Nokia was purposely sabotaged by Stephen Elop.

Elop was a Microsoft employee who moved to Nokia to become their CEO.

Elop scrapped Meego as well as the rapidly-improving and highly promising Symbian OS that Nokia had, killed internal projects that used Android, and went all in on Windows Phone 7, a completely unproven platform that just happened to be from his ex employer.

After the market really didn’t like that, Microsoft was able to buy Nokia for a bargain price (€5.4bn), and Elop was given a €18.8m bonus.

Curiosly, that bonus works out as €1 million for every €1 billion that was wiped off Nokia’s market cap during his time as CEO. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence…

When he was asked for the good of the company to take a smaller bonus, Elop said that he “couldn’t”.

After the deal to buy Nokia went through, Elop moved to a different cushty position within Microsoft.

Nokia didn’t really fumble smartphones. They were purposely ran into the ground by Microsoft so they could use a powerful brand name as the the thin end of a wedge to take over the phone market, without having to pay much for it. Then Microsoft fumbled it from then on out.