It's not like that at all. Nokia earned lots and lots of money. When you do that, your biggest problem is to put that money into something useful. That something can be purchasing other companies, or it can be used for R&D. The problem is to do that and still maintain focus on your core business. Building and maintaining patent portfolio, like Nokia has done, is an investment for the future. Lots of it may be on the fringes of what practically can be used for phones, but it it's like huge and tall building, you have to build it brick by brick, you cannot cheat.

Nokia R&D did everything right. All the wrongs were done by design teams and poor execution; EDoF camera, too little RAM, no real flagships after the N95, poor Ovi store, no dedicated team of first class programmers to revamp Symbian from the ground (went open source instead) etc etc. All that ended up with the N97, E7 and every other Symbian^3 + device. The only exception was the N8, but that one is also plaged by too little ram and too small battery.