Now its a battle of ecosystems so unless Nokia can pull an entire ecosystem out of its hat then I don't hold out much hope for its future success.
I think that's kinda revisionist history.
Maemo was already developed by the time the phone market turned into the software-driven smartphone market.
Nokia was late to throw Maemo on a phone, true, but they had one ready in 2011. It had hardware that won all sorts of design awards and was cutting edge in both hardware specs and design, with classic Nokia durability and engineering. It ran a wonderfully-slick, open-source friendly, polished OS. It even had a "Retina-level" display before they were common. Nokia still had a major marketshare when it was ready for release and could have used their market presence to ensure a successful launch.
The problem was, Elop was trying desperately to kill it.
He couldn't quite kill it outright, as Nokia had contractual obligations to release it, but he ensured that it got minimal advertising time and prevented it from being distributed in many key markets. Despite that, people loved it. It swept design awards. Some reviewers called it the "best phone Nokia ever made." People in EU countries where it wasn't released were buying it via eBay from the countries that did have it.
Elop's response? No matter how successful the phone was, no matter how much people liked it, Maemo would never be used again.
Naturally, the aggression towards the platform by the CEO coupled with the limited release and minimal marketing did just fine to kill it, and he was free to continue molding Nokia into a target for an MS buyout.
Nokia understood the market just fine. They were just betrayed.
That said I completely agree that the N9 was the best phone Nokia ever made and that Windows Phone was a catastrophic decision that should tarnish the career of every executive at Nokia who supported it and refused to change course when it was obviously failing.
The demise of Nokia devices was entirely avoidable
I think the Lumia line is the best thing that ever came out of Nokia, after all the home grown crap-OS at Nokia before.
"Symbian ... no, let's do Qt ... actually MeeGo will be great; really! Aww shucks, it sucked, too."
Please don't blame your downfall on Microsoft.
Stephen Elop was working for Microsoft's interests long before he ever joined the organization.
Nokia was the best steward of Qt, and I'm glad MS didn't get their hands on it when they had the chance.
Obviously you have an inside perspective that I don't, but from the outside it just looked like y'all made an amazing phone. :) I can't say I heard much about internal issues, but I believe it given other things I've heard about Nokia internal management...
As someone who had a number of Nokia ix devices this* is a steaming mound of revisionist history. The 770, 800, 810, and smartphone successors were absolutely aweful at basic PIM-type tasks. They failed because their core functionality was dreadful. Want to sync your contacts with Google? Enable redpill mode.
They built tablets and phones that were very interesting for people who want to add Debian repos to their phone. This is not a market niche that will make you billions, no matter how often it blames Big Bad Elop.
Did you ever use an N9? It was nothing like that.
The 770 tablet, and such, sure. But the N9 was quite far removed from the geek toy tablets.
They couldn't even ship two Series 60 phones back to back with the same J2ME profiles. It was simple mistakes that stopped any kind of platform emerging.
The sad part is that Nokia had all the pieces as early as 2004. But they never grasped the software software side of things (RIM made exactly the same mistake).