There's more than one type of customer out there. People that love/bought the N900 were in a serious minority. Otherwise, things would not have been like they are presently.

No Elop at Nokia. No announcements from Samsung stating that they've sold 3 million Samsung Galaxy S II's in 55 (or less) days. No Microsoft deal with Nokia. Those are all connected... if the N900 or anything Maemo was remotely as popular as you lot think it was, then these discussions would not have happened.

So yeah... what danramos sees is what most other consumers that aren't blinded by fanaticism and/or ignorant to better options - the middle of this ignorant storm of consumerism is still enough room for people to know, have used, and can precisely critique Maemo for what it is, what it could have been, what it didn't accomplish.

I say that as a Maemo fan - still think Diablo was the first Maemo that made me a serious fan, although I had a 770 before it - and I can state easily that what you don't see... Maemo for all of its innovations was really a failure for Nokia.

Worse... it opened the door for yet another failure in the form of WP7 to waltz in and say "Well... we have a marketplace for music, videos, XBOX 360 and an official Twitter app and you do not..." and have that be a compelling argument against Maemo.

Maemo had years to establish itself as something prominent. Nokia floundered. Nokia faltered. Nokia restarted multiple times. And thusly, Nokia allowed the competition to redefine something they should have set the definition for.

If you cannot see that, then welcome to the part of the crowd where fanaticism disallows that.

It's been like that since 2005. Time for potential to be applied. Or replaced. Sadly, it's been replaced with a shittier version of "potential" (read: WP7). Blame OPK. Elop is just making it worse - the decline started in 2007.

That's part of the whole "potential" part. Have you seen Microsoft's stock value? They've also dropped to something less than their glory days 11 years ago. Blame Ballmer. Bill Gates had that company at record levels.

20k apps... ok. I have an HTC HD7S - and let me tell you. I don't have more than 20 apps on my phone. Not because I'm a lame user, I have 77 on my Android device(s). I have like 80 on my iOS device(s). And yet, I'm missing certain key apps on WP7 at the moment.

It's functional - so is Maemo. It's modern - so is Maemo. It has an ecosystem - ok, Maemo has sorta one... Ovi is half-baked for Maemo.

No arguments there. Yahoo is #2 - and Nokia had a contract with Yahoo for their mail.

Not knowing who Elop is doesn't excuse the fact that once you know who he is... you see the missteps by this current administration. But the problem is... most people are really unwilling to look back at OPK who let his campaigns - marketing, networking and device/ecosystem campaigns - go unsettled and largely unknown. Nobody knew what Nokia was doing. Still don't...

And to excuse it as "part of Nokia's culture" is straight dumb. Google has shown that if you engage your audiences, things like the Google IO conference can get people that don't know who you are, start to follow you, pay attention to what you say and be interested in what you do. Apple... Steve Jobs gets up there, sells the ever-living **** out of anything iOS. People eat it up... but guess what?

Nokia needs that too. Silence sells nothing. Wide open systems sell to people that think that it's important. I'm quite sure there's a percentage of the 1% of the desktop types care about that.

And it's famously less than the people that buy Android, Symbian, iOS and even WP7 - yep, it sold more than the last Maemo device. Sad, huh?

Regardless... being able to criticize yet can't take criticism for what you evangelize is unrealistic and incredibly biased.

Points at thread.