[pavlov]

Elop left Microsoft earlier this year in one of their reorgs. It's reasonable to say that he was fired, I think.

It was clear before the Elop memo that Nokia's phone business was becoming a very expensive albatross. If they had stuck with Symbian and MeeGo, the financial situation in 2013 wouldn't have been much different from what actually happened with the Microsoft deal: under pressure from Apple and Android, the phone unit was losing money to the tune of hundreds of millions per quarter. Except this time, there wouldn't have been a buyer lined up to pay $4+ billion for it.

So Nokia absolutely did manage to offload the phone business just in time. Microsoft ended up writing off the whole purchase price.

An Elopless Nokia in 2015 would look a lot like Blackberry. Not quite bankrupt, but not in a happy place even though it had a technologically superior new OS and a brand that used to be worth a lot.

[lemonade]

Well, Blackberry still has quite a few governments as its customer, and will continue to have them for a while. And as I recall, the N9 still sold millions of devices even though it was no longer receiving any promotion. The consumer market is not the only road to success.

I also would like to think that after the Snowden revelations Nokia would have been able to convince many organisations that security and privacy are not dead, and that ones mobile phone is probably the most invasive technology in use.

It goes where you go, it listens to what you say, it reads what you read. It should have only one master - its owner. So far Jolla never had the scale, the public visibility or the political profile of Nokia as the European champion of technology. That story could have been told by Nokia far better.