Perhaps you never worked in large corporations. The reality there is far from being "we are the one single entity", there are different flows, clouds, islands, even greater hunks of earth out there. Surprisingly, they all fight for the same bucket of gold and have their own pride and ideas how to achieve world domination -- their corporate world and, if luck permits, outer world's domination as well. In short, life is though and medieval there.

In Nokia Mobile Phones long time were a cash cow who brought the money and paid for investments in other areas. Symbian did pay a bill as well but to a lesser degree. Maemo/MeeGo did consume. Cash cows have their own culture, development and business. Those with bigger pockets also have considerable say in what to invest in future, especially when cash cows are past their best days. So when attempts to reinvent come from within the cash cow it gets better credibility than those of a pure investment only and haven't paid out yet.

Of course, force balancing makes it so that not one force is always prevailing but rather a spectre of winds blow at the same time. If mobile phones folks got to hold the keys of their future, they would definitely argue that their technical knowledge of past is very relevant how to reach out to the next billion, perhaps, spiced a bit here and there with other achievements. Jussi's reveal as design/product marketing for future phones tells me exactly that -- Swipe UI is considered a good heritage of MeeGo and worth to bring to the next billion. At the same time, if you look around on LinkedIn and various blogs/twitter, some of Maemo/MeeGo engineers indeed are travelling to Ulm or doing something related to the next billion. How definitive is that work in terms of the platform being "Harmattan successor"? I doubt it is so -- yes, experience is taken with an interest and maybe some attention is paid to but largely design decisions would come from Ulm/Beijing areas as reinforced in those frequent travels -- while Maemo/MeeGo never been there, mostly in Helsinki capital area and Oulu/Tampere. Stadin folks are re-classified as soldiers, good and reliable but those who must be at frontline during the battle rather than in planning rooms.

The fact that Qt will be used there doesn't tell you anything about heritage. Trolls didn't really have real world mobile experience prior Harmattan/Belle (sorry, but Qt Embedded is far from real world) and were hard gaining it, sometimes in fights and often learning from failures. The fact that Qt 4.8 has gained 2x boost in file operations performance on Linux and 8x boost on Windows can give you a glimpse to the reality and may cool off a bit. (https://twitter.com/#!/quimgil/statu...86332956979200)

Let's see what Nokia World panels about the next billion would reveal today and tomorrow.