Depends on what you mean by Nokia. Nokia which is still around, cut off an arm to give it to Microsoft. The arm itself didn't fare very well...

While Maemo/MeeGo was cool (Former N900 user here), I doubt it would have succeeded in the long term. It would have been equally difficult to entice developers as it was for the windows phone platform, putting Nokia in the same position as they were with WP.

Because the "old timers" though this linux thing was a toy and a fad and stuck to Symbian