[adventured]

Not accurate. They're flush with cash.

End of fiscal 2010, they had $16.4 billion in cash.

Today they have $12 billion in cash. With zero long term liabilities.

They have drastically more money than they would need to remake their business and target Android.

If it didn't work, that might be the last shot they get at it however.

[Danieru]

To be fair if I was Nokia and wanted to save myself this microsoft deal would still make sense. It all depends on the contract terms.

Sell the smartphone division, aka Windows Phone division, to Microsoft. You get rid of Elop and still scavenge a portion of the money poured into WP. Then start a new smartphone division leveraging Android. On the employees front most of your best former designers and engineers are still local just working for Jolla or Intel. Buy Jolla for the hardware designer then partner with Intel and get help on the engineering front. Hype the hardware at some consumer electronics conference and try hiring back the few of your best engineers which stayed and were included in the Microsoft deal.

Boom, you now have Daniel's untested and high risk plan for an Android Nokia. Please vote for me as the next Nokia CEO.

[Geee]

This is quite plausible scenario, if that's what they want. The truth is that the smartest engineers have jumped ship a long time ago anyway to the network division or other companies, and rest of them will leave soon.

Most of what Microsoft bought was truly just dead weight and Elop. Also, the deal included just the employees and Nokia brand licensing, not patents or other valuable IP, so it's not comparable to Google/Motorola deal, which was mostly about patents.

The 'new' Nokia will soon release their new strategy, that'll be interesting. They have already released information that they will stay in 'device business' although they can't release phone products until 2016.