Nokia screwed up, but diverting resources to an even more miniscule market is even crazier.
Instead they should be betting on the web, completely. Ubuntu, being a traditional Linux distro, has a big library of desktop apps that can be cross-compiled in Emscripten, but instead they split their much smaller resources between several different options.
So given that, if they were going to put some eggs in another basket, why would they choose Ubuntu over Android, which has an existing application base and at least some user awareness?
It seems like we're at the same stage right now in the mobile OS world as we were in the personal computer market back in the 80s, with multiple competing platforms such as the Amiga, Atari ST, BBC Micro, Commodore 64, PC, Mac, etc. Each had it's advantages, and each had significant success, but there's actually only room in the market for two or three of them long term.
I worked very closely with Nokia during that time period. As closely as one could work without being directly employed (we deployed a product directly to the S60 baseline).
What happened at Nokia was the end result of years of engineering neglect. Symbian was a monster. It was poorly engineered in general, and certain subsystems (like messaging) had a reputation for simply being impossible to work with. It was just a huge mess.
The UI saga was just another symptom of that mess. That touchscreen phone referenced in the article? It existed well before the iPhone in various incarnations. They spent years trying to push that thing over the finish line, and failed. The underlying graphical subsystems gave them problems. The new form factors presented by the emergence of touchscreen slate devices proved at odds with a whole host of assumptions made throughout the (huge) Symbian/S60 codebase.
The whole thing was just a giant hot mess.
It's possible that competing internal frameworks could have worked. The ultimate problem is that they never developed one compelling UI paradigm/library that actually worked. Much less worked in a well integrated way across the whole platform.
Nokia failed at project management. They failed at engineering. They failed at leadership.
Now they're just another OEM.
I suspect they've learnt from that and now leave the software side to Microsoft, while leaving them free to focus once again on creating good hardware.
