PIPS made it very clear that the way-forward was a unixish kernel/base system - as Apple did, as Android did, and in fact, years before either, as Nokia did wit

PIPS made it very clear that the way-forward was a unixish kernel/base system - as Apple did, as Android did, and in fact, years before either, as Nokia did with Maemo/Meego. It was pure facade to say "continue with Symbian because PIPS + Qt". There were a lot of strange quirks in PIPS because the underlaying system/kernel wasn't unixish. And there were a lot of things all unixish systems as of 2008 already did well (multi-CPU, large memory) which Symbian really struggled with. Some of the "small-system optimisation" in Symbian (the single global service message port / queuing system) made it very hard to parallelize/scale out. Nokia somehow was so uncomfortable with the idea of an opensource "base" that they rather bet on / sold out to Microsoft. But then, this is water down the river, and we will never know whether "alternatives" to the bet they made would have had better returns.