I don’t know if this news is disappointing or just a plain facepalm.

It looks like the Shareholder Nine just don’t have the stomach to get their case argued and pled over a long term or they just didn’t mull it over so well, as after just 36 hours they’ve withdrawn their bid to oust Elop as CEO and turn Nokia away from the Windows Phone.

In the short amount of time since their announcement of their withdrawal, they’ve also withdrawn their Facebook page, the Twitter account, and their webpage. In fact, all primary sources appear to have vanished from the face of the Internet, leaving behind only the original coverage of their emergence to mark their passing. Heading to their Facebook page ends in a redirect; the Twitter account is a ghost-town with no tweets (but they did manage 1,375 followers); and their blog—nokiaplanb.com—shuttered itself, let down the curtains, and now redirects to nokiaplanx.com. A site which seems to be a random joke generator that suggests random plans for Nokia’s future using a very limited vocabulary and a penchant for schoolchildren.

Ina Fried over at All Things D has posted a bit of a run down of the final events and why they decided to withdraw themselves so quickly, to summarize: the Shareholder Nine and “Plan B” apparently didn’t do their homework,

“After reviewing the feedback we’ve received from investors on our Plan B, we have decided not to carry on with it,” the group said on Wednesday.

“In the last 36 hours we were contacted by hundreds of individual shareholders (owning anywhere from 10 to 400,000 Nokia shares) pledging to support us. Nevertheless, the responses that we received from institutional investors were not encouraging.”

It turns out, the group said, that institutional investors are more likely to sell their shares than opt for a radical approach that, the group concedes, amounts to “seating a bunch of kids on the board of directors.”

The group also said that many workers and developers would have already moved on by the time new directors could be elected. “We also realized that by the time our Plan B would kick in, most remaining software talent in Nokia would have already left the company, so it would be really an uphill battle to pick up things from there,” the group said.

I guess they just didn’t know what they were in for.

It strikes me that all of this poking and prodding should have been done before they went live with their manifesto and essentially trumpeted their battle plan to the world. The problems that they site would have been readily apparent after even a short brainstorming session with a few of the other shareholders. The total lack of support for their plan seems to rest of very solid reasoning and it certainly explains why they withdrew so quickly.

Of course, to this day the Shareholder Nine still maintain a sort of anonymity in the media and blogosphere. Furthermore, I can see why nobody cares at this point: they presented an abortive game plan that wouldn’t have worked as implemented and then evaporated the moment they were thrust into the light.

The plan did seem too nascent to take much purchase, but some of the points in the manifesto—especially those that covered criticism of Nokia’s R&D methods—seemed like things the company might take to heart. However, given that the Shareholder Nine saw fit to withdraw their open letter entirely, leaving it only in the hands of those with the presence of mind to copy it (and Google cache) there’s nobody to argue the finer points of their criticism.

As for Nokia itself, the rest of the world really doesn’t need to keep watching to see where the Finnish corporation is going to jump: they’re pretty much kept up about their alliance with Microsoft and their future with the Windows Phone 7.