Comment by carlosjobim

Nokia is a strange story. I remember when it happened, and absolutely everybody knew it would kill the company to sell it to Microsoft. So of course the leaders and owners of Nokia knew the same thing. My guess is that they decided that they couldn't compete with the iPhone and decided to cash out what they could. Maybe Microsoft could help them with shuttling money to offshore accounts or some other under the table services? Nokia was publicly traded, so it could have been a great robbing of small time investors. But did Microsoft really get anything out of the deal that was worth the price?

I had the Nokia N9 at the time, which was years ahead of its time and one of the most well designed smartphones so far, both in hardware and especially in software. Modern iOS and Android still look dated in comparison.