I don't think anyone ever called it a Microsoft bailout. And the people who lost their jobs, both at Microsoft and Nokia back then, wouldn't consider this such a rewarding, positive thing.
They were the ones not wanting to make handsets with GNU/Linux originally, allowed some internal political wars between Symbian and GNU/Linux camps when they finally went for it and the best of it was having a contract clause for Elop giving him a bonus if he managed to sell the company.
I'd love to find out more. I've spoken to a couple of former employees, and I was told that what really stopped Nokia from responding to Apple effectively was that they had started to outsource engineering.
Has anybody written anything reliable on the subject?
However the had so many reboots that scared the developers away.
On one side they went
J2ME -> Symbian C++ / Java -> Symbian C++ with PIPS -> Symbian C++ / Qt -> Symbian is now open source -> Sorry use .NET instead
On the other side the Maemo was Gtk+, but then the team decided to move to C++ and port it to Qt.
These actions angered everyone that was trying to earn their money targeting Nokia devices.
Ah and don't get me started on Symbian C++ with its quirks copied from Win16 days and Palm OS.
The Apple without Steve Jobs wasn't that great and it still remains to be seen how they will do now.
After all, for how long can they keep selling new iPhones and Macs only?
Of course, they have the bank full and can afford to make a few errors for the time being.
The Register has a few good stories on it.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/11/21/nokia_hildon_the_gre...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/01/12/symbian_history_part...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/09/symbian_developers_m...
As you might imagine not everyone wants to disclose what went wrong on public forums.