As anyone who's been following Nokia's descent knows, the Finnish mobile manufacturer is in trouble. Finally, executives at Nokia are admitting it and are making efforts -- a little late in the game, true -- to do something about it.

Yesterday, we reported Nokia CEO Stephen Elop's message to his employees in a memo: The company is "standing on a burning platform" and must change course. "Android came on the scene just over 2 years ago, and this week they took our leadership position in smartphone volumes. Unbelievable." he wrote.

Today's Nokia news suggests that the company might be acting on those strong statements. According to a Bloomberg Businessnews report, Nokia might be close to a software partnership with Microsoft. Elop, a former Microsoft executive himself, has met with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to discuss the possibility of powering Nokia smartphones with Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 mobile software, an unidentified source said. Elop has also held talks with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, but those discussions are not likely to lead to a partnership with Android.

A possible deal -- rumors of which we reported on all the way back in December -- could be likened to a late-game Hail Mary pass, but it could benefit both companies. Nokia, the longtime leader in the worldwide mobile market, has been back and forth with its plans to unleash its new mobile OS, MeeGo. The new OS was supposed to replace Symbian -- until recently, the most widely used mobile OS in the world -- on all of its smartphone devices. But Elop pushed its launch back to 2011. And while Nokia is still the world's largest mobile phone vendor, it's market share dropped from 36.4 percent in 2009 to 28.9 percent last year.  

Microsoft, too, could benefit from a deal. Despite launching a revamped mobile OS with WP7, its stock has remained relatively flat. It moved 2 million licenses for WP7 in the last quarter of 2010 -- not enough to trigger a turnaround. But Nokia still claims 37.6 percent of smartphone sales, according to Gartner, potentially opening up the playing field for Microsoft.

One thing Nokia doesn't want to do is adopt the strategy of HTC, Samsung, and Motorola. That is, Nokia refuses to simply license Android from Google for its own devices -- a move a former Nokia exec once likened to "peeing your pants to stay warm". Rather, Nokia is aiming to forge a "strategic alliance" with a software company. 

"We need an attitudinal shift," Elop said last month, according to BusinessWeek. "We must improve the quality of our execution, accelerate the speed at which we execute, and enhance the effectiveness of our partnerships."

The changes Elop wants to implement could also mean additional changes to its executive leadership. The company's top executive losses have been well documented here on DailyTech and elsewhere, but a necessary "attitudinal shift" at Nokia may require additional shakeups. 

"Stephen Elop does realize what the problems are, but the question is whether there is a credible strategy and whether they can execute it without compromising their existing sales," Stuart O’Gorman, an investor at Henderson Global Investing Ltd., told BusinessWeek. "They’ve done the easy step that previous management didn’t take, which is realizing the problem. The harder steps are still to come."