Why are you comparing 'Nokia sells Windows phones' (happened) with 'Nokia sells Android phones' (<-- I don't get this).
Whenever I see someone complain about the new directions, the focus on Windows phones I think of Maemo as the worthy alternative, not Android.
Now, even as a Maemo fan (still wearing the t-shirts to prove it) I still understand that a completely different system might've been .. difficult and/or scary. But for me that system was a differentiating factor, something other than 'another Android'.
MeeGo was not intended to be a differentiating factor in itself. It was an open platform with a Free SW base; only some of Nokia's applications were proprietary. This is not too different from what Android is today.
The problem was that Nokia forgot what their strengths were. Their big problem was the software side, but in pretty much everything else they were way above the competition at the time: industrial design, logistics, marketing, sales channels, etc.
So it was in their best interest to adopt an open platform, because it would have let them focus in what they did best. But it was a mistake to try to do it all by themselves so late in the game.
Nokia had actually been working on a touch-based mobile Linux system for several years (the N770 came out in 2007). If they had bet on that line of work earlier on, things might have been very different.
I always felt that MeeGo/Maemo were _far_ more open and hack-friendly than Android ever was.
Yes, there were closed components again, but as far as I was involved Nokia actually interacted with the community (I was at multiple events, meeting the Nokia guys of that time). If that happens around Android then I'm completely unaware of that.
I agree that Nokia was mostly a hardware shop. But I believe that they might've pulled off with Maemo (or MeeGo) what they did with Symbian.
(I also owned the N800 or N810? Can't quite remember)
They'd been working on Maemo for years and it was still at the level of being a tech demo. A fairly basic Linux distro ported to a mobile platform, but no real unified development framework like iOS, Android and WP. They needed something world class immediately, but just flat out didn't have the relevant resources internally to do it.
Whenever I see someone complain about the new directions, the focus on Windows phones I think of Maemo as the worthy alternative, not Android.
Now, even as a Maemo fan (still wearing the t-shirts to prove it) I still understand that a completely different system might've been .. difficult and/or scary. But for me that system was a differentiating factor, something other than 'another Android'.