, but without consistent leadership, there's just no way the company can hope to keep up...

Ah - someone here is starting to think with the right mindset.

All articles that appeared in the media like this are part of a information campaign - its no coincidence.

The appointment of a M$ guy as CEO by the board is also no accident and is deliberate.

When asking the question WHY WP7 was picked instead of Meego, TECHNICAL considerations of which is a better product should be TOTALLY ignored - business people at a high level who make these decisions dont know technical **** - they only know buzzwords and talking points.

You would be better off looking at the money trail, who talked with who in public and who loses and who gains in each viable outcome.

Assuming that Meego was dropped for WP7 for technical reasons just shows that you have never worked in a corporation at a high level.