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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We still don’t yet know now this strategy overhaul will play out for Nokia as the first round of Lumia phones debuted earlier this year and the next generation of those, running Windows Phone 8, hit the market in the coming weeks. And we also don’t know exactly how Nokia arrived at this destination, although many of the high-level details were reported along the way.

Sampsa Kurri, founder the technology-centered site Muropaketti, does know, however. Kurri culled together bits and pieces of the story through interviews with Nokia employees based in Finland and offers up what I consider a must-read history of Nokia’s response to change, development efforts and operational choices that profoundly affected where the company is today.

Many of the details confirm the thoughts we had about what was going on at Nokia as it saw its share of the smartphone market tumble: Good ideas that were too late to implement as compared to products from more nimble competitors; considering Android long after some had advocated it; and a strategy of constant change for user interfaces and app development platforms.

If you read just one article today, I highly recommend it be Kurri’s detailed history of Nokia’s plans to propel the company forward in the face of iPhones and Androids and how its Maemo efforts fueled MeeGo only to go up in smoke for Nokia.

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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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The moves in the last couple of days demonstrate that the company, which is currently the Android smartphone maker to beat, and nipping at Nokia’s heels as the world’s biggest mobile handset maker generally, is progressing in its attempts to look for new business opportunities.

These five-year bonds would be the first overseas bonds that Samsung has issued since 1997, writes Bloomberg, which confirmed the bond plans with Samsung. The bonds would be issued by the company’s U.S. unit and would be aimed at expanding the company’s production facility in Austin, Texas, which makes components that it could use in its own devices but also sells to other handset makers such as Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). It opened last October.

The move shows that despite some reports that Apple might turn to other component makers in the wake of legal scuffles between the two companies over mobile patents, Samsung is confident that this business will continue to remain strong in the years ahead, irrespective of that contract. At the moment, Samsung is the exclusive provider of A4 and A5 processing chips for Apple, which uses these in mobile devices such as the iPhone and iPad. It’s unclear what Apple’s business represents in terms of overall revenues for Samsung today. In Q1 2011, the figure was estimated to be around 5.8 percent of all of Samsung’s revenue.

In December 2011, Samsung reorganized its electronics business to make a stronger distinction between the division that makes components and the division that makes consumer mobile devices.

Tizen foot forward. Meanwhile, Samsung appears also to be laying out plans for what it might do next with its own devices business, specifically around the platform that it uses: it has confirmed that it is in the process of integrating its existing feature phone OS, bada, with Tizen, a new project Samsung is spearheading with Intel (NSDQ: INTC). It is partly based on MeeGo, Intel’s former stab at creating an OS with Nokia (NYSE: NOK) that was put to pasture when Nokia decided to pursue a mobile device future with Microsoft.

That should come as no surprise, given that both bada and Tizen are based on Linux and Samsung had always said that this would be the intention; however, now we have a bit more detail on how this might look in practice. According to an interview in Forbes, when the integration work is complete, developers’ bada applications will be supported in Tizen, and apps written for Tizen will still be able to work on bada devices.

Tae-Jin Kang, SVP of Samsung’s contents planning team, tells Forbes that Tizen will not become its main operating platform “anytime soon,” but that also begs the question of whether that is what Samsung ultimately hopes it can achieve. It could one day replace bada — or even, considering that it comes from the same roots as a previous smartphone OS, MeeGo, replace Android or Windows Phone in Samsung’s smartphone portfolio.

Or could it be used for both kinds of devices — say as a “lite” version for feature phones, and a heftier product for smart devices? That would potentially give Samsung greater control over its OS and, for a company spinning several plates at the moment, might point to a way of unifying its device strategy under a single platform. It would also give the company greater control, something that it does not have with Android, which is open-source but effectively developed and run by Google; (NSDQ: GOOG) and help Samsung better follow in the footsteps of Apple’s vertical-integration business model.

bada has proven to be a very popular platform where feature phones are concerned, and some analysts have taken to comparing it in the same category as smartphones. Gartner says that in Q3 2011, bada accounted for 2.2 percent (2.5 million units) of all smartphone sales, roughly double that of Windows Phone.

We should start seeing the first fruits of Samsung’s Tizen move soon: Kang says it will release two Tizen devices over the course of this year. Leaked pictures of what the OS will allegedly look like (one pictured here) emerged last week.

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At our recent Mobilize conference, I accosted our speakers and attendees, such as Sprint CTO Stephen Bye and Ville Vesterinen, CEO of the hot game company that created Shadow Cities, to ask them whether or not the world needed another mobile OS. For the most part, folks were doubtful, but one developer surprisingly didn’t mind the idea of a third, and it’s clear the carriers want one to dampen the power that Google and Apple hold over the ecosystem. Check it out.

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Tizen will be hosted by the Linux Foundation and development of the open-source OS will be led jointly by Samsung and Intel (NSDQ: INTC).

Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, writes in a blog post that like MeeGo, the Tizen platform will focus on HTML5-based applications and the aim will be for it work on “a variety of device types.”

MeeGo, he notes, will continue on as a project at the Linux Foundation, although it seems that it will try to promote Tizen as the next step forward. To that end, MeeGo code will be “carried over to Tizen,” which presumably will mean that developers for the older platform will be able to just as easily develop for the latter.

Does all of the above ring a bell to you? It’s not dissimilar to what Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Intel cooked up with they mashed up Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo into MeeGo.

What might be different here is that Samsung has already been developing smartphones and tablets on other companies’ operating systems — namely, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Even its feature phone OS, Bada, is based on another company’s proprietary kernel, the Nucleus RTOS. It has been talking for some time of developing something that it can call its own.

Nokia, in contrast, was coming from a different place. It already had an OS, Symbian, which the company saw was not performing as well as it should. Nokia’s new CEO, Stephen Elop, himself ex-Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), concluded that it would have cost too much, and taken too much time, to recreate a second system of its own with MeeGo — hence the relatively quick decision to move to WP7.

Putting these two together, Samsung has some very workable operating systems under its belt — three in fact — that it can continue to use while it tries to stir up its own homemade concoction.

That’s the theory, at least. In reality, it could prove just as difficult (impossible?) for Samsung and Intel to make a go of Tizen as it was for Nokia and Intel with MeeGo.

Some initial responses have been particularly caustic. One example:

“Intel and the Linux Foundation have shown that they can’t get the job done. I don’t see why anybody should give a crap about Tizen,” wrote Ryan Paul, the open source editor for Ars Technica.

We’ll have to wait and see how serious all this will be. The first release of the OS will be due out in Q1 2012, and the aim is for the first device to be out by mid-2012. No detail as to what that device might be, but at least those dates give us a deadline by which to start to judge whether or not Tizen will fly.

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On the day that Nokia (NYSE: NOK) started to ship the N9 — the first and possibly only smartphone that it will make built on MeeGo, a report emerges that indicates the OS may still have a life long beyond Nokia’s involvement with it. Intel is apparently gearing up to announce a MeeGo partnership with the Limo Foundation, whose members include Samsung, Panasonic and NEC.

The report, published in FT Deutschland, does not include confirmation from any of the companies involved. As the MeeGo Experts blog points out, the news comes one day before Intel holds its annual developer event, Intel AppUp Elements, to be held in Seattle on September 28 and 29.

Samsung getting involved in MeeGo would make for an interesting twist to the whole smartphone/OS race. The company was already rumored to be looking at ways of developing its own smartphone OS, and was even mentioned as a would-be buyer of HP’s WebOS operating system, now left out in the cold after HP (NYSE: HPQ) said it would discontinue making devices on the platform.

Last week it emerged that Samsung had plans to make its own Bada OS, used in its feature phones, open source.

A tie-up on MeeGo could give it a shot to make MeeGo the underpinning framework for Bada, which currently sits on top of a proprietary platform, the Nucleus real time operating system kernel, owned by Mentor Graphics.

Aside from smartphones, the touchscreen-friendly MeeGo was always also viewed as a possible OS for tablets. According to the FT Deutschland article, Gartner estimates that in 2011 there will be some 476,000 tablets sold using the MeeGo OS from OEMs such as Acer. That works out to a market share of less than one percent, the article notes.

And therein lies the issue: Although a lifeline for MeeGo would be great news for Intel — which hopes to use the OS as a route to pushing its processing business — it doesn’t erase many of the challenges that any new OS would face in a market largely dominated by Android and iOS, with growing presence from large and well-funded competition from Microsoft’s Windows Phone. Although having a large handset maker like Samsung on board might help.

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