Nokia: hanging up - FT.com So long, Nokia. That isn't exactly true, but assuming all shareholder approvals are granted, Finland's best-known export (Angry Birds aside) is about to offload to Microsoft the bit that gets it all the bad headlines - phones. That would allow it to concentrate on the bit where sales are only declining slowly - telecoms equipment - but which is at least generating operating profits on an underlying basis. As investors wait to hear from both companies about the deal, and while the inevitable conspiracy theories abound as to whether Stephen Elop was a sleeper agent for Microsoft all along, they can at least reflect on one general lesson: joint ventures in technology are too often doomed either to fail or not to succeed as well as they could have done. Nokia in July bought out Siemens from its networks JV for a bargain price amid a general belief it was never a happy operation. Frictions are present in any joint venture. The press release on Tuesday's deal talks of the benefits for Microsoft of being able to accelerate the growth of the brand through faster innovation, synergies and unified branding - and so on. The conclusion from that wording must be that a joint venture with two active partners was not as effective as it might have been with a single driving force or a single owner. The only other interpretation is that Microsoft and Nokia in any combination were never going to make a success of smartphones. Nokia's device sales have been falling at a 20 per cent clip for the past five years. At least the business is small enough in the Microsoft scheme of things that it cannot bring the tech giant anywhere near as close to ruin as it has done Nokia.