Symbian Foundation prepares to shock the competition

The chief of the new Symbian Foundation is optimistic about the future of the mobile operating system it will control - and confident it can stay ahead of new rivals such as Google and Apple.

Lee Williams, currently head of mobile maker Nokia's S60 division in its devices business, will take up the reins as executive director of the not-for-profit organisation once it becomes operational, pending regulatory approvals.

The Symbian Foundation will unite all the various flavours of Symbian's mobile operating system - Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) - into one open source platform, ending 10 years of Symbian as a proprietary operating system.

The Symbian roadmap
As executive director, Williams will be responsible for working with Foundation members to set strategy and direction, as well as overseeing day-to-day operations to ensure it sticks to its roadmap.

In an exclusive interview Williams told silicon.com he is not afraid of existing Symbian developers being poached by high profile rivals such as Apple and Google - and instead said developers who have explored such newcomer alternatives are actually being frustrated by what they find.

He said: "What they [developers] express more than anything is levels of frustration with the level of incompleteness of the offering [on rival platforms]. Look at Google as an example - they just delivered days ago what they actually said was open source a year ago and so I hear developers all the time go 'well okay, now I can finally look at the code, here are my complaints…'"

But despite the bullish talk, Williams conceded the Symbian Foundation - which was only announced back in June - faces several large challenges, including his aim of getting a complete, integrated distribution of the operating system together and available in the marketplace as quickly as possible.

Williams explained: "We need to, by the beginning of next year sometime - in that first half, hopefully in the first quarter - get a distribution out there that represents everything that this platform and asset base can represent.

"I think it will shock the competition if we're able to do that."

Williams believes the Foundation already has a head start on new rivals as it has "a large existing developer base" and so the focus is on serving that community, rather than growing it. "In that way we're quite a bit different from the competition," he added.

On the Foundation's openness
Despite currently being on Nokia's payroll, Williams was keen to assert the independence of the Foundation.

He told silicon.com: "I haven't been at Nokia that long. I haven't been drinking the Kool Aid more than two years. My Finnish is just awful and then I would say on top of that anybody who knows me and has worked with me in my career would always describe me… as an independent thinker and more at one with an ecosystem vision than any one company vision."

He added: "[The Foundation] is truly open. And more so moving forward there will be code openly available, there will be developer support activities and other things that happen in the Foundation that will be as much a benefit to others in the ecosystem as Nokia and that'll become crystal clear to people."

But he conceded that ensuring even distribution of benefits will be a challenge for the Foundation - not least because several members can otherwise be considered direct competitors.

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