The stock market appears to predict otherwise, believing that this move lowers the net present value of the company. Of course, stock markets aren't necessarily accurate prediction markets, but given suitable efficient-market hypotheses they're an approximation of such a thing.
The stock market isn't predicting anything. It just believes given the current information and Nokia's decision, $NOK's value deserves to be lower now than what it was prior. It's just a current snapshot - no indication of the company's future whatsoever.
Well technically a company's stock value is supposed to represent the discounted present value of all future profits. So you can interpret a reduction in stock price as an indication that the market expects profits to be lower in the future.
PR scandals do that. They also frequently have little bearing on a company's profits, unless it's sufficiently nasty to warrant significant numbers of boycotters for longer than the average consumer memory is.
Stocks are nowhere near that deterministic. When people think others will jump ship, they try to jump first, to lose the least money. When people think others will want buy, they buy first or sell higher, because they can get away with it. There's more games theory than future prediction if you ignore long-term investors, as they make up a microscopic amount of the daily trading and thus the daily prices of stocks.
The stock market just reacted for admitting defeat, Nokia drilled that Symbian is the better option for years and only today acknowledged that is not the case.
Sticking to Symbian and finishing MeeGo were not their only options. AFAIK, the Android stack would run just fine on top of the MeeGo kernel. They could have gone with Android in their high-end while gradually pushing Symbian down towards their dumbphone range.
That depends on you viewpoint. The OS itself is technically good (as in significantly better designed than android and friends).
On the other hand, Symbian has some generally good design assumptions (for example client-server division of almost anything) that are hard for programmers that come from other platforms/just don't care and thus it's architecture is often hacked around, which sadly includes many applications written by Nokia itself.
