John Gruber has written a blog post about Nokia and its tradition of being a hardware company first and foremost. I think he's dead-on:

http://daringfireball.net/2010/09/nokia_next

It's obvious that, at a macro level, Nokia's hardware based worldview is to blame for many of its current problems, most notably the erratic OS strategy. But I think it's also at the root of many frustrations we as Maemo users and developers have experienced over the years, such as the device-centric handling of software updates and the platform in general.

I think Nokia's future depends on its ability to transform itself into a software company first and foremost. Hiring an executive from the world's biggest software company as CEO may have been a smart move in that light. I hope they succeed in making that transition soon, and doing it with Meego.

And my crystal ball says that people will invariably argue that his statement about one OS is not part of Nokia's wide-flung strategy to hit more targets than any other competitor out there. Nor is it in Nokia's best interest to pare down any further what they're slowly done so far... Symbian or MeeGo are their OS's of choice. That's two overlapping OS's where Qt is the overlap, for the most part.

The move to something external of Nokia will probably not happen. Not even Elop can make that happen; not even in North America.

I've long argued, however, that Nokia has almost always been about the hardware first. A new CPU, a new GPU, a new RAM chip, whatever... and they will drop the prior iteration, move to the next; continued, official support be damned.

I'll also disagree that bringing in a software-mostly CEO is the "best thing" Nokia could have done. To be extremely honest, if I were to pick somebody from Microsoft, past or present employees included, I'd gone for J Allard - he understand social, hardware and software... as well as entertainment. He doesn't have cellphone experience, but I'd venture that he'd be a quick study.

MeeGo's been shown off in a few forms already, so even I'll hold off on the vaporware tag - and I'm pretty damn quick to pull that out normally. I do fear for Nokia's choices; but that's because I simply don't know enough right now what they will and can do to change either directions or increase mindshare in areas where they've lost it.

No disrespect to John Gruber, who I actually hold a very high regard; but the people of this community will dissect that article to pieces based on many stances that all boil down to one thing... they won't believe much of that he's stating.

Good article, nice opinion piece... I'll remain patient and see what Nokia pulls out.

Hmmm...why would they need to settle on one platform? They have been using multiple platforms for years. S40/S60/S80/Maemo. I just see Meego now coming in at the top with S60 moving down to the middle and even low end eventually.

I do think they need to standardize a little more however. Have one hardware platform that runs almost everything on a current software version, except where the extra gadgets like compass or fm transmitter are needed. Since those gadgets aren't in every phone some phones wouldn't support those apps.

My point was not that Nokia should settle on a single OS. Having fewer OSes would be a good thing, but I know that Symbian will be around for years, and I think that's ok (I own both a Nokia 1200 and a 5230 and think they're great devices for their price).

What I did mean to say is that Nokia must recognize the importance of the software side in today's high-end smartphone experience. And doing so IMO means their whole process needs to change and become much more software driven than it used to be.

The issue isn't so much multiple platforms but who controls them. With Symbian it's Nokia, Maemo was Nokia, and MeeGo is the Linux Foundation.

Android is controlled by Google, and WP7 is controlled by Microsoft. Both of those companies have their own motivations and locks on the system the handset vendor has to accept before they can gain the full functionality (or even use) of the OS, all of which relate to services, a key area that Nokia and other handset manufacturers are trying to move into. MeeGo comes with none of these conditions.