Lol. Plus MS makes billions every year from Android patent royalties. 

Since smartphones and the rise of Iphones, Galaxy, and androids as a whole I dont think Nokia is near as big of a name as it once was.  Nokia has been making excellent phones, i agree.  Blackberries were once huge as well.  Can you remember the last time those were extremely popular?  Things change over time and it is hard to say that Nokia is anywhere near as big as they once were and has really struggled in recent years from my understanding.  I didnt say everybody doesnt know who they are, im saying as a brand Microsoft is much bigger than Nokia.  Microsoft basically bought the Lumia team (as well as others)and will try to continue developing their phones and Lumia for the future.

Ayee! M$ certainly knows how to make money, thats for sure!

Their 1st issue started with Blackberry phones, though they still managed to hold onto the cheaper phone market. But once Apple made smart phones the norm Nokia failed to jump on in time leaving them behind and struggling to be remembered.

Well that's dumb, why didn't they just evolve with the competition and make smart phones too? :/

They entered too late. And when they did enter, there phones ran Windows OS. 

Big reason was no one knew whether or not smart phones would take off with apple, their were smart phones before the Iphone that didn't take off. So while apple was racking in the cash other companies were rushing to make their own smart phones.

Only reason micro even purchased part of Nokia was gain a decent part of the mobile phone space. They didnt have to work all the way from the bottom. Now that they have some percentage they will chuck the nokia part away and continue on.

Nokia was one of the companies to seriously challenge Blackberry's qwerty keyboard phones, but they just couldn't beat Blackberry's design, OS or security.  Qwerty keyboard phones are not popular nowadays but Blackberry's keyboard, OS and security are the main reasons the company still sells any phones at all.

About what happened to the Nokia brand, in their own words they couldn't keep up with the "intense smartphone competition at increasingly lower price points and intense competition at the low end of our product portfolio."  

The Nokia brand was very recognizable outside N.A. but past 2010 they couldn't get a foothold with the competition being so fierce and their profits started to dip with both their smart phone and low end products having smaller margins.

This is old news. I'm sure of it.