It's a pity Elop killed it, and then sabotaged Nokia with move to Windows Phone. They should have never hired him to begin with. But Nokia's problems started before him. They were torn by internal politics. Instead of pouring all resources into Maemo / Meego, teams were bickering about whether Symbian should get precedence and so on. That was the root of their problems.
The leadership knew Symbian was getting frazzled around the edges, and was Maemo was their experiment with an alternative (the first Maemo interface was effectively their S90 interface ported to GTK), but they didn't want to sink Symbian before they knew they could transition their revenue over.
Sadly the board grew impatient and brought in Elop.
Between that and how HP pretty much installed a revolving door on the CEO office, i wonder if boardroom meddling is a massive curse on tech companies. This because a board will focus on quarterly increases in profits, even if the company is solvent and likely to remain so for a decade or more. Consider Dell taking his namesake company private again so that he could enact long term goals without the board constantly interfering.
