I dislike the board that brought Elop in, and promised him a bonus if he managed to sell Nokia Mobiles business unit, and they were also the ones that decided to off-shore factories and R&D into Eastern Europe and India.
Unfortunately Nokia was doomed because it was too slow and bureaucratic and could not adapt to the iPhone... Contrast with Samsung that managed to quickly churn out iphone "clones" and to iterate quickly.
What does MS have to do with this? The Nokia factory shuffling and strikes GP was mentioning happened before MS took over.
And people love to blame MS but Nokia was a sinking ship already by that point. MS was just a new captain added to steer the Titanic but the same fate was inevitable, as its home grown MeeGo/Maemo platform arrived too late and to too little adoption to stand a chance against the already established iOS and Android platforms who were throwing infinity money on becoming the undisputed mobile duopoly platforms, selling 10x as many devices as Nokia was selling Maemo N900s. It was already over for Nokia by that point same as it was for Blackberry. Nokia's own engineers admitted this the moment they got to play with the first iPhone at their Espoo HQ.
That's like blaming a drunk driver for hitting a guy that previously shot himself in the head.
Nothing MS could have done would have changed that fate for the better. WHat did people expect MS to have done?
You're missing the point to argue in bad faith. The point was the even if a drunk driver hadn't run over Nokia, they'd still be dead from the Android and iOS onslaught, doesn't matter who ran over their corpse after that. A judge won't make you a murderer for running over a corpse, just a drunk driver, this is such a weird hill to die on.
BTW, we're still waiting on the Nokia insider details you were mentioning before.
I won't spill any beans, some stuff is easy to find online, the other I usually keep my NDAs.
Nokia is still pretty much around, and owns where UNIX was born in case you missed that part of history.
While we had issues, the burning memo platform was the killer for the third party developer ecosystem, just coming around the hill to move from classical Symbian into Qt/PIPS, in a UNIX culture, to be told to go Windows.
Define "not looking dead" to you. Look at their sales, share price, market share and profit trajectory in 2011. From the investors and bean counters perspective it's the very definition of dead. They were losing 11% market share in last year alone!!! How is that not dead?
MS actually prolonged Nokia's existence, since only they had the cash to burn on the impossible mission of catching up with Google and Apple ecosystem, while Nokia alone could not sustain those losses by itself.