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Holy s—-.
It was crazy enough when talk began leaking out this morning that HP was spinning off their PC business — they’re the biggest PC maker in the world.
Now they’re winding down (read: killing off) webOS and killing off the Pre and the just-released TouchPad?
Yes, they have their large enterprise business. And now they have Autonomy. So essentially, HP is going to try to do the same move IBM did in the 1990s. It worked for IBM, will it work for HP?
More importantly, did HP really need to do this? Seems a little premature to me. Yes, the TouchPad was a flop. But we’re in the very early days of the mobile/tablet space. And again, HP rules (ruled) the PC business.
With the webOS buy, HP had an opportunity to control an entire ecosystem — hardware and software working seamlessly together. They could have been a true foil to Apple. Instead, they’re giving up and becoming an enterprise company.
Wow.
Bottom line: This is a very poorly run company.
Time For Facebook To Buy WebOS
In the rush to analyze what HP just did, everyone is throwing around a ton of ideas for what happens next. Of those, Nicholas Carlson’s is the best so far.
Dan Frommer calls this “not a crazy idea”. I’d go farther. It’s a good one given Facebook’s vision. They clearly believe in HTML5 and are working towards that future, but at the same time, they need their own mobile OS solution. WebOS would give them the best of both worlds.
Facebook has tried to fork Android to make their own flavor, but whispers suggest that hasn’t worked as well as was hoped. WebOS could be fully their’s — for a price.
The idea of Amazon buying webOS makes some sense too, but they’re likely already too far down the path of building their own Android fork. We should hear more about that soon.
Google is another wild card. They already have Android and Chrome OS, so why buy a third OS? Well, if the Palm patents were included, that would be one reason. But more generally, webOS is also in-line with their vision of a web-based future. Certainly part of it could help Chrome OS and/or Android.
But a certain $12.5 billion deal that just went down may preclude a webOS deal.
One final thought: HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion. Given the current market, Palm’s patent portfolio alone is likely worth much more than that. HP’s move could go from dumbfounding to genius if they spin those patents off for several times what they paid for all of Palm.
Isn’t Jon Rubinstein on Amazon’s board?
HP: The Linux Desktop Company
Well, I didn’t see this coming. HP CEO Leo Apotheker, according to Bloomberg/Newsweek said that “every one of the PCs shipped by HP will include the ability to run WebOS in addition to Microsoft Corp.’s Windows.” I knew HP was serious about webOS, its Linux-based tablet/smartphone operating system. I didn’t know that HP was this serious.
This demo shows some very innovative features of the HP Web OS Tablet including interaction with WebOS phones using a bump like interface. The task switching looks very nice however i’m not sure how long it would actually be before i got annoyed with it in real life. And the mail and browser look very appleesque. All round good marks for the WebOS from this demo though.
HP says webOS tablets to be 'similar to the iPad'
HP’s been saying it’ll use webOS on a tablet since the first moment it bought Palm, but it looks like things are starting to pick up ahead of that “early 2011” due date — in an email to the Palm Developer Community, HP’s Peter Helm says webOS will be used on “tablet-style devices similar to the iPad.”
