Texrat has posted an interesting article on the (numerous) missteps Nokia has made with MeeGo this year and how it's slowly killing off much of the inertia and enthusiasm they had managed to generated over the past few years.

It's a nice overview of many of the areas Nokia has fumbled and illustrates exactly how little Nokia has really learned in this market over the past 5 years (despite several statements from the likes of Ari and other claiming education). It's unfortunate that Nokia has managed to create such an amazing platform with so much promise and foster a great community, yet continually cut the community off at the knees, abandon their existing customers both in support and next generation hardware features and generally just kill off all the enthusiasm and inertia they can.

Watching this cycle repeat itself first with the 770, then with the N8x0 and now with the N900, despite several promises to the contrafry, has become depressingly familiar.

MeeGo's initial promise of new beginnings and openness hasn't been realized and Nokia's failure to leverage any of the enthusiasm they've generated with Maemo and maemo.org. Instead pissing it all away by providing no migration path for their existing users and contributors, and watching as those contributors interested in getting involved flail uselessly against the wall of disorganized we're-open-but-not-really that is currently MeeGo. Which leaves us with a dying Maemo and a MeeGo overshadowed and stifled by it, and nobody very happy for it.

Is Nokia, as a company, really capable of properly developing, deploying and supporting an open product from start to finish without hamstringing either the community, their own developers? What I've seen over the past 5 years leads me to believe not. The dinosaurs at the top of the company seem to be stuck in 2002 and their shortsighted business decisions are killing this community, this platform and the company as a whole.

Are they capable of really changing direction here? Big ships do turn slowly, sure, but it's not making it any easier when they start turning back the other direction.

So, what are your thoughts?