I know it's popular at the moment to lay all the blame at Elop or at Nokia management (current or past). But maybe the truth is really that MeeGo was just to late and not good enough?

The impression that I get from various threads here and elsewhere is that at the moment MeeGo is still nowhere near ready, and an end-user ready release is at least another 6 months away. Now in the alternative world were Nokia did decide to ride it out with MeeGo, by the time it's finally market ready (autumn? winter?), was it actually going to be better for mass market end users than the iPhone 5 or the Samsung and HTC Android 3.x devices it would be competing against? Somehow I doubt it.

Of course, I don't believe that Nokia WP7 devices are anywhere near ready yet, and they may take even longer to get on the market. So it's not like I'm endorsing this move. All I'm saying is, maybe Nokia's fate was already sealed a long time ago. Maybe the only way they could have turned the tide was if they had reacted faster, developed faster, delivered faster than they could.