Maybe there were compelling technical reasons and good licensing terms that lead Nokia to choose WP7 over Android.
But if a person is leading a company, they might perhaps consider the psychological impact of their decisions along side with technical and market factors. I mean, his job is to make money - not to make decisions that "would have worked if it hadn't been for those pesky workers" (unless the intent was to gut the company from the get-go - though I doubt that would leave more money in the end either).
Desperate measures were needed. But I don't think I'm alone in feeling depressed that the desperate measures seem involve a move back toward proprietary systems (even if my only involvement with Nokia has been using the excellent QT library).
If, assuming, your aim to get some value out of a company - get some value out of the technical teams that exist in the company, one assumes that one needs to keep the morale of that company at a certain level. And giving the impression that you're gutting everything the company stood-for seems like a not-terribly-effective approach here even if Nokia's internal process was broken.
If you're the underdog, being able to claim you are "fighting for good" is psychologically useful. If Nokia had gone with android, one might be able to believe they'd bring some open source "chops" to the table.
Again, my experience is programmers are willing to work to fix a broken - if they feel like the company if offering them loyalty. Obviously, today's announcement didn't make Nokia's workers feel that was happening.
Nokia's stock dropped a bit after this, btw.
Better link to the story also: http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-is-the-p...