The board brought on Elop to do precisely what he did - any ire should be directed squarely at them.
Say what you will about RIMM, at least they aren't striking at the prospect of QNX replacing their OS.
As Nokia said, it is a war of eco-systems now; not devices. Even a low-end Android beats a better spec'ed Nokia because the software is so much better. The quality of apps on Ovi store says it all.
Really? The Ovi Store is pathetic, and even though they have improved a bit recently it comes nowhere close to the other platforms. Casual games are very important, Ovi has less to offer than the nascent Windows Marketplace.
I am among the few who think this is better for Nokia, given the alternative. Nokia is a hardware company. They don't do great software, and they just accepted that fact.
Btw, they might have a gotten a good deal with Microsoft too, given the situation MS itself is in. WP7 is a great OS, and the collaboration with Nokia could see it appearing on cheaper devices. Nokia is famous for making affordable devices that can survive a drop or two. In fact, I know many people who WANT a Nokia with a decent OS.
There are serious competitive considerations for Nokia not choosing Android. I think Elop outlines them pretty intelligently here - http://video.allthingsd.com/video/nokia-ceo-on-choosing-wind...
1) The platform would succeed.
2) They'd be one among a crowd of Android phone manufacturers.
3) It would be hard to differentiate from the others.
Contrast that to Windows Phone 7, where:
1) The platform is playing catch-up, and may fail entirely.
2) They're already one among a crowd of Windows Phone manufacturers, with LG, Samsung and HTC already shipping, and Dell having devices in the pipeline.
3) The party that controls the platform has chosen not to allow differentiation, requiring all the devices to be lookalikes[1].
On all his supposed drawbacks of Android, WP7 looks even worse.
There's some other odd stuff in the video, which begs for explanation. He starts by saying that "Microsoft has placed a large bet on us." But it isn't yet obvious why Microsoft has bet more on Nokia's success than it has on the success of the other WP7 handset manufacturers. And if they have, I can't imagine HTC or Samsung being happy about it.
There's also some stuff at about 2:30 about how each party has licensed technology from the other, with an implication (though not an outright statement) that money might be flowing both ways. If that's true, it raises the possibility that the sale of an HTC WP7 handset results in royalty payments to Nokia, for the mapping technology that Microsoft has licensed. That could cause real friction with the other vendors.
(To clarify: the mapping technology bit was part of the announcement, though it wasn't clear what it was doing there; the payment structures were not announced, but Elop did seem to imply in that video that money would be going both ways, and I'm not sure what other reason there is that Microsoft would have to write checks to Nokia.)
[1] http://mobilementalism.com/2011/02/12/the-photo-the-nokia-fa... has a photo (second in the post) with a bunch of them. They all really do look alike.
Microsoft is already in the habit of paying companies to force their users to use Bing search (see Verizon replacing Google search with Bing on some of their Android phones).
Though for Nokia's sake I hope they're not getting paid per use but per device. Bing's quality outside the US is dreadful, so the vast majority of Nokia's customers are either getting a crappy experience or will somehow need to replace the default search engine.
I wouldn't discard that possibility. Phone makers have to pay to call their Android sets Android and to have the Gmail, Google Maps and other Google properties on their phones. Maybe Microsoft is giving them a boatload of money and saying "spend this money to make WP7 suck less, for we can't to it ourselves" on the condition they sell only WP7 phones.
We don't know what's in the package. This could give Nokia time enough so it can be carved into smaller sellable pieces before the whole thing collapses.
The whole thing would collapse anyway without an aggressive course correction. MeeGo isn't going anywhere and Symbian is doomed. They could have gone Android, but I guess the board thinks the company is doomed no matter what is done and that WP7 is what brings it more time.