Despite fierce rhetoric when it was launched little more than a day ago, Nokia’s fledgling shareholder insurrection opposing the company’s pact with Microsoft seems to have fizzled almost as quickly as it initially caught fire.
As of today, the site, put up by nine former-Nokia employees who published an “open letter” to Nokia shareholders and institutional investors advocating cancelling as much of the Microsoft deal as possible, and refocusing on MeeGo as the preferred smart phone operating system, is gone — leaving only error messages stating that the page no longer exists.
Before vanishing into the ether, however, one technology blogger was able to garner information as to why the group disbanded.
“The Plan B team said they had not received encouraging feedback from institutional investors. They also said they believed most of Nokia’s software talent would have left the company by the time their plan kicked in,” wrote ZD Net’s Mary Jo Foley.
Microsoft and Nokia signed the deal last Friday to make Windows Phone 7 the smartphone operating system for Nokia’s smartphones.
Stuart J. Johnston is a contributing writer at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @stuartj1000.
