I hope they make a successful purchase. They need to quickly abandon Maemo and MeeGo before they lose money.
So for you could have not done it any faster. So dunno in that contex where MS is needed.
Nokia has spent certainly much over a billion to Qt/Maemo/MeeGo and as WP will anyways be ready somewhere Q1 so of course they want to get something out of the R&D spent.
Don't forget that S60 devices (the business centric and dumbphones) are Nokias biggest sellers and the only thing keeping the company profitable at the moment.
MS doesn't have anything to replace Symbian with on the lower end devices and that's where Nokias staple income resides.
There's no need to buy nokia when WP is already shipping on a number of hardware manufacturer's devices, and it's not like Nokia has a monopoly on well designed hardware anymore......
Doubt the finnish government will allow this to happen.
What does that matter? About 15% of Nokia is owned by Finns, goverment doesn't own Nokia.
Goverment has feeded a lot of money to Nokia in other ways so they could demand some back like Nokia had to pay in Germany when they left. Though the laws in Germany concerning these are very strickt so i don't know if that would even happen in Finland.
The reason Eldar is still doing his crazy predictions is because threads/newsitems like these exist wich give him enaugh credit to leave his mom's basement for a day or two. He is sometimes right, but so is my trustworthy coin. Combine that with some knowhow and voila.
The threads title has been discussed before, it could happen in the future. This is a known rumor for some time now.
But I am sorry to have contributed in that wich I had thought not to become involved in, ofc meaning the indirect feeding of a troll :P
Think about Microsofts business.
They develop software and sell licenses to other companies.
By buying Nokia, they would lose their biggest customer for WP7 licenses and hand in hand with that they'd lose any other manufacturer out there because it's obvious that they'd prefer "their own" hardware manufacturer, causing bad sales for all the others.
Maybe they want to be more like Apple and bring it all in-house. Imagine a MS designed phone, running WPx and linking to Xbox Live, the MS App store, etc. etc. There are many MS-lovers who would buy-in to that in a big way. My son would by an Xbox-phone tomorrow regardless of what I advised him to do.
If that increased their marketshare, selling the OS to other manufacturers would become more profitable as they could ramp up the prices. If the other manufacturers opt-out, they sell more of their own-brand phones. It's a win-win (big assumption on marketshare increasing).
MS would also get lots of IP rights from such a purchase, maybe they would like to merge some MeeGo code into WP7 = WeeGo anyone? ;-p (joke!)
