I'd hope that most people here know better than that!

It's an "internal Nokia suicide pact" alright.

MS just sent a slow little mirage-y floater raft towards Nokia's burning platform. It costs them effectively nothing. But...

MS has this deadly Midas/Medusa (*) effect on their "partners". Their "partners" freeze whatever survival tactics they had been deploying, start bleeding to death and when the stock price has slumped enough (often not much above the full value of said "partners" cash and assets, i.e. having lost all future prospects) MS or one their colluding front companies buy the former competitor on the cheap.

Midas? MS gets to maintain their existing cashcow monopolies.



(*) Wikipedia: "Athena transformed Medusa's beautiful hair to serpents and made her face so terrible to behold that the mere sight of it would turn onlookers to stone (in some accounts Poseidon raped/ravished her)"