[chipotle_coyote]

You're closer to the truth than the conspiracy theorists, but when Elop was hired, Meego was still actually on the table as The Nokia Future. He took it off the table because in his estimation it just wasn't ready. (I worked for Nokia at the time, saw the N9 prototype at the same point in its life he did when he made that call, and he was right. It just wasn't ready.)

And, as a fairly long article in Business Week (I think) detailed a couple years ago, Android was actually the first choice over Windows Phone, but Google and Nokia couldn't come to terms: Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.

Having said all that, I can understand some of the conspiracy mindset around this. Nokia wrote Elop's contract in a way which basically gave him a huge golden parachute if the handset division was sold to someone else, and that really is nuts -- I doubt the intention was to explicitly reward failure, but it's damn easy to paint it that way. But this whole "secret mole" thing? Frankly, whatever one thinks about Microsoft's business practices, I don't think it's plausible that they're really clever enough to pull this off.

[justin66]

> Nokia wanted to be able to use the official Android branding and use Nokia's existing services (mostly their maps), but Google's license doesn't allow that.

Can you elaborate? It's hard to understand in light of all the extra cruft the carriers put on their Android devices.

[sbisson]

Nokia wanted to use its maps and not Google's, but still be a Google services licensee. That's a no go as far as Google is concerned. Microsoft let Nokia replace its Bing maps with Here, and in fact licensed it as a replacement for the Bing mapping data.

Third party apps on carrier devices that have the Google Play store are in addition to the Google services, not replacing them. The Google services are all there, even if they're hidden.

[justin66]

Would the thing have been feasible if they'd simply bundled Here and kept the Google Maps app on the menu as well? It seems like an odd thing to become a sticking point.