It started before the current boss and once-again Microsoftie Stephen Elop, but he was meant to stop the rot and not to build another burning platform that couldn't compete with Apple and Google/Samsung.
Looking at what Elop achieved, you're left wondering if the whole thing wasn't just one big gamble that failed.
To recap, when he took the helm, Elop chopped the older Symbian platform with its market-leading Pureview photo technology, deciding that Nokia would go with Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system.
Windows Phone would propel the Finnish device maker to top dog position in the world, Elop figured.
Except it didn't work like that. Windows Phone isn't bad, but it couldn't hold a candle to Apple or stave off Samsung and other Android makers. It's still struggling to keep its head above water in a competitive market in fact.
Despite Elop telling me as late as February last year that Nokia phones running Android was a non-starter, a year after it happened: Nokia X devices appeared, running a hacked up version of Android that doesn't have those opprobrious Google services on it that Microsoft doesn't like.
The Nokia Android strategy didn't last long either, and now looks like it'll be jettisoned in favour of Lumia devices running Windows Phone.
How's all the flip-flopping in the in all-important mobile market working out for Microsoft then?
Paging down to the bottom of Microsoft's latest fourth-quarter results we see that the company sold 36.1 million phones.
That figure is not to be spat at, but the problem is that Lumia smartphones just don't sell well: only 5.8 million were snapped up by customers. The rest, 30.3 million, were non-Lumia devices.
Although revenue from Nokia phones hit US$1.99 billion, the gross margin for that segment was just US$54 million, and the operating loss hit US$692 million.
Compare this to Apple which sold 35.2 million iPhones in the quarter to June. This is up 12.7 per cent, despite not introducing any new models, and draw your own conclusions as to how well the Elop engineered Microsoft-Nokia marriage is going.
Gear: Belkin-Linksys WRT1900AC
Wi-Fi's wonderfully convenient and the latest revisions of the technology like the 802.11ac standard have made it really quite fast too.
However, the perpetual nuisance of encountering dead spots where the Wi-Fi signal doesn't reach or suffers interference is still with us, and I had high hopes the Linksys WRT1900AC, lent to me by Belkin which bought the brand from Cisco, would fix it.
The WRT1900AC is pricey (around $340 including GST) Transformers looking device. It has an elaborate four-aerial arrangement for multiple input/multiple output (MIMO) Wi-Fi signalling, beamforming and fast 802.11ac performance.
Long story short, the WRT1900AC works great close by - the fastest connect speed at 5GHz 802.11ac I saw was with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S that claimed a 867 megabits per second link, with the Macs hooking up at 600Mbps. With USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet interfaces, the WRT1900AC is built for speed at close range.
Further away, the signal became very directional and no matter how I angled the antennae, it didn't reach the far end of the house without suffering from enough interference to make it unusable. The dummied-down software in the WRT1900AC wasn't any help either to work out the best positioning of the router and aerials for a strong signal.
Due to inconsiderate neighbours blasting away in the 2.4GHz band, I was hoping to have 5GHz signal throughout the house instead with its higher performance and shorter reach, which by happenstance means its less susceptible to interference.
Consulting with wireless networking engineer and consultant Jonathan Brewer at Telco2 http://telco2.co.nz told me that using a Wi-Fi repeater to reach the far end of the house wasn't the greatest idea. Repeaters are simple solutions, but the performance is often spotty and they can be temperamental about which routers they want to talk to.
Jon suggested that I grab a pair of powerline networking adapters and put a spare Wi-Fi router upstairs as an access point instead.
Having tried out powerline networking in the past, I was a bit sceptical as to how well it would work but this time around, two cheap Netgear AV200 adapters turned out to be quick and easy solution to the Wi-Fi reach problem.
Plugged into the right sockets upstairs and downstairs, the Netgear adapters are humming along (well, no, they're quiet actually) at 170Mbps down and 150Mbps up, which is better than expected. The actual speed is limited by the 100Mbps Fast Ethernet network interface on the adapters anyway, but the performance is sufficient for what I want.
It's not the ideal solution though: it means three more bulky devices including the spare Wi-Fi router in your home. In terms of convenience and performance though, powerline adapters are hard to beat.
If you're thinking of installing powerline adapters, there are now newer ones available that promise a theoretical 500 to 600Mbps speeds, with wired gigabit Ethernet network interfaces. I would wait a bit, as there's a new generation of powerline adapters coming apparently, with 1.5 gigabit per second connect speeds - you're not going to get anything near that speed in real life, but even a third of it would be fantastic, especially if you're on UFB and watch high definition video over your home network.
