I don't understand why Nokia's shareholders haven't gone to the board with torches & pitchforks.

Without Elop constantly extolling a Nokia project and product independent of Microsoft, Nokia becomes more & more the Microsoft Mobile R&D and manufacturing arm.

Maybe the Nokia board thought it would be best to work toward such an inevitable merger, or even they could have been naive enough to think that a takeover would be the best support for Nokia shares. But Nokia's status to Microsoft if WP7 phones are successful is so component, that a takeover wouldn't be necessary. After Nokia becomes the MS Mobile phone development & manufacturing arm, MS will just hire any developers they wanted, & then like everyone else move manufacturing to China where it's cheapest.

The board couldn't have been thinking to take on a turnaround CEO. The question is were they naive enough to think they were going to have Ballmer steer a takeover/merger, or even a Kerkorian style breakup selling the pieces, when the obvious track is cherry picking existing R&D and temporarily manufacturing assets.

After an announcement that Nokia is not vigorously pursuing a product of its own independent of Microsoft, I would be astonished if share price didn't collapse almost completely. The for-now performance of base model phone sales is not going to bring investor confidence in the *future*, which is what's looked at by investors.