It wasn't supposed to happen this way. Normally reading a dose of Eldar Murtazin's prognostications is an opportunity to roll your eyes at his over-the-top opinions and sensationalist claims.
And while Murtazin's headline-generating potential is very much alive and well, the strange thing about his latest Nokia "rant" is that I agree with him completely.
As many of the Nokia faithful will tell you, Murtazin and the once-mighty Finns have a fair bit of previous, and it's unlikely that the Moscow-based Murtazin got too many Christmas cards from Lapland's direction last month.
A lot of it comes back to Murtazin's scathing dismantling of the Nokia N8 back in 2010. There was no question that all was not well in the Nokia camp at the time, but many felt that Murtazin stuck a big Kick Me sign on Nokia's back, and Symbian^3's, and then jumped up and down to get as many people to notice as possible.
Of course, it's largely what you get with Murtazin, journalist and self-styled mobile insider whose often sensationalist claims always seem laced with plenty of self-promotion, a fact that's rubbed plenty of people up the wrong way over the years.
And he was back in fine form this week, leading to another swathe of dramatic headlines: “Nokia is selling its soul to Microsoft”, “Microsoft to buy Nokia if Elop resigns in 2012”, and more.
Murtazin has repeated claims that Microsoft is working behind the scenes to buy out Nokia, and that Elop is the man on the inside smoothing the way for it to happen, diluting Nokia's value and priming the company for takeover.
In other words, it's another case of Eldar Murtazin saying we should all point and laugh at Nokia, right?
No, actually – and while I still can't quite get on board with conspiracy theories that Elop is no more than a Trojan Horse for Microsoft, I am starting to strongly come round to the view that Elop's decisions will be the killing of Nokia, which is just what Murtazin is saying.
No one's arguing that things were going well with either Symbian or MeeGo in the build up to Elop's now-famous “burning platform” memo back in February, but deciding to drop both and signing over a huge part of Nokia's potential for innovation to Microsoft has had far-reaching implications that have almost universally been bad for Nokia.
Internal development organs such as Nokia Research Centre and Nokia Labs are deeply ingrained parts of the Nokia DNA, and have surfaced a steady stream of hardware and software innovations over the years that have provided reference points for all sorts of mobile technologies we use today.
Yet these are the very resources that are hit hardest by the Windows Phone move – one that has taken Nokia's future out of its own hands and created rifts within the company which will probably never be healed.
Delve behind the headlines and that is largely Murtazin's point: he's basically standing up for the “Nokia of old” against the corporate machinations of Microsoft and Elop, saying that while the latter is replaceable, the former never will be.
Does this mean Stephen Elop is working actively to make Nokia easier to buy for Microsoft? I honestly don't know. But if the sale does end up going through and Nokia ends up being Microsoft's property, does it really matter?
