This news makes me very sad. Most people here seem sad too, but bear in mind that this community isn't exactly representative of the market in general. The slashdot crowd seem sad also. What's really interesting is the slump in the share price, that's not an indicator that involves fonboyism or zealotry in the same way.

I will _never_ use anything from Microsoft, I've been a computer guy for whe whole of the PC era and have seen how they are a marketing-led outfit with little regard for producing quality products when it doesn't impact their bottom line. Their buisiness practices are questionable at best and have often been proven to be illegal. They have a long history of destroying their buisiness partners.

People here should understand that now both Maemo and Meego cannot be allowed to succeed by this new unholy alliance. Imagine how embarresing it would be if their new super-whizz phone couldn't do half the things the aging n900 can do with it's old hardware and poorly supported, supposedly inferior, operating system. I would be very wary of any future updates, expect a few spanners in the works. Normally this would be paranoia, but where Microsoft is involved paranoia is usually the best policy.

In the topsy-turvy world of buisiness law and ethics all that matters is producing returns for the shareholders. If it was the case that Nokia shareholders were mostly tech-savvy people then there may be some legal recourse to remove Elop and reverse this decision, but I can't see that happening. IANAL.

Someone here said recently that what Nokia should do is build a top-class set of tools and applications on top of Debian or some other established distro. I wish I could remember who said that so I could give them the kudos they deserve. That's obviously not going to happen now, but I propose that this community does all it can to gain access to the required firmware, tools and application source code so in conjunction with the wider open source community we, the people, can build a truly open firmware that can be all that Maemo should have been and MeeGo could have been.

One other point directed at those unenlightened people who suggest that popularity is a measure of quaity, two words: Justin Beiber :P