The Smartphone Wars: Nokia&#8217;s fallback?
<p>Here&#8217;s an interesting news story alleging that <a href="http://moconews.net/article/419-todays-nokia-leaks-are-brought-to-you-by...android-and-compal/">Nokia has ported Android to the N9. There are </a><a href="http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/24/nokias-android-flirtations-revealed/">pictures at engadget.</a></p>
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<p>It&#8217;s unclear what, if anything, this means.  If Nokia&#8217;s management were sane and competent, it would be easy to conjecture that they&#8217;re preparing a fallback strategy in case WP7 continues to bomb.  But it would be pretty difficult to sustain any theory that Nokia&#8217;s management is sane and competent on the facts of the last two years.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s just gotten more difficult, since the CEO of Nokia has announced that he will <a href="http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2387559,00.asp">kill Meego on the N9 even if it&#8217;s successful</a>!  Which of course guarantees that nobody will buy the soon-to-be-orphaned N9, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.</p>
<p>Good Goddess&#8230;after his one moment of insight as he wrote the <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2921">burning platform memo</a> it it has come to look as though Stephen Elop is so utterly incompetent that he couldn&#8217;t organize an orgy in a whorehouse.  He&#8217;s just gone from mere strategic stupidity to active sabotage of his own company.</p>
<p>This is really sad.  Call me sentimental, but I mourn the Nokia that did a fine job of flooding the world with cheap, well-designed cellphones back in the 1990s.  The only good thing about this stumbling, shambolic finish is that the Nokia/Windows alliance probably completely scuppers Microsoft&#8217;s already miniscule chances of getting any traction in the smartphone market.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Changed an idiom that confused several readers.</p>
