Verticals and a device comeback: Nokia fights to return to growth in 2017 Three years ago, end-of-year analyses heavily featured Microsoft’s decision to acquire Nokia’s devices business. As we picked over the corpse of Nokia’s smartphone failure, there was wistfulness for a world-beating business gone wrong, but also a recognition that the Finnish company had lived up to its century-old reputation for agility, getting out of a sector where it was failing, and leaving its rump company better equipped to be a mobile powerhouse still – in infrastructure and intellectual property if not in handsets. Nokia, we now know, certainly gambled more astutely than Microsoft. By mid-2015, a year after the deal was finalized, the US company had accepted the…