1.These posts belong on abovetopsecret.com. I was just reading a post there "China Developing Anti-Gravity Technology". Intriguingly, there was a 30-second WP7 ad on the page. Proof of the conspiracy!!!

1B. Poor, poor, Ballmer. Lying awake at night worrying not about iPhone, Android, Chrome OS, ARM compatibility, iPods, the Cloud, but Linux and the Qt framework. Yes, Qt, the most fearsome threat Microsoft has ever faced. It must be destroyed by any means possible! It's available on Windows desktop, Max OSX and desktop Linux and I can't think of one commercial software vendor adopting it rather than products like Visual Studio and .NET, but somehow it's going to take over the world when it's on a Nokia phone! That way people can write software that works on a non-existent MeeGo and a dying Symbian - it's unstoppable!

1C. Yes, Microsoft entered a deal with Nokia to intentionally make them "fumble around" at a cost of only a few hundred million or billion dollars (because they weren't fumbling around already and were never going to implode if left to their own devices). Microsoft's goal was to screw with an open source framework, not to get its mobile OS on smart phones and help secure its place in an emerging mobile market before it gets shut out. No, that would be crazy conspiracy talk.

2. Yes, the clear plan for Nokia would have been to purchase a business that contains an unprofitable and dying network segment and a profitable desktop Linux segment, neither of which Nokia knows anything about, then kill off the network business and halt development on SUSE Linux Enterprise to channel their developers into MeeGO and introduce things like Mono into MeeGo, probably requiring another major rewrite/reset of the OS. Of course, it wouldn't actually need to buy Novell and kill it in order to get experienced Linux developers or use open source Mono and could just license any patents it needed for much cheaper than buying them and it already has a great deal of software engineers and is spending massive amounts on R&D with little to show for it, but hey... why not drag another company down with them?

2B. As an unabashed fan and user of openSUSE, which dragged me away from Windows XP for good, your scenario is giving me chest pains right now and my hands are shaking.

2C. Making a phone OS on top of openSUSE would have been a nice idea, however.

3. No, it's not his concern. If Nokia's been ladling out the gravy for years and spending enormous amounts of money on R&D that have failed to yield what they needed to return to a leadership position, how dare he stop spending that money or remove people who can't show that their work has contributed to the bottom line of the company? What would Finland had done if GM was located there when the company almost went bankrupt? Demanded GM hire more auto workers and give them all raises and make no budget cuts and not get rid of any failing brands? (RIP Pontiac, the Symbian of cars )

4. Yes, if Nokia had just clicked its heels togther three times, made a wish, sprinkled fairy dust, then asked all of Nokia's employees to just try really, really hard this time, MeeGo would suddenly get finished, it would kill iOS and Android, and Finland and MeeGO and Richard Stallman would all live happily ever after.