Its all about long-term goals and business.
If the Nokia-Microsoft deal falls flat, I'm certain Nokia will go the way of RIM and then follow Palm's pathway. They just dont have the resources, the cash, manpower or the time to become relevant in the ecosystem wars.

Windows Phone will still do fine, its slowly catching up (there's Mango, then the HTC TITAN, and now 50,000 apps).

Nokia NEED to succeed in this deal to recover, much more than Microsoft, but that doesnt mean Microsoft isn't benefiting. In fact, Microsoft wants to purchase Nokia but they dont want to make a bad investment. All due to Nokia's SIZE, so instead they are taking a half-measure and using them instead.


So what's really happening? I think Nokia and Microsoft are collaborating heavily behind the scenes. Nokia is handing out a lot of control to them (OS, WP requirements, etc) and also promising to nurture and grow WP7 to be competitive. Ofcourse Nokia's asking for enough profit to continue their business, but they would need to do more to be relevant.

And that got me thinking, not so long ago Microsoft axed an amount of its own developers, and Nokia layed off an even larger amount....perhaps Nokia developers will join Microsoft within the collaboration in hopes of expanding their [Nokia] resources.

And that leaves a few things: patents, spectrum, and Qt.
Its established Qt is mobile friendly so perhaps the collaboration is to introduce DK of Qt-Metro natively for Windows8 "apps" (arm and x86) and allow Windows "programs" to be made in the traditional .NET

(sidenote: silverlight is doing horribly)

That makes a lot of sense for Microsoft, and it also means more opportunity for Nokia to do business (since they REALLY need it).