Certainly no need for big font for that question!

Plenty of people here had a problem with the move from Maemo to MeeGo. Maybe you weren't around much then, or have a memory lapse.

People have a bigger problem this time, because the Intel collaboration did not kill openness, Linux stuff, etc. And while the MeeGo transition seemed stupid, this one sounds suicidal, or at least extremely diminishing of what Nokia was and could have been.

Thats a rather simplistic view - at the extremes price matters - see credit ratings and cost of funds.

Of course you don't lose that in cash in real time, but stock works in mysterious ways. Including as currency in stock-swap based acquisitions and a part of remuneration packages.

If I still rooted for Nokia I'd be worried by them losing a quarter of their market valuation (what you call a "short-term fluctuation") practically overnight as the market's opinion to elop's eloping with ms.

Because Nokia's UX was going to be closed source. The reference UX is the bare minimum required to operate a device, not a complete user experience. This was laid out many times.

So whatever Nokia had, has no bearing on MeeGo itself, which is much, much more than the reference user interfaces that people have been crying and whining about.

Totally fair question, however Intel has not been tried for anti-competitive actions, only investigated in ways that led them to folding (and fast!) The caveat with the MeeGo partnership vs WP7, is that Intel never once had a hold on Nokia over it.

1.These posts belong on abovetopsecret.com. I was just reading a post there "China Developing Anti-Gravity Technology". Intriguingly, there was a 30-second WP7 ad on the page. Proof of the conspiracy!!!

1B. Poor, poor, Ballmer. Lying awake at night worrying not about iPhone, Android, Chrome OS, ARM compatibility, iPods, the Cloud, but Linux and the Qt framework. Yes, Qt, the most fearsome threat Microsoft has ever faced. It must be destroyed by any means possible! It's available on Windows desktop, Max OSX and desktop Linux and I can't think of one commercial software vendor adopting it rather than products like Visual Studio and .NET, but somehow it's going to take over the world when it's on a Nokia phone! That way people can write software that works on a non-existent MeeGo and a dying Symbian - it's unstoppable!

1C. Yes, Microsoft entered a deal with Nokia to intentionally make them "fumble around" at a cost of only a few hundred million or billion dollars (because they weren't fumbling around already and were never going to implode if left to their own devices). Microsoft's goal was to screw with an open source framework, not to get its mobile OS on smart phones and help secure its place in an emerging mobile market before it gets shut out. No, that would be crazy conspiracy talk.

2. Yes, the clear plan for Nokia would have been to purchase a business that contains an unprofitable and dying network segment and a profitable desktop Linux segment, neither of which Nokia knows anything about, then kill off the network business and halt development on SUSE Linux Enterprise to channel their developers into MeeGO and introduce things like Mono into MeeGo, probably requiring another major rewrite/reset of the OS. Of course, it wouldn't actually need to buy Novell and kill it in order to get experienced Linux developers or use open source Mono and could just license any patents it needed for much cheaper than buying them and it already has a great deal of software engineers and is spending massive amounts on R&D with little to show for it, but hey... why not drag another company down with them?

2B. As an unabashed fan and user of openSUSE, which dragged me away from Windows XP for good, your scenario is giving me chest pains right now and my hands are shaking.

2C. Making a phone OS on top of openSUSE would have been a nice idea, however.

3. No, it's not his concern. If Nokia's been ladling out the gravy for years and spending enormous amounts of money on R&D that have failed to yield what they needed to return to a leadership position, how dare he stop spending that money or remove people who can't show that their work has contributed to the bottom line of the company? What would Finland had done if GM was located there when the company almost went bankrupt? Demanded GM hire more auto workers and give them all raises and make no budget cuts and not get rid of any failing brands? (RIP Pontiac, the Symbian of cars )

4. Yes, if Nokia had just clicked its heels togther three times, made a wish, sprinkled fairy dust, then asked all of Nokia's employees to just try really, really hard this time, MeeGo would suddenly get finished, it would kill iOS and Android, and Finland and MeeGO and Richard Stallman would all live happily ever after.

Yes, that's the way forward in the technology industry; don't do the hard work yourself, pay somebody else to do it for you. The next obvious step for Nokia is to outsource hardware development to, say, Motorola or somebody. Then, just slap the "Nokia" name somewhere on the thing and boom, the company is rolling in pure profit!

So at least something good came out if it.

First, stop acting like a jerk.

Although I wouldn't call Qt a threat currently, good development tools other than those provided by microsoft which are platform independent are indeed a problem for microsoft. The dominance of windows is also due to their superior development tools compared to other platforms.

Remember applications today and in the future don't necessarily have the look and feel of the platform as in the past.

now that will surely never happen. coz nokia is most known the world over for its awesomely designed, engineered and built hardware.
(even critics do not have anything to say about that).

so having to outsource hardware production is just plainly stupid.

Why not? You yourself noted the amazing amount of money Nokia will be saving by not developing an OS; they could save just as much money by not developing any hardware. If there's no business advantage in having an operating system built under your own control and to your own specifications, then surely there's also no business sense in messing around with your own hardware designs either. Let somebody else do all the real work, and Nokia can just sit back and let the bucks roll in...