The board does not fire him because that would show even greater dysfunction and Nokia would all but collapse, not to mention they would need to pay his golden parachute.

I'm not going to suggest everything was OK at Nokia pre-Elop but you are kidding yourself if you think he didn't make things worse by declaring his only products dead before even having a device ready, then a while later customers (maybe even Nokia themselves) find out that WP7 itself was not ready either.

And while we are here arguing about whether Elop was right or wrong there is one thing you cannot deny: There will now be customers from all sides, Symbian, Maemo, Meego and even WP feeling severely burnt by Nokia right now. It's as if they were trying so hard to save themselves from the burning platform they left their customers to burn. It will be a real uphill struggle trying to win them back.