Maemo/Meego is so mature that it has been deployed on how many generations, iterations, and models of phones? And not from a company that focuses on a single product line, but from a company that spawns what seems like dozens and dozens of new product lines per week?

Maemo/Meego should have been what Android became. You know why it didn't? Because Google took Android seriously, and Nokia didn't take Maemo seriously. They weren't aggressive about it, they didn't make it top priority, they didn't capture and retain their initial momentum. Instead, they treated it like a bastard step-child.

And, now, Nokia will just be another one of MS's b*tches. But, that's about all they had left, a choice between being Google's b*tch, or MS's b*tch. They pretty much admitted it with the statement from a few days before the MS announcement: either build a new ecosystem from scratch (which they haven't been able to do) or join someone else's (which means Android or Window-Mobile, since they can't join Apple's).

They wouldn't be in this situation, if they had been aggressive about Maemo from day one. Or, even if they hadn't realized it with the 770, and started to be aggressive with the N800. Instead, we saw years of floundering, aimlessness, and other people (like Cisco) doing more to promote the new platform than Nokia did.

That doesn't mean there weren't some people at Nokia who took it seriously. Some people really did. I mean at the company-wide level. And definitely it wasn't done aggressively. If there's one word I would use to describe Nokia's handling of it, it's "inertia". Which is, actually, the same problem MS has: inability to overcome their own inertia. And that's who Nokia picked to join forces with. Someone with even more inertia than they have themselves.

Of all of the choices Nokia could have made, I predict this will be one of the nails in the coffin, not one the moments of salvation. I predict Nokia will end up like SGI ... enough legacy inertia to keep hanging on, by thinner and thinner threads, for a while (maybe, just like SGI, a long while) ... but just like SGI, jumping on the MS ship will be the moment everyone looks back at, and says: that was the point of no return.