Well, as I said to another commenter, my observation wasn't "MeeGo was poop," it was "MeeGo wasn't ready." I'll admit that when the Windows Phone rumors starte

Well, as I said to another commenter, my observation wasn't "MeeGo was poop," it was "MeeGo wasn't ready." I'll admit that when the Windows Phone rumors started -- which was right after I'd been laid off from Nokia, as the product I was working on was being transformed into something that no longer needed the server-side components I was developing -- I dismissed them out of hand. (And got some level of unintended fame by calling them "loony" on my blog, and having that picked up by BGR. I'm surprised Nokia didn't hire me back at that point just so they could fire me again.) While I think MeeGo was fairly unusable at that point, it seemed to me that in 6-8 months with serious work it could have been awesome. And, apparently, in the shipping N9 it was. The specific "what if" question I've thought of that parallels yours is whether they could have gotten, say, two MeeGo devices out in 2011, and three more in 2012, which would have put them in roughly the same place they're in with Windows Phone, but with an OS that was entirely theirs and with what might well have been a larger ecosystem. The MeeGo team had only predicted being able to get three devices out by the end of 2012; maybe if they'd been convincingly optimistic things might have gone differently.