I'm not in total agreement with you on this, especially since Windows mobile is hardly "progress" (at least, so far as anything they've shown or planned on so far) and it's most certainly not emulating winning strategies. Nokia had the right idea to try to do SOMETHING to move ahead--but it's like watching a race where one of the athletes sees he's ahead but the others are catching up fast so his strategy is to suddenly slow down and match the pace of the SLOWEST competitor and agree to hold hands and kiss while everyone else wooshes past! And you have to admit that Balmer and Elop make an incredibly vomitous couple adding a creepy factor.

Despite all the talk about how they're crippled, Android and all the others are managing to QUICKLY catch up and (in MANY ways) are out-innovating and out-performing Nokia. It doesn't help that Microsoft insists on very, very limited and already outdated specifications for their platform which they've only RECENTLY loosened up on.

The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with you on: Maemo is, without question, the poster-child for stagnation thanks to Nokia and the lack of opening up many crucial portions of the system and software and thanks to decisions by Nokia to based the whole thing on hardware that was not open-source friendly. It's a shame a large company like Nokia didn't lead the way to MORE openness which they were keen to brag about repeatedly and publicly but failed to actually do most of the time. Nokia left MOST of the requests for open-sourcing dead on arrival, despite a promising wiki and invitation to request it, and effectively excommunicated the Maemo council, rending them impotent and unable to perform their stated duties despite Nokia's stated intentions once again. Remaining here and realistically asking 'what would you like to see in a Nokia N9 successor' is silly, seeing as how both Maemo and MeeGo have both been long abandoned by Nokia and crippled by the lack of open hardware support. That's truly "Stagnation." To illustrate contrast, I've repeatedly pointed about CyanogenMod--who has not ONLY gotten hardware support from many manufacturers (i.e. Samsung, who has not ONLY given free devices to CM developers but even hired the lead organizer/developer from CyanogenMod with the idea that they might even start using CyanogenMod INSTEAD of the stock Google system).