Microsoft did no such thing. Nokia is very directly responsible for its own cell phone failings.
This line of thought really needs to die.
The Nokia board hired Elop from Microsoft because they wanted to bet the company on the Microsoft phone, full stop.
If you want to assign blame, then its on Nokia for wanting to pursue that strategy.
As someone that was an employee at the time, I am also fed up with the anti-Microsoft narrative.
Also there are some errors there, Windows Phone only became an alternative after the burning platform memo, that wasn't at all well received neither internally, nor by the 3rd party devs that had just started to migrate their Symbian tooling yet again, this time to Qt + PIPS + Carbide.
The biggest blame with the board, as revealed on the Finish press, was the bonus clause on Elop contract to sell Nokia Mobile business.
yes Nokia had years to come up with a better OS and they didn't. Even Samsung failed at this endeavor years later.
They had MeeGo (Qt/Linux). For some reason they thought that not worth it to continue. Let's take Windows!
I've always asumed it wasn't a good enough OS just from the consumer news articles I read, was a freshman at the time. What was technically remarkable about it?
It was a direct competitor for Android at that time. GUI was really nice. I don't think it was essentially worse than Android. There was the potential.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/31z13e/is_...
http://www.eedailynews.com/2010/05/android-vs-meego-two-appr...