Basically MeeGo is years too late. Even WebOS is very late. Now Android is dominating after Apple iOS. In order to sell smartphones they need to run something that customers want to buy. One idea would have been Android, but they seem to hate Google more than MS

MS windows smart phones are are certainly less interesting than Android, but certainly more interesting than WebOS/MeeGo. So they want just to make money until MeeGo is ready... Most likely MS will pay a part of the development of new phones which Google would not do as they already have got other hardware partners. If they still can not compete against Android then they will have to change soon again the direction. It is really hard to sell MeeGo when there are basically no 3rd party apps compared to iOS/Android/WP7.