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While one Plan B was busy winning a Brit award, another was going off the rails. The Nokia Plan B shareholder revolt has been called off. It burned brightly with the fires of conviction for two days before fizzling out.

The shareholders were objecting to the decision to jump into bed with Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 – turning Nokia into an OEM hardware producer rather than the most innovative mobile phone company on the planet. There has been some debate on whether or not this will be a good move for Nokia, but the company is certainly paying the price for falling behind the rest of the market on its mobile operating system, Symbian.

Despite the support that many shareholders had apparently pledged (Plan B claim a large number – though not precise), the project has been derailed by institutional investors. These investors are mammoth organisations wielding a lot of power in companies as shareholders, but with a legal obligation not to take big gambles with their clients’ money they could not possibly support the plan. Without their support there was nothing that Plan B could realistically achieve.

There is also the small matter that the Plan B group would not be able to take charge until May, by which time Nokia should already have started paring down its software teams and many wheels would already be in motion.

If somebody wanted to save the Symbian OS, they would be better off inventing a time machine.