[raverbashing]

The problem was twofold:

- Internal politics and the "old school" symbian developers not buying into this ecosystem

- MeeGo/Maemo was more worried with Free Software "circle self pleasing" and rewriting stuff every couple of months than actually shipping a product

How did Android approach the same problem? Kept the kernel and replaced X and most of userspace with dedicated libraries and binaries. Focused on shipping a product (first Android versions were very poor) and after the iPhone came focused on making it similar.

[nextos]

I think that's a bit unfair. Meego was scheduled to use Wayland instead of X. While I don't remember if it did, Sailfish definitely does. Maemo was also quite of an early adopter of Pulseaudio. Thus, the whole Maemo-Meego-Sailfish saga has been one of the pioneers in changing the stack SysV/X/ALSA -> Systemd/Wayland/Pulseaudio and friends.

The N9 was a really polished product. Offline navigation was incredibly good. I still use it. With a bit of care it could have been a nice product.

[raverbashing]

Why is it unfair?

If they had focused on shipping and improving the user/developer experience instead of rewriting their product every year or so (and while I didn't see the N9 I did see the N800/N900 and the experience wasn't great - also because of hw issues) we wouldn't be having this conversation

N9 was released in September 2011 that's 5 years after the first iPhone and Android had an ok product by then.

Had them focused on improving what they had on the N800 (released January 2007) instead of what they did they would have owned the market. Instead they let Android surpass them. They had everything to succeed and THEY BLEW IT

[u801e]

> Offline navigation was incredibly good.

It definitely still is. It's unfortunate that map updates are no longer available.

[mtgx]

Pretty much this. Lack of interest/willingness to invest aggressively from the CEO, even though Maemo looked quite promising when announced.

Meego was a distraction and pretty much a mistake. I think it was mainly pushed by Intel so they have a reason to sell Atom. People may not remember but before "netbooks" Atom was supposed to go into Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), which were much smaller than netbooks but larger than smartphones.

Netbooks pretty much came out as a "trial and error" device from PC manufacturers, who were failing with MIDs. If I remember right, Microsoft also had to extend selling new XP licenses post-Windows 7 launch, because of the netbook popularity, and because it didn't want Linux to become popular on them.