Not jumping around, but plenty of tests and lessons learned. It's easy for you to judge from a distance years after, but the decisions are made in a less comfortable context. With Maemo Nokia has made plenty of decisions that had no precedent and not even direct references, and has put a risk and investment that not many other companies have put trusting the potential of the Linux and free software communities.

Bringing the standard Linux and free desktop stack to a position where it could lead mobile development was not easy. It was (and it is) a task that requires thousands of patches accepted in dozens of open source projects you don't directly control and have several stakeholders, from Kernel to Mozilla with everything in between. It also required creating a bunch of open source projects that now benefit even laptop users of any Linux distro. Then Qt got into the game offering an API style, application framework and developer tools that, again, needed a lot of development and polishing for the mobile context. And Web Runtime is also landing, completing the equation.

This path is more complicated and heavyweight than the one taken by Android or Palm with their isolated environments on top of a customized Linux stack. Still, I believe it's a more sustainable and powerful path that will bring a higher success to this platform.

If it would have been easy to do something more evolutive and at the same time as fast as Mawemo evolved, other would have probably done it. Still, I claim what Nokia has done with Maemo is already complex enough. Without Nokia doing these steps and taking these risks before anybody else, what choices would you have now for your mobile device? I believe it is fair to say that without the contributions Nokia has done to the Linux and free desktop stack in the last years even the Linux based competitors would be a much harder time putting their products together nowadays.

... and with MeeGo Nokia keeps taking risks and investment in the Linux and free software communities now with MeeGo, still making life easier to other competitors while benefiting as well from this collaboration.