As someone who was at Nokia when Elop became CEO and had some (very limited) view into the goings on, as the kids say: "yes, this, +1".
Circa 2010, Symbian was clearly uncompetitive and MeeGo was far behind schedule. There was a fairly ambitious plan to build a new UI framework in Qt that ran on both Symbian and MeeGo -- the Nokia N9 used this with Harmattan, which internally I don't think we ever referred to as MeeGo, IIRC! -- but I'm pretty sure when Elop arrived he took stock of things and thought, "My God, this MeeGo thing is Nokia's version of Apple's Copland project," and it's really hard to say he was wrong.
Looking back, it's really easy to say that he was wrong not to choose Android, but it was seriously considered. The problem was that Nokia insisted on two mutually exclusive conditions: they wanted to use a lot of Nokia-based services so the new devices still "felt Nokia," and they wanted to fully partner with Google and market the devices as Android. And Google wouldn't do it. If you want to call your device "Android (R)" then you use Google services; if you want to use your own, you have to do what Amazon did with the Fire devices. Google wouldn't make an exception for Nokia, but Microsoft -- who by that point had, at least internally, realized Windows Phone was seriously floundering -- would. And so they went with Microsoft.
Circa 2010, Symbian was clearly uncompetitive and MeeGo was far behind schedule. There was a fairly ambitious plan to build a new UI framework in Qt that ran on both Symbian and MeeGo -- the Nokia N9 used this with Harmattan, which internally I don't think we ever referred to as MeeGo, IIRC! -- but I'm pretty sure when Elop arrived he took stock of things and thought, "My God, this MeeGo thing is Nokia's version of Apple's Copland project," and it's really hard to say he was wrong.
Looking back, it's really easy to say that he was wrong not to choose Android, but it was seriously considered. The problem was that Nokia insisted on two mutually exclusive conditions: they wanted to use a lot of Nokia-based services so the new devices still "felt Nokia," and they wanted to fully partner with Google and market the devices as Android. And Google wouldn't do it. If you want to call your device "Android (R)" then you use Google services; if you want to use your own, you have to do what Amazon did with the Fire devices. Google wouldn't make an exception for Nokia, but Microsoft -- who by that point had, at least internally, realized Windows Phone was seriously floundering -- would. And so they went with Microsoft.