When I first sat down with Jolla in September of last year, I was talking to CEO Jussi Hurmola. A month later, Hurmola was out, moving to a strategic role around Sailfish, Jolla’s open-source, MeeGo-derived OS. He was replaced by Marc Dillon, who went on to lead the official unveiling of Sailfish OS.

As of Monday, Dillon will be Jolla’s new head of software development (a role he was already carrying out, anyway). The new CEO, Tomi Pienimäki, was previously CTO then CIO at Itella Corporation, a Finnish logistics outfit.

At first glance, it looks like Jolla has opted to go for a more business-centric leader – Dillon is quite a developer evangelist type – now that it’s signed serious deals with the likes of Chinese handset distributor D.Phone and Finnish carrier DNA, and is preparing to reveal its handset later this month.

Here’s what Pienimäki said in a statement on Friday:

“Jolla is a great company with an exciting and promising future. I truly believe we can make a difference and bring something unique to the consumers. My task is to listen very closely to our customers and further build the collaboration network. I also want to ensure that our team can fully concentrate on the most important task: bringing the first device to the market this year.”

Jolla Chairman Antti Saarnio thanked Dillon for his “inspirational leadership in the CEO role during the past months” and Dillon himself said he was excited to “be able to give 100 percent attention to what I love – working on the product with the Jolla team.”

Interestingly, Jolla also noted that it has Ari Jaaksi on its board. Jaaksi was the head of the doomed MeeGo project at Nokia before jumping ship to lead HP’s doomed WebOS team. Hopefully he can break with tradition this time.

Hong Kong telecoms and mining giant China Fortune, which has a 6.25 percent stake in Jolla, also has a representative on the board in the shape of Steve Lau, while other board members include private investors’ representative Mohamed Boukerche and Stefano Mosconi, Jolla co-founder and CTO.

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For fans of open-source mobile software, this is a big deal. It’s the evolution of the MeeGo operating system that Nokia ditched in favour of Windows Phone, and… well, here’s how it looks:

The UI was shown off by new Jolla CEO Marc Dillon (Jussi Hurmola left abruptly about a month ago, and is now a consultant to the firm), along with his team. There weren’t a whole lot of new details today, nor was there hardware on show. Indeed, the team came on stage brandishing a range of development hardware, rather than the Jolla smartphone that will soon go on sale through giant Chinese distributor D.Phone.

So here are a couple more pictures. In some ways – and I say this without denigrating the Sailfish UI – it brings together elements of both Windows Phone and Android. From the Windows Phone side, it seems to have borrowed the live tile concept for the homescreen, only it presents it in quite a different fashion. The app menu looks Android-ish, in my opinion, as does the dock at the bottom of the screen:

One for the road, this time the lockscreen:

Oh, and there’s a video too:

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I say ‘alliance’, but it’s not clear yet who the other members will be. All Jolla is revealing is that its partners will be “leading players in the industry” such as chipset vendors, operators, retailers and both OEM and ODM manufacturers. Names will be revealed soon, hopefully.

Oh, and the partners will be investing an impressive €200m ($258m) into this new ecosystem. As Jolla itself only has seed funding through Nokia’s Bridge program (it’s a spinoff of sorts), it can be safely assumed that the other partners are the ones stumping up the big cash.

“China is a game changer in the technology industry,” Jolla chief Jussi Hurmola said in a statement. “The next big mobile change will come from China and Jolla wants to be enabling it. There are massive resources and competence to transport the whole industry.”

The OS that this alliance will be touting is codenamed Sailfish, and it will be ready for licensing to “other device manufacturers, design houses and service companies” in the spring of 2013. Sailfish will also be based on MeeGo, but it is important to note that this is a separate initiative from the Jolla device that will launch in China this year through the distributor DPhone.

Sailfish may also have a wider scope than the Jolla OS, adding new device classes such as automotive to the tablet-smartphone-TV spread we already knew about.

An interesting aspect of this announcement is the importance of the Sailfish alliance datacentre, which will be hosted at the Cyberport Hong Kong facility. It looks like this will be the base for a variety of Sailfish cloud and collaboration services. And according to Jolla, Cyberport has hefty links through to China, Europe and the U.S.

“We’ve been following Jolla’s development closely and are now delighted to see Jolla select Cyberport as the primary location to host the new mobile OS,” Cyberport COO Mark Clift said.

Jolla is also setting up new R&D facilities in Hong Kong and China, the company added in its release.

Clearing up confusion

I must admit the addition of ‘Sailfish’ to the Jolla lexicon threw me a bit. Happily, Hurmola cleared up my confusion, so here’s a quick primer on which name fits which part of this story:

MeeGo: The ex-Nokia/Intel OS that underpins what’s going on here.
Jolla: The name of Hurmola’s company, and the name of the phone that will launch this year, and most likely the branding put on the OS that phone runs.
Sailfish: The name of the alliance and the current codename for the branding of the OS that this alliance will use. According to Hurmola, this OS will be “as close as possible” to the Jolla OS powering this year’s device, although there may be some differences.

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Jolla is the most mysterious of those players, which also include Firefox OS and Open WebOS. Jolla (a Finnish word for a small sailing boat) arose from the ashes of Nokia and Intel’s MeeGo project, canned in favour of Microsoft’s mobile OS. The Linux-based OS has not been shown off yet, but Jolla has already scored a deal with China’s top phone distributor, DPhone.

The first Jolla device is due later this year, so to find out more I spoke with the company’s chief executive, ex-Nokian Jussi Hurmola.

Meyer: So when’s that phone coming and what will it look like?
Hurmola: We’re going to announce the smartphone later this year. When we announce it, we’ll also say when you can buy it. We’re setting up an ecosystem. You can’t do a smartphone without supporting developers, services, navigation — we are setting all that up.

Nokia’s only MeeGo handset to go on general sale, the N9

We’re also talking about using the MeeGo software in other devices — not just Jolla. We want to make as big a wave as possible.

So you’re going to produce other devices that don’t use the Jolla name?
We’re open to cobranding. On the software part, we’re working with other businesses to bring non-Jolla devices, MeeGo-based devices. I can’t say with whom at the moment. For example – and we’re not saying this is what will happen – ‘Vodafone powered by Jolla’, or ‘Jolla by Louis Vuitton’, or some internet service powered by Jolla. It’s a bit dangerous to talk about it. It’s not information I can disclose now.

Fragmentation is a big issue with Android’s different form factors. How are you going to avoid the same problem?
One interesting thing about MeeGo is it supported multiple categories of devices, from car dashboards to smartphones and laptops. We feel that’s important for us, and we’ve been playing with our UI in different devices from TVs to featurephones, and are trying to make the framework and UI components scalable. We can enable physical variation while making it easy for developers to write Qt QML native apps. We understand developers need a stable platform and the smartphone will represent the default form of Jolla’s MeeGo-based platform.

But why would an operator choose to work with you?
From a technical point of view we can integrate the operator’s value-added services into the device, so they don’t have to be an over-the-top application. So many operator-service apps are lost, as people don’t find them or use them. With an open and independent platform, we can integrate these value-added services into the functionality of the device itself.

From an ecosystem point of view, we offer an alternative. Services are not bound to the platform. Let’s say there’s a big music or video label that usually has to go through branded front-ends: with Jolla and its Meego-based ecosystem they can connect to the customer with their own brand. At the moment we are so small and agile that we can integrate and develop new features really quickly. We will launch a very interesting device with a very cool brand and quality.

Nokia ditched MeeGo in favour of Windows Phone

How big a part will cloud services play in Jolla?
Cloud is part of everything. All functionality is basically extended by the cloud, but if you’re talking about moving apps and functionality of the device to the cloud, we still need to wait for LTE [to spread] and different pricing of roaming data.

It feels in a way like MeeGo’s story has similarities with that of WebOS, which was ditched by HP then open-sourced. Is that fair? Is there scope for some dovetailing of the two projects?
WebOS is an interesting case; it did something new. They had a pretty interesting take on applications, web and multitasking, and we want to learn from that. In terms of compatibility with WebOS, I don’t know — let’s see if something happens with WebOS. There are other things like Tizen and [Mozilla's] Boot 2 Gecko, and KDE. We as an emerging ecosystem are all about cross-platform and compatibility. We want to build an independent and inclusive ecosystem.

The mobile market feels like a two-horse race right now. Really, how are you going to break into that?
These kinds of markets are always two-horse races. The horses just change — look at RIM and Palm; these things come and go. Even product categories come and go, such as netbooks. This market is changing at amazing speed. The technology is evolving.

Now the entry to the market is lower than ever before. One thing we want to do with this MeeGo-based ecosystem is we want to be an enabler. There’s lots of pull from the market to have an alternative. iOS and even Android are quite protected and bound to a single business. You can use Android, you cannot lead it — which is a reason why we didn’t use Android. We wanted to do something new and couldn’t do it with Android.

We’re in a good position starting with MeeGo. MeeGo was big before it was discontinued. Almost wherever we go around the world, the [developer] response is: ‘We actually have this running on MeeGo already. We did it a year ago but didn’t bring it to market.’ Cross-platform is what we have to use: HTML5, things like Marmalade, and being compatible with different elements.

HTML5 on mobile has been a somewhat contentious issue recently. What’s its role in your view?
We would love HTML5 to succeed fast, because it would mean our MeeGo-based ecosystem would be compatible with everything out there. But, at the moment, I think there are interests against that. It would again take away the control point from the existing platforms if suddenly everything were compatible.

Are those interests working against it within the HTML5 Working Group? I mean, Google and Apple are in there…
I hope the Working Group people are honestly trying to make it work. But looking at the implementations, there are so many APIs and different versions of different APIs. It looks like there are reasons to do it like that, but it’s difficult to speculate. The standardisation of HTML5 has been slower than it should really be.

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The details are still largely shrouded in secrecy, but at least now the company has answered one major question buzzing around it: how can it get the breadth and depth of apps it’ll need to encourage new users in?

After all, every successful modern mobile OS has a large and vibrant app store that draws in customers — and helps keep them there. In part, the inability to build and encourage an app economy has been part of the problem for Nokia, RIM and other troubled mobile giants.

But in an interview with Finland’s 3T magazine, Jolla CEO Jussi Hurmola said that he would get around the problem of having to build a new app ecosystem — by using existing ones.

More specifically, the company will be letting Jolla handsets run Android apps through ACL technology, which will enable them to run software built outside MeeGo’s traditional bounds — potentially bringing in apps from Android and Qt as well as those built in HTML5.

This is not exactly new: OpenMobile’s ACL has been supporting MeeGo for about a year — but it could help Jolla overcome a critical adoption obstacle. Now they’ve just got to get the rest running too.

I’m trying to track down a translated version of the original magazine article, but other Finnish reports say Hurmola outlines a number of other features, including improved multitasking, and a fresh and new user experience.

For his part, Hurmola says this is not the full picture. On Friday he tweeted that there was still more to come.

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So what’s the answer? The solution put forward most often is a buyout by Microsoft — already the company’s software partner. But reports suggest that although Redmond did take a look at the idea last year, it didn’t like what it saw. Similarly, rumors of a potential buyout by Samsung seem to have been ill-judged.

So if a sale is off the agenda, what else is there?

Here are five other options that have been suggested as possible paths to redemption.

Keep simplifying

One of the brutal-but-necessary cuts that Stephen Elop made was chopping back the mess of systems and services Nokia was trying to balance. After his burning platform memo laid out the situation ahead of the company, the plug was pulled on MeeGo, and Symbian while not quite dead was put on life support.

These days Nokia is shipping just 10 new handset models: six Asha phones running Series 40 and four Lumias.

That’s dramatically smaller lineup than in the past, but that’s not enough for everybody. Last year Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey suggested that Nokia “focus on 3″ products in an attempt to bring clarity back to its offering.

Nokia: you make too many products. Focus on 3.

— Jack Dorsey (@jack) October 26, 2011

Slimming down further is tough for a business like Nokia which is used to supplying product at all levels of the market, in many different segments. But it is making more progress down this route, offloading things like the blingy but incompatible Vertu brand. The question is which three products would it focus on?

Look to the past

Plenty of people think that while Nokia’s previous strategy was not perfect, it at least had it in control of the full stack: hardware and software. For some that means that there is still a chance that MeeGo, the Linux-based OS that emerged from work done by Nokia, Intel and others. The MeeGo-powered N9, for example, had a lot of fans.

In fact, MeeGo is still considered viable by Jolla, a startup of former Nokians who are trying to build it into a fully-featured OS. In an interview with the Arctic Startup blog, Jolla CEO Jussi Hurmola laid out a few details, including the fact that the phone “will offer a developer mode that developers and enthusiasts can use to get more out of the device.”

But there are a lot of unanswered questions here still:

A smartphone with out any apps is fairly undesirable these days, so building an app ecosystem will be a major challenge for Jolla. Hurmola only commented that they believe they have the answer to that problem, but it’s difficult to imagine how exactly they will build that support considering that Microsoft is pumping millions into its ecosystem (such as programs like AppCampus), with only fair results.

And then there’s Symbian: not yet abandoned by the company, and still being updated to service the millions of existing users out there. If Symbian keeps its head above water, does it become a viable plan B?

Go Android

Nokia has already said in the past that it considered working with Google but decided against becoming just one of dozens of manufacturers building on Android. And in a situation where it has, that argument makes plenty of sense — after all, why become yet another Android supplier when you can work closely with a software provider (in this case, Microsoft) in a productive, close relationship?

Except here’s the problem, Microsoft is not proving to be the partner Nokia expected: the appearance of Microsoft Surface tablet PC shows its apparent willingness to piss off OEMs, while the decision to make Windows 8 incompatible with previous versions left Nokia having to rapidly discount Lumia handsets.

That’s left plenty of people suggesting that maybe Android will be the way to go: from pundits suggesting that “only Android can refloat Nokia’s sinking ship” to the hackers who are trying to make it happen by getting the N9 running Android Jellybean.

Get rid of Stephen Elop

Like many former Nokia staff, Tomi Ahonen — now a prominent mobile industry analyst — is bullish about the company’s fortunes… if it chooses the right path. But right now, he suggests, what is happening is “carnage”, as the business jettisons its strengths in order to chase. The answer? A change at the top.

In a blog post on Thursday, Ahonen pointed out that the former Microsoft man has presided over a massive decline and suggested his removal would be best for the company:

When Elop took over, in the first full quarter he was in charge, Nokia’s smartphone unit sold 28 million smartphones and had 29% market share. Nokia was twice as big as Apple and three times bigger than Samsung. Nokia’s smartphone unit was growing sales strongly – the year 2010 Nokia had seen bigger growth in units sold of its own smartphones than Apple had with the iPhone! Now the unit sells 10.2 million smartphones, the market share is down to 6%.

[…]

Nokia has thrown away 4 out of every 5 loyal customers it held only a year and a half ago! Yes, we are witnessing history being made – history of the worst CEO of all time (And it will only get worse in Q3). Pay attention to this, this is the classic case study for MBA’s of the future to study how not to destroy your company, using methods like the Elop Effect.

Ahonen’s not alone. Former Nokia exec Lee Williams is another who has ripped into Elop’s management by saying “There’s no overarching vision for this company”, while former Apple and HP man Jean-Louis Gassée questioned his credentials.

“He has zero experience in terms of what makes a smartphone maker tick. And what is his experience in supply chain management? Zero,” he told Computing earlier this month.

There is one option not listed above, of course:

Don’t change anything

Elop is at least consistent in his messaging: turning Nokia into a winner will take time and pain.

And there were some notes from Thursday’s results that felt maybe, just maybe, like a tiny chink of light. For example the fact that Lumia shipped 4 million units in the last quarter, more than expected. There are caveats: shipping is not the same as selling, expectations were already low, and while 4 million may feel like progress it is really just a drop in the ocean (Apple, by contrast, sold more than 35 million iPhones in its Q2).

But certainly a few posters on my last Nokia story argued that things were on the right track. Here’s S Kyle Davis, for example:

“It’s just their low end phone business that is suffering, as the market overall is shifting to smartphones. Nokia is shifting with it, but it will probably take a year or more.”

Meanwhile Evster88 (who accused me of huffing glue) said things were improving.

“You are indeed missing the big picture here. Nokia’s restructuring is WORKING and public opinion on Windows Phone is steadily improving.”

The evidence for that is hard to see. The market, which had an initial small bounce after Thursday’s results, quickly reverted to its gloomy view of Nokia’s future. But Elop is convinced that if he keeps going, it will click. However, even if he is correct there’s another question: whether he’s got the money to keep the company afloat in the meantime.

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