Do you think the market has reached saturation point? Being panicked into doing something drastic because your market share is declining when the market is growing at the rate it is and countries like China and India have barely got started is exactly the kind of vanity that leads to self destruction. NOKIA had plenty of time and space to act rationally.

Before Elop's announcement NOKIA had GROWING SALES, GROWING MARGINS and good PROFITABILITY. They also had a cohesive plan to cover mid-tier (Symbian) and high-tier (MeeGo) devices using a unified developer platform (Qt). Sure they had taken longer than the optimum amount of time to execute that plan but they had just reached the point where it could start to bear fruit and then what happens?...

Elop scuppers that plan and instead announces NOKIA will swap to an OS that is already a proven failure in the market place. As market share is your obsession check out the figure for WP7 and that's despite quality manufacturers like Samsung, LG and HTC already providing extremely nice hardware for it, better hardware than Symbian's ever enjoyed.

In fact Elop's actions absolutely guaranteed NOKIA would lose market share. In developed countries we are now seeing feature phones dropping off the bottom of the scale as many consumers opt for budget smart phones instead, this is exactly the kind of customer retailers and carriers would have pitched Symbian phones at if it weren't for the fact Elop had announced them EOL. Now low cost Android devices are being very successfully marketed to those customers instead.

WP7 supports a very limited range of hardware and the level of hardware it it requires just to run is too expensive for budget phones so NOKIA will now struggle to compete in that market.

At the top end NOKIA's hardware guys are wanting to put multi-core processors, higher res screens, better cameras, etc... on their new phones but WP7 doesn't support that either and it's likely to be another 9-12 months before it does. NOKIA are powerless to do anything about this except badger M$ to please hurry up and make WP7 as functional as Symbian is right now.

NOKIA can no longer compete on either scale, WP7 being the limiting factor.