But, mmm let me see, that's the meeting between Bill & Steve & Stephie, right?

Not really, or actually it does not really matter what the small fish think. The major shareholders know of this all, or to better say, they just did it like planned all along...

One good thing with this deal is that both Nokia Lottery and Microsoft Lottery spam emails will come as a single mail

The board of directors would have denied it too. Admitting it would have been an even bigger disaster for Nokia's value as well as disqualify the board of directors. This way, Elop gets all the blame while the Board of Directors can stay out of the heat. A plus is that Elop isn't a Finn, which makes blaming him a lot easier than blaming actual Finns.

Oh well. Finland is going to fade back into the virtually obscure background again like it had been before Nokia started hitting it big with cell phones--unless this Jolla crap pans out. It BETTER not turn out to be crap after all of this.

I repeat my question: Didn't Nokia already lose most if not all of their best and brightest minds to their competitors already? How can shareholders be okay with this particular purchase?

Finally, whew. I was waiting for this moment so bad.

Well, MS needs to go to mobile, it absolutely yearns it. It has no choise.
The desktop&server business is profitable but there's no growth up there. The only business in town is the mobile business, they've realised it and haven't got it.

Now, they might well be throwing money to the fire but oh boy they have got plenty of that stuff. If there's a remonte chance that this aquisition is going to turn profit one day they are risking all to do it.

And just as I said, shareholders are just Bill & his bedboys, the rest don't have a say on it.

How does this affect Jolla? If I understood right Jolla uses Nokia's technologies on their permission. Now that those technologies are owned by Microsoft.... ?

I'm glad its over.

I need to go back and read some of the old, obnoxiously myopic arguments that sounded like marketing reads that I used to get from some of the Nokia employees every time I pointed out obvious moves toward this end. I've said something along these words all along: It doesn't make me happy to be right about this--but I can see where it [was] going. Particularly telling was all the puffery about open-source and openness while they overtly became more and more closed-source. I saw that coming years ago, sadly. I'll say this again too: I'm glad I didn't waste any MORE money than I already did back when I got the N800 and the companion navigation kit for it. Nokia didn't deserve to succeed when it didn't listen to what customers wanted either.

Sadly, it's a lot of workers who'll suffer the most for upper-management's golden parachutes and windfall PERSONAL profits while the company gets disappeared.