> N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere. Idolized? Yes. Is it enough to make people purchase the phone? Not at all. If

> N9 with MeeGo(more strictly Maemo) has been idolized by everyone, everywhere. Idolized? Yes. Is it enough to make people purchase the phone? Not at all. If a fancy UI and eye-candy animations were enough to be successful, webOS would be the leader of tablets, and I'd be using BeOS to write this. What Elop realized was that Nokia was, indeed, sitting on a "burning platform". And MeeGo wasn't the lifeboat they needed. MeeGo was fancy, but too incipient as a platform to compete against iOS/Android. No developers, no industry support, no technical expertise within the company to develop it (plus the political fights with Symbian). It'd be a long, slow, expensive and bumpy road ahead. It'd cost him 3-4 years of development time, and the the board and investors would crush him well before he could deliver on the plan. Symbian was completely f-ed up, broken to its core, so this was never an option (and it's laughable to read "Symbian was winning" as put by the OP). A much better review was also posted on HN today - "Symbian, a post-mortem" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648843 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4648843. So the only real options were between Microsoft or Google. Android offered no differentiation against Samsung/HTC -- and no insurance against patent lawsuits. And I guess Microsoft offering a pile of cash probably helped to sweeten the deal. Will Elop be fired? Well, it wouldn't surprise me. The odds are against him, as they were since the day he joined. But I highly doubt it'll make things any better for Nokia.