Could you - or anybody - can come up with a good (as in realistic and pragmatic instead of idealistic) proposal on how to 'do' community input regarding the new UI? ...[I]f we would show the whole plans, and then get n comments on it, ... Would following the democratic majority of the developer community lead to an optimal solution in terms of an UI solution? Wouldn't that be the worst kind of "design by committee" that one could imagine? Do a poll for "Feature X, do solution A or solution B" and vote which solution gets more votes? No?
[W]e've already seen what happens with Hildon when well intentioned developers go away for 18 months and then come back with a beta which has a practically fixed API, which lots of developers immediately start finding inconsistencies, edge cases, over-zealous specialisms vs. over generalisations. ... The only valid answer I can see is the one we've heard before: "exposing this information for external comment from the community will reveal too much of our future plans". This is a fine answer. But, of course, there's then no hint of roadmaps, design principles (not in the UX sense) or architecture plans on which the community can contribute. So, no contributions means the cycle continues and products which could've had free consultancy services from an empassioned expert community are shipped in a sub-optimal state...
...[G]enerally UI's are not revealed in advance because of competitive reasons. If we would have shown the Maemo 5 UI plans at the time they were ready for the first time, any smart competitor would have not commented anything on them, picked up on the good ideas, disregarded others and probably even come out with their own device before Nokia. Then end consumers - who don't know and care about the process of how things get done - would be just left confused. Showing our own cards is a very basic problem, and I hope everybody realizes that. We will be the first company out with the device with the Maemo 5 UI. If you wouldn't believe your UI is an competitive advantage and therefore don't care about that fact, then we can all go home already. So, either you hold your cards really close to your chest, or you then do the complete opposite, and do like Mozilla, and open up everything all the time, right from the start. If Nokia = Maemo and nothing more, and if Nokia could crank devices out faster than any competitor, then perhaps there would be more options. But since Nokia > just Maemo, even Maemo does not work in a bubble. Revealing some parts of Maemo UI would reveal ... elements of "Nokia UI" - see that however you want.
Well, yes, external consultancy costs money. But it can also offer consistency, with testing methodology, target user gathering, non-biased testers, consistent reporting metrics etc. etc. So they're not really comparative. You wouldn't replace one with the other.