It has just been announced that Symbian’s head honcho, Lee Williams has decided to leave his post due to personal reasons. When the executive officer of a major mobile phone OS developer suddenly ups and leaves during a very important time; that is sure sign that things are really not going well.
Nokia purchased the Symbian Software Company over two years ago, and prior to that, the two companies have been pretty much what would be considered as industry partners. However, recent events have shown that the bond between the two has been shaky, and as such, the Symbian Foundation is facing a very dark future.
Last year, Nokia pushed ahead with the development of the Maemo operating system. Despite the fact that the Symbian S60 was still being used as the newest OS for the Finnish phone maker, the N900 launch with the open source Maemo (to a certain degree of success too) which has shown that Nokia does not rely on the Symbian alone.
While no new Maemo devices has been developed since then, the fact that Nokia has teamed up with Intel(and thus, they developed the Moblin OS) is certainly looking bad for the Symbian. Add in the recent announcement from both phone makers Sony Ericsson and Samsung that they will cease to use the Symbian platform and we have a very distinct sign that there might not be any S^4 in the future.
All of this naturally places a heavy burden on the Symbian^3 toting Nokia N8 and Nokia C7. The two devices are going to make or break the future of the mobile platform in order to determine whether it will be able to survive in the current generation of mobile phone operating systems or whether this will be end for the most well distributed platform developer.
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