In fact, N9s still retail for pretty high amounts despite being unsupported and outdated hardware.
I think they could have kept working on it on the side, and released a phone every 1-2 years. Even with the minimal size MeeGo team at Nokia, they released 3 major updates.
So do Neo-Geos. Nobody cares how high you can price products that'll only be purchased by a few fanboys.
Elop played the game straight forward. Forking is a half baked option and when you are leveraging your company, forking is not an option. You need full scale OS support and that means, Nokia could have either gone with MS or Google. Google apparently refused to make space for Nokia's competing service suite (Read-Business Week) and as such, the option was only MS. I know the hate is strong for MS in this community but it's way too illogical to think one man alone could have played his tactics and strategies to influence Nokia to switch to a MS OS for his career progression.
Meego was ruled out as an option as well. A tech-pretty thing may not always work out. WebOS taught us that lesson. So conspiracy theories are pretty meaningless.
I don't know what this means.