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Comment by scooble | Hacker News Reader

I may be misremembering, but I believe that at the time Elop joined, Symbian was still the largest smartphone OS by the number of devices. And (my memory is shaky here), the fact that Symbian and Maemo both used QT meant that there was a path for existing Symbian app developers to transition to the new platform. Maemo was slow coming, but killing it at launch still seems like an odd move.

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The Qt SDK was released for Symbian just a few months before Elop joined. Symbian applications and developers were not yet using Qt when Elop killed off both Symbian and Meego, just a few months later. It was part of a long-term strategy that did not have any time to play out. Quite possibly it would have been too late anyways.

Killing off Symbian in a speech while shipping more phones than any company on earth was, generously, not part of any strategy but a horrific blunder, less generously, it was sabotage. I've got no love for Symbian, but when you're selling that many phones, you phase it out, you don't announce to the world that there's no reason to buy the phones you're still trying to sell.

Porting Symbian UI to Qt meant that they could at least merge surface-level stuff and have core apps that ran on both Maemo/Meego and Symbian, then retire Symbian when no one would care or notice.

I don't see how people give Elop a pass on that: He very publicly declared that they were End-of-lifing the entire product lineup, but the next OS version (WinMo) wasn't ready. How else did he possibly think customers and developers were going to react? Keep buying then-deprecated phones?

Yeah, as if the Osborne effect was not bad enough (people skipping on existing products when announcing new) - he basically went out and said "all of our products are worthless and we dont have anything new to replace it anytime soon". I mean, even if when it is true, you just don't say anything like that - ever.

> I may be misremembering, but I believe that at the time Elop joined, Symbian was still the largest smartphone OS by the number of devices

I think this is correct. It had a traditional market base but was already hopelessly noncompetitive except for old reputation and brand value (see my other comments here) and on a steep decline. Compared to iPhone and Android which were more modern and on a steep growth path.

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