Rom market domination to sell-off in less than 10 years. As Microsoft swoops in to buy Nokia's mobile business for £4.6bn, what happened to Finland's most beloved company, and why would Microsoft take it on?
Whenever you turned on one of Nokia's legendary handsets, you always got the same thing: that famous signature logo, holding hands.
And for more than one generation, it was hand-holding Nokia did best - carrying people through, bit by bit, the mobile revolution.
Because way before we were shouting, "Damn you autocorrect", we were grappling with new-fangled predictive text.
In the days before highly customizable backgrounds and operating systems, there were swappable (and very, very cool) fascias.
And, of course, more than 12 years before anyone ever made birds angry, there was the mobile game to rule them all: Snake.
Nokia were by no means the first company to release a commercially available mobile phone, but it was the first to do it really well, and with true mass appeal.
"Back in the 1990s there weren't these other big brands," says Ben Wood, an analyst at CCS Insight.
"Nokia were so dominant. People didn't talk about what brand, it was just about the number, 3210, or whatever you had. They took users on a journey."
Era of complacency
So far, so good - but then one presentation changed everything.
"Complacency had kicked in," Mr. Wood continues, "they felt they could do no wrong.
"Then all of a sudden, in January 2007, Steve Jobs walked on to a stage and pulled an iPhone out of his pocket and changed the world forever."
The fall was swift. According to figures from analyst firm Gartner, Nokia's smartphone market share in 2007 was a dominant 49.4%. In subsequent years, it was 43.7%, then 41.1%, then 34.2%.
In the first half of this year, it had plummeted to just 3%.
Many blame this decline, at least in the initial stages, on Symbian, the firm's