Stephen Elop's memo told all of the organizations selling Nokia's hardware that they were End of Life'ing all of the devices on their shelves, which resulted in every point of sale pulling them. This created an insane revenue gap that ultimately forced the sale to Microsoft.
Edit: Source: I was working at Cingular/AT&T at the time where we pulled all of the Symbian phones from the walls of our retail stores within days of this memo landing.
Stephen Elop's memo told all of the organizations selling Nokia's hardware that they were End of Life'ing all of the devices on their shelves, which resulted in every point of sale pulling them. This created an insane revenue gap that ultimately forced the sale to Microsoft.
This is an excellent review of what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future: https://hbr.org/2012/12/how-to-anticipate-a-burning-platform.
Edit: Source: I was working at Cingular/AT&T at the time where we pulled all of the Symbian phones from the walls of our retail stores within days of this memo landing.