I too was there during those days, in Espoo.

But to be honest we also had our share of alienating developers, it wasn't only MS fault.

First the Symbian development was a mess with the Metrowerk tools and that Symbian C++ dialect, then came PIPS, followed by Carbide (Eclipse based).

Followed by the whole mess of open sourcing Symbian and closing it again.

Or the Symbian model moving from Symbian C++ / PIPS to Qt, also in the middle this process.

Maemo was GTK, but then everyone should move to Qt. Better not lets also move the OS into Meego.

I remember asking why the Nokia 770 didn't had a GSM modem and the team saying to me that wasn't the market they wanted to target. When they did the usual roadshow of upcoming devices.

Nokia was already quite bad in terms of relationship with app developers before Elop came into the party, due to the internal politics.

Of course, the famous burning platform memo was just the last way to alienate developers that were slowly accepting the new Qt based model for Symbian, after all the previous pain points.