Ok let's try to do away with the existing conspiracy theories.
As much as I would have liked to have rather seen a partnering with RIM or hp/palm, those 2 platforms have little to offer nokia outside of sales, eg they they don't have a search or ad revenue system. So any partnering would have been little good to nokia for revenue generation.

This leaves MS, Google, and Apple. Apple is impossible to partner with I am sure we can all agree on this. Google doesn't need nokia it is already huge in the mobile area so it's not going to cut a deal for ad revenue sharing, and google has it's own mapping and gps software and it is damn good and well developed, so it does little good to offer up the navetiq for anything. This leaves MS who has always struggled in the mobile area, including partners willing to push it mobile tech to customers. now ms has a large search engine like it or not and has an ad revenue system, but their mapping and gps tech is weak and not well developed.

This is why the nokia ms deal makes some sence as both companies can gain something. Nokia has a large brand device marketshare and a strong European foothold, as well as some top notch mapping and gps tech. MS has the search engine and ad revenue as well as being deeply engrained in general the general corporate world. In short both can gain from a deal.

What doesn't make sence is the exclusiveness of the deal. I feel nokia undersold what they have to offer to MS. All dropping symbian and meego did was piss off current customers and developers. It also left them behind the curve if the MS re-entry fails as all previouse attempts have as they lost their core developer base and their core customer base as nokia is basically abandoning them. Also nokia is no longer seen as a pioneering company they become a OEM maker. Symbian won't be worth the effort to resurrect as it will be far behind the curve development and customer wise. Meego will be less likely to be as developed in the handset area or another company will have bought into it and will be heavily steering it.

The exclusiveness of the deal removes nokias ability to be flexible in the future or really viable to consumers and developers due to betrayal. You can't say hey our stuff is crap so we going to MS, and later turn around and be all MS stuff is crap so we using our stuff as you were just saying how your stuff is crap. It doesn't instill confidence.

Nokia could have pushed for the deal with MS just as it is now without the exclusiveness, they could have scaled back to symbian team from 3000, down to 1000, get meego team to 600, and formed a MS team of about 200-400. This would have made everyone happy and saved money and increased profitability. Only thing they might have lost out on in the MS deal is MS marketing moneys and some of the supposed WP customization and steering options.

Heck it's not like nokia couldn't roll an update out to all their devices relatively quick making bing the default search and integrate the windows ad stuff into them as well as nokias ovi maps to generate instant revenue to MS which nokia would get some percentage of.

Buisnesses seem to loose out on the concept of customers, piss them off and they leave to other options. They leave and the business revenue dries up and you cease to exist or you get bought out. This happens and stock isn't worth crap. MS does understand this which is why any market they enter they NEVER leave maybe go into a holding or maintenance pattern but they don't drop thier stuff until they can replace it with something else of theirs. This is why MS does get some loyal customers. Nokia should have taken note of this when penning this deal.