Wrong, Nokia would not be dead without that deal for sure.
They still have the brand and scope to be successful with Qt/Meego and their own services.

MS on the other hand could really finish them off, I hope nokia's management is aware of that.

I think that the question "Why" has been a little bit forgotten during recent events and I do suspect that there's a very simple reason for Nokia's current actions:

As everyone probably is aware about, Nokia has had difficulties in developing Symbian quickly enough to stay in touch with the competitors.

Since ARM is working on multicore CPUs and Symbian's kernel is designed for traditional single core CPUs, Nokia faced the need to rewrite Symbian's kernel to be able to utilize these new CPUs. The folks at Nokia have apprently long ago realized that Nokia doesn't have the resources to rewrite the Symbian kernel (at least fast enough) thus leaving Nokia with an operating system which can't utilize these new multicore CPUs. The anouncement to ditch Symbian^4 and upgrade current Symbian^3 in increments was probably a consequence of this realization.

My conclusion is that Micro$oft was the least bad alternative of only bad ones. Time will tell. But I wonder what will become of Meego on Nokia's horizon?

Personally I think I'll buy another N900 and mothball it so that I'll have a working überphone when my current one is worn out. It's very possible that the N900 will be the entire phonemarket's first, only and last überphone .....

Only from an academic point of view. They don't now, and didn't earlier have the resources to do it. That was their failure. Symbian took it all because it is way too inefficient as a platform, too difficult to make it work on new HW (although the best OS ever created for smartphones). If they had put recourses into Maemo years ago, the story would have been different. The N8, E7 etc would all run Maemo with Qt in an expanding ecosystem, and Symbian would already being phasing out.

Ugh, couple of posts ago I complained about the buzzword 'ecosystem' replacing the other 'HTML5'... I really cringe when I hear them. HTML5 ain't ever going to replace native coding, not even high-level coding, you just cannot manage a large or complex project in an economical way in a markup language + JavaScript that is effectively stuck in the '90s by ECMAScript's laziness and hesitance. Not to mention that no matter what you do, it wont get you anywhere near native performance.

And that is if we can even assume that ALL HTML5 clients, on ALL platforms will actually follow all the same standards that are still years away of becoming final.

Sure, for a quick fart app or a twitter client, HTML5 might be more than enough, but for something complex that actually requires power and system integration, HTML5 ain't the answer.

Of course they will not die, they're too big and too rich for that, but they will be leveled down to something that Microsoft would be if they would yank out their Windows and Office business in favor of a competing platform that in time fails miserably.

You really think that MeeGo can survive on headsets without a support from a powerhouse such as Nokia? Really?

ZTE, Huawei and the likes cannot afford to polish MeeGo to a final product, let alone get developers interested in the platform, they should be striking deals with Microsoft or Google much before Nokia. For them it would be wise, for Nokia it's just way too risky with no perceivable award.

The way it is now, the best course of action for ZTE would be Android, not MeeGo...

I'm a bit puzzled about all this death talk.

Isn't Nokia a ginormous corporation that sells the most phones in the world?

Even if they'd totally loose the high end market, and have, let's say, half of themselves left, they'd still be a huge phone manufacturer globally and only half dead (or less?).

But, for the record: I hate that they're in bed with MS. Really going for MeeGo would have been sweet. A real linux OS on a phone (as opposed to other OS:es that have a linux kernel, that I might mention) was too good to be true?

check this out:

The above poster has been hung up here in Barcelona, in the area us humble journalists still aren’t in allowed yet, and shows a smartphone and tablet running Intel’s Linux variant as their OS.
from here

Yes. We'll always have the N900. *sniff*

What amazes me is how much the message changed in just two days. Two days ago Elop didn't mention anything about the possibility to add these services to WP7 and Symbian got much more love now.

I guess the new message is thanks to 15% of market cap melting away in a single day.

Don't be too sure:

http://christophew.posterous.com/zte-meego-inside

My N8 has a 680 mhz processor. History shows windows needs the high end speed to perform but Nokia always gives lowest possible speed necessary so they better do a 180degrees switch on their processor speed.

I don't think Europe likes the idea of an Americanized Nokia.

Does Nokia phone OTA updates disappear now?

I'd rather not carry around a mini version of my desktop on a Nokia slow processor unless it's a high speed dual core.
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Will they use the new ti omap just announced?

Does this mean we will now have an additional $100-300 expense a year to keep our phones from getting eaten by viruses?

I want my mommy.