First off, these are a great set of questions. And ones that have been asked here in various capacities over the past few years. Its harder to answer, and for a ship the size of Nokia, its not merly a "go do it" as much as it is "what will be effected in core and non-core assets if/when we do move to doing it."

As a developer, if you cannot create demand for your application, then you are either (a) building to scratch a personal itch, or (b) have no sense of building an application to solve a problem - you are more on the side of coding for fun - which isn't a bad thing, but you end up being limited towards what you can address when you have this perspective.

Nokia tried changing this (largely western/developed countries) perception with the creation of N and E series brand lines. They then offered the hardware in mobile devices that could do this. However, there was not as much attention given to the marketing or developing on-device aspects that could have been paradigm transforming.

That being said, there's a thread here that's been talking about how one can develop applications on the N900 (using TV-Out and wireless keyboard). This would be essentially something that shouldn't just be marketed by developers, but forwarded by Nokia as one of those genre-bending approaches to mobility that the N900 and Maemo 5/6 platforms enable to be done.

After that, its all about making development tools usable and *easy* on the N900. You then end up with users, knowledgeable that they can develop on their device, pushing applications from an open platform to a nearly open store to people who just have openly held and acknowledged issues. AKA, you change mobile

This part actually requires people that think outside of the box to have people loudly shouting what it is that they do well - in good season and wisdom. When the tools become easier to use and maintain, communication with Nokia, Maemo, various other open source-supporting companies, and students becomes cleaner, then you see these changes from the bottom up.

Some of this you can see in some projects here now. For example, there are a slew of us working various angles towards getting a Bible application up and going for Maemo 5. There are some folks coding, others who will be testers, a UI/UX set of folks, and possibly more. This is allowing each of those persons to break the genre of "just another application" towards creating something that is platform defining.

EDIT: A week ago, I won an application from Nokia Conversations for asking why NFC wasn't included within the Maemo 5/N900 project and that it should be something added to the platform. This is the kind of out of the box thinking that opens up the appeal from other persons/orgs/areas. (end edit)

I can also say from personal experience that Maemo4 got a nice boost after WordPy was released. The UI/UX design, plus the attention of the developer and community allowed for Nokia to have a means to say what is possible when a community works together. But it all starts with communication. And that foundation/framework is here, just needs to be pushed/matured a bit.

By the way, HTC is quickly trying to change their model to be more like the Mer project - where the company develops something, sells it for a time, and then releases the code to the community to continue to enhance. This improves developer relations, and creates avenues for educational integrations that creates future HTC workers, marketers, etc. where these folks would have otherwise had little to no familiarity with that code or the persons there.

Is it possible to do this here? Yup.
Do you end up projecting the same image as HTC and Apple? Nope.

In time, all needed voices will rise to the top. Its a *body* though, and each part plays its role as needed - in silence until that moment.