I have heard this a lot. I think it is a fantasy.

(a) N9's sales were a drop in the ocean. It is like if you have a game with 100% good customer reviews. But there are only 50 reviews. The tiny but vocal segment who loves it, loves it. That doesn't matter.

(b) There was no room for a third ecosystem. Developers were busy writing apps for Android and iPhone. Nobody would write apps for (random 3rd OS that has a couple of million phones). It wouldn't matter if the N9 had had working desktop fusion and teleportation. The platform was dead.

I don't think it's a fantasy.

The N9 had a very good reception, and with Nokia's prestige and loyal customer base it would have been possible to compete against the iPhone. The N9 built on top of the N700 series, which was launched ahead of the iPhone. It was essentially Debian running in your pocket. It already had a huge "app store", all Linux repositories. Polishing this was not that hard, given that they also controlled Qt. Qt also meant a simple migration path for Symbian applications.

People don't realize how mature the N9 was. Read some reviews. Their maps application had incredibly good offline coverage and offline routing in 2011. So good, I've been using it for that purpose till 2020 as nothing compares. Mind that Google Maps still licenses lots of mapping data from Navteq, which was Nokia's mapping spinoff.

Aside from this, even if they wanted to go with Windows Mobile, it sounds like a really bad strategic move not to have a backup. Especially because going with Windows Mobile was a bigger gamble, which ended up failing spectacularly. Going ahead with the N9 didn't use many resources. Windows Mobile devices by Nokia would eventually reuse the same hardware. Why not selling both.

As someone who actually used n900 for a while, thinks it was really cool device, and who developed software for it, I say N9 was a fantasy. Way too little even more too late. This comes back to the cultural issues OP mentioned, there was still too large part of the organization who really believed in Symbian, and on the other hand Meego ended up as kind of punching bag for some "strategic" efforts (like Qt and the Intel/Samsung "cooperation") without enough actual engineering.

> It was essentially Debian running in your pocket. It already had a huge "app store", all Linux repositories.

They dropped Debian as a base and switched to Moblin, which was one of the problems. Also it is telling that you refer the community repos as app store, and ignore that it also had actual proper app store too ("Nokia store"). The utter failure of Nokia store was another glaring issue that they never figured out. Critically the community repos, no matter how awesome, did not support commercial apps in any way, nor did it bring any income to Nokia.

> Polishing this was not that hard, given that they also controlled Qt

Yeah, nope. 80/20 etc.

The N9 ran a Debian based OS. It was MeeGo/Harmattan, which was essentially Maemo 6 [1], but labeled MeeGo due to the deal with Intel.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo#MeeGo/Harmattan

Oh, right, they never finished the Meego transition. Pretty telling about the state of the project

> Debian running in your pocket

Did you mean N900?

No, the N900 is the successor to the Nokia 770 (via N810)

Arguing of sales numbers doesn't work for the N9. It was a dead phone walking when it was released: The Microsoft partnership had been announced, Elop already had publicly stated that whatever its sales numbers MeeGo wouldn't be continued and it wasn't even sold in major markets like the US (here in Germany a few shops imported them from Switzerland!). Of course it (and more importantly the platform) didn't stand a chance like that.

(I'd tend to agree with the second point that MeeGo would have had difficulties and likely would have failed later, even if they'd focused on MeeGo and the N9, but there was something to it)

> N9's sales were a drop in the ocean.

The sales of a future hypothetical Windows phone were far less at that point.

> There was no room for a third ecosystem. Developers were busy writing apps for Android and iPhone.

Yet Nokia was attempting to launch a third ecosystem, just not the one that anybody wanted.

Yup, my claim isn't that Windows was a good decision. The article suggests the alternatives were Meego/Windows/Android. Only Android was possible. Meego was a fantasy. Windows Phone was a fantasy. Network effects are a thing.

If you agree Windows phone was never going to work, then you need a story how Meego could have worked when Nokia had a fraction of the resources to put into it.

Meego was "already working" (with scare quotes.) Maemo was great, and shipping. People used it and enjoyed it. It had an extremely lively developer community, and the cheat that since it was based in Debian, new apps could be written as UIs added to common, standard commandline applications. The scare quotes are because the relaunch as Meego was pointless, but was also working well enough.

Windows phone was not going to work because the brand is herpes, and Microsoft makes technical decisions based on business strategy rather than merit (and everybody know it.) It had nothing to do with the amount of resources put into it, which I'm sure were vast; Microsoft is happy to lose money in markets for a decade or two in order to block new entrants, waiting for the market leader to make a mistake. If people wanted a phone that would trap them into a rent-seeking ecosystem, they already had a choice in iPhones that was at least attractive and common.

Meego phones could have slotted into the nerd/serious phone category that various Android distributions have awkwardly tried to fit in. It would have also been a non-US alternative for markets like Europe and China. They also could run Android apps within a VM.

I think your last paragraph concedes that Meego could only have gone for a small niche. Nokia had huge market share. There’s no way they would have limited themselves to being a phone for nerds. If they had done Android right, they could be up there in Samsung’s place.

Reports at the time indicated that the N9 outsold Nokia's Windows phones by 3:1 even though Nokia intentionally sabotaged the N9 by not selling it in the biggest markets (e.g. the US).

https://dominiescommunicate.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/n9-outs...

I remember going through the Verizon specs for phones and manufacturer at the time (N9 wasn't properly out yet, so we were targeting N900). Verizon had not updated their hardware requirements so it was impossible to get approval for a modern phone at the time.

For context: less than 18 months earlier the phone manufacturers had finally agreed, after a long consumer campaign, to all support combined data and power over a single cable. This allowed to get rid of custom chargers everybody hated.

Verizon's specs at the time still mandated that any phone they sold had to have separate power and data sockets. How do I remember? I spotted this brilliant piece of malice in their specs and raised it with the project lead, who then took it higher up.

How did it do compared to the iPhone?

Great question!

Compared to iPhone, N9 had a practically zero marketing budget, and an announcement at launch that the platform has no future as Nokia is going all-in on a Microsoft partnership.

As far as an apples-to-oranges comparison can be made, N9 did great.

Must be hard to be an engineer and have management destroy your beautiful project. “Bridge on the river Kwai.”

However, management had reasons. There was no room for a third platform.

I also note the unfalsifiability of some of these claims. On the one hand if N9 beat the Windows phone, that shows how awesome it was. On the other hand, if it was destroyed by the iPhone, well, it was sabotaged.

n9 was announced to be the last of its kind even before they started selling it. It's a miracle that millions(really?) of people ended up buying them