As a Nokian working for Meego (for a long time now, as some might remember), I understand the ecosystem thingy painfully well. Qt is very cool, QML is very cool (hey, even I was able to build an app with it), but coolness doesn't alone cut it.

I would have chosen slightly differently as Elop, regarding Qt at least, but hey, who am I.

Developers want to reach consumers, i.e. target platforms that have a) good developer tools to create attractive UE:s and b) many users. Rather than company C selling platform C and D selling D and E selling E, aligning where possible makes the platform a bigger ball and therefore more attractive. You know that Nokia is very capable of delivering a large amount of devices with a given SW platform. It's like a huge factory: turning around takes time, but then when the machines are chugging 'There Will Be Devices'.

It's in Microsoft's and Nokia's best interest to succeed. The user experience that WP7 is able to provide is very good already in its 1.0 incarnation. No doubt the future versions will be even better, filling some of the gaps. Microsoft has a lot of assets and services in its disposal. If they're as determined as with say take Xbox as an example of a successful platform, only a fool would count them out.

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The decisions that Elop had to make reminded me a bit of what Barack Obama said in a recent interview with Bill O'Reilly:

O'REILLY: What is it about the job that has surprised you the most? That you weren't prepared for coming in here?

OBAMA: You know, I think that the thing you understand intellectually, but you don't understand in your gut until you're in the job, is that every decision that comes to my desk is something that nobody else has been able to solve. The easy stuff gets solved somewhere by somebody else. By the time it gets to me, you don't have easy answers. You don't have the best...


The easy answer would have been just to stay the same course. But well, I ... the realist in me, and hey it's just my opinion, feel free to disagree, Meego in it's current form wouldn't have been so super-powerful-earthquake to have overcome the chicken and egg -problem, competing against Android and Apple and Microsoft and HP and Samsung and whomever all at the same time.

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But you all know what the endgame is likely going to be. It's HTML5 or HTML or whatever you want to call it, and that game hasn't still been really even started yet. From platform-specific code to universal. Develop once, with standards, and it'll run on all the devices.It's coming, and it'll change the rules of the game, especially the ecosystem rules, one more time. If things go in a certain way, it will create a very interesting almost level playing field for devices to innovate around other parts of the user and developer experience.

Just be patient.