What promises ? Did Microsoft guarantee that the former employees of Nokia would be guaranteed jobs at Microsoft for a lifetime ?

Did Microsoft promise that they would build the data center in Finland within the allotted X amount of time ?

I think they have all the rights to be fussed since Nokia is one of the best known finnish companies. For decades it made sure that lots of finnish employees had jobs and paid taxes. Now that MS decides to cut a big amount of them, it's the governments job to make up for that with no compensation whatsoever. They must clean up the mess that a stupid MS decision generated.

They could've ditched Symbian for Android. You know, the most popular OS on the planet right now. It's hard to say how that would've played out giving the fact that most Android manufacturers aren't making money, but surely making smartphones powered by Windows Mobile exclusively wasn't the wisest choice.

They have the right to be concerned or disappointed, but not nonplussed at what Microsoft has done here. Again, this isn't a charity. Microsoft decided to cut them because that venture (Nokia) has been failing, and Microsoft was losing money. To continue on funding that would be to subsidize a failed venture, and they'd have to make their cuts elsewhere in areas where they're seeing more success to compensate. It is precisely the opposite of a "stupid" decision; it was a necessary and practical one.

Microsoft doesn't owe Finland its tax money; to the contrary, if it meant so much to Finland they should have done more to keep Microsoft invested there. Whining like a bunch of children over it will not reflect well on them when trying to attract other big investors in the future.

There's lots going on here atm and our joke of a government is trying to cover up their own shit by blaming others. With all the decisions they've made to drive business away from Finland I can't believe they dare to say this. Shameful.

Don't get me wrong, I should have clarified myself. The stupid decision was not the recent job cut, but the venture itself. Nokia wasn't in a good shape back then, sure, but it went completely downhill from that point onward and this evolution was somehow predictable. The worst decision in my oppinion is the killing of the Nokia brand. While I don't have any significant data, I believe that the Nokia brand name had been pretty strong.

Of course it's not charity, we all know that, but MS shouldn't even have entered the mobile market in the first place.

But, leaving them with nothing and putting the burden on the government (hence taxpayers) is why such a deal should be scrutiniezed.  Microsoft has a duty to sharholders and Finland has a duty to its citizens.  Obviously, there are cases where govenrment intervention is necessary.  Corporations are not designed with peoples well being in mind.  That is the job of the government.   It would be like if the govenrment allowed Ford to be purchesed by Russia and then they crashed it, took the patents and left the thousands and thousands of workers to burn.  Hopefully, the government would have the forsight to put the people first from the get go and require full accounting of plans and determine how liability should be handeled. 

Well I'd certainly never sit here and say that Microsoft is good at avoiding stupid business decisions... Really, the Xbox is about the only successful brand they've managed outside of their over-the-moon success with the Windows operating system (pictures show it's even used in North Korea haha) and even it had to run at a severe loss initially, had perhaps the worst and most costly initial error in console history in the Red Ring of Death that cost roughly $1.15 billion to fix, and even now is getting smashed by the PS4 due in large part to what they initially had planned and presented for the Xbox 1. Actually, have they ever begun to make money on the Xbox brand?

...So I just looked it up. In 2013 they'd lost about $3 billion in the preceding decade on it, and thereafter lost $400 million in the Xbox1's first year. I'm going to go ahead and say Microsoft has yet to profit a dime from the Xbox brand either lol

Finland should probably just ask China for money, their state policy seems to be to just throw money at any country that will take it.

I personally thought that Nokia committed suicide when they announced their partnership with MS and the move into Windows Mobile/Phone, whatever it was at the time. And I was right.

Nokia had to do like everybody else and move into Android. They could seriously kick some a**es. They had the brand, they had the HW and they could make a good customized Android OS. This instead is just their natural ending.

Well all that entirely depends on a country's foreign investment laws. And I can actually imagine with how Nokia was failing at the time the Finnish govt saw big ole MS with it's deep pockets as a white knight and possibly let some of the usual guarantees slide. Of course you can't hold a corporation to certain commitments inperpetuity. At best you could get a 10 year undertaking, with a get out clause after 5 years if things are going badly.