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Comment by VulgarExigency | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.

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I am sure the reason came from Microsoft. They have mastered outplacement as an offensive weapon.

I think the reason was a lack of thriving app ecosystem. Microsoft seemed like a much better bet in that regard, they just messed it up in incredible ways.

Microsoft was a horrible bet in that regard. Maemo was a natural development platform for many products (just straight out of my head: Mozilla, VMware and Rovio have all chosen it organically), to the point where there was plenty of notable stuff that was first developed on Nokia N900 and ported to Android/iOS afterwards, but only officially released for iOS and Android because Maemo was already abandoned as a consumer platform. Windows Phone had no such gravitational pull at all and its lack of software eventually became an internet meme.

I'm not convinced by that. If Maemo was a natural fit then Microsoft surely was equally so, given they already had Windows Mobile. They also had a large army of developers familiar with Microsoft APIs and the financial backing a large tech company can provide (IIRC MS literally paid people to make apps for Windows Phone). That's the kind of thing you'd need to catch up in an app library race you're already losing.

Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.

They had no developers familiar with these Microsoft APIs as Windows Phone was starting from scratch with new APIs that were incompatible with neither Win32 nor WinCE/Windows Mobile. The only thing that could save them that they were betting on was that these new APIs were also made available on desktops, but were pretty much ignored by developers there as well and ended up largely replaced with an even newer set of technologies.

Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.

GTK wasn't a first class citizen in Meego.

Never claimed it was.

Nor was it in the final versions of Maemo, if you want to be pedantic.

Nor was Qt in its first versions, but how is this adding value to the conversation? Both of them were first-class in Maemo 5 and that's when the developers were clearly being attracted to the platform which is what I was talking about above. Harmattan was already DoA.

I mean MS paid a stupid amount of money for Nokia too, i think that was they mayor influence. MS bought a platform to run Windows on for $10 billion if i remember correctly?

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