Nokia has been trimming down its expenses and some of the cuts have been pretty close to the bone.

The latest to go is Sotiris Makrygiannis, the head of the Meego Project team inside Nokia. =\Meego was the operating system of choice for a few NOKIA devices including the predecessor of the NOKIA Lumia 800 design, the NOKIA N9, MeeGo was also presieved as NOKIA’s Plan Bs if the partnership of using Windows Phone was to fail, but now it seems they’ve pretty much left themselves to rely on the Windows Phone platform and the S40 devices to keep the future of NOKIA going.

The team was responsible for the OS running on the Nokia N9, the predecessor to the NOKIA Lumia 800.

With them goes one of Nokia’s Plan Bs, leaving them pretty much with Windows Phone and S40 to bet their future on.

While the decision to cut R&D teams may appear to be borne out of desperation, Nokia always intended to outsource their software R&D to Microsoft, thereby realizing billions in savings. Presumably even in February 2011 the team should have seen the writing on the wall.

The move interestingly also leaves Nokia without any open source operating systems, an interesting reversal for the company who first open sources Symbian and then bet on the Linux-based MeeGo before turning to Windows Phone.

While all these moves will be saving Nokia money, ultimately the wisdom of the acts will depend on the performance of Windows Phone handsets – an OS which is now almost inextricable linked to Nokia.